Kerry Bianchi, CEO of Visto shares her insights of blockchain and how it can improve transparency in programmatic advertising.
Concerns about transparency, brand safety and ad fraud will remain high in 2018. In turn, I expect mounting demand for the development of tools and technologies which bring insights, control and analytics that will protect media investments from bad actors or questionable content.
One path to ad-tech supply chain enlightenment that is receiving considerable interest is blockchain, and I suspect that 2018 will bring more evaluation as to where it fits in the digital ecosystem. While likely too cumbersome to bring value as part of the real-time bidding process for programmatic trading, we are seeing some promising thinking around leveraging blockchain for “smart contracts” that would ease the administrative flow of order management and billing between clients and vendors.
This only works if there is adoption by all parties involved in the transaction, so will take some work and education in order to leverage the technology at scale. That said, the seeds of cooperation are beginning to be built among industry players and key organizations including the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab that has established a working group dedicated to opening the conversation and use cases around blockchain. Over the next year, I believe we will see more tangible conversation and uses cases emerge.