Lot of blockchain startups have made it their goal to make the digital ad ecosystem transparent. However in its own unique way, Kiip, a leading mobile marketing and mobile mobile ad platform has initiated the ‘first-ever blockchain mobile ad campaign”. This campaign has gained significance for two good reasons: this will make brand content more pertinent to consumers and secondly this is a huge advancement in promoting transparency within the mobile ad supply chain.
The campaign is being leveraged by Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer and maker of Bud Light, Budweiser, Estrella Jalisco, Michelob Ultra, Stella Artois. This campaign is built around in an effort to break free of the traditional advertising techniques which are quite interruptive; it will also help the brands connect with their consumers in engaging and meaningful methods.
“We’re building a company to last for the next 100 plus years and that can only be done by disrupting existing paradigms through innovation and putting consumers at the heart of everything we do,” said Lucas Herscovici, AB InBev’s Global Marketing Vice President of Consumer Connections, Insights and Innovation. “As the world’s largest brewer and brand builders, we take our responsibility for the stewardship of the category seriously through our approach to advertising and the ways we create meaningful experiences for consumers with our brand content. This campaign will increase transparency in programmatic ad buying and support the ways our brands earn consumers attention.”
The campaign is using nascent technology, in the manner of Kiip’s “Single Ledger” blockchain product in an effort to tackle basic issues like mobile ad fraud. The Single Ledger facilitates all players in mobile ad sales chain to view and audit campaign data directly, basically anyone who has an encryption key will be able to access the data. The technology lets simple and clear reconciliation of campaign performance data amongst all the parties, eradicating potential for fraudulent reporting by third parties and ad serves. It also streamlines the usually painful arduous reporting and payment process.
“When we started digging into the potential of blockchain, we began to realize that if Kiip was started today, it would be built on blockchain technology,” said Brian Wong, founder and CEO of Kiip. “Blockchain’s magical impact comes in the form of its immutable and decentralized ledger technology. Data that is stored uniquely in thousands of servers can never be manipulated. We saw this technology’s potential to impact several major areas of the advertising world, including supply-chain transparency, campaign data reconciliation and viewability verification. Single Ledger, quite frankly, is just the beginning for us.”
Usage of blockchain creates an absolute place for the data to stay and the ability to set up a smart contract that gives out an exact count at the end. Although the campaign is still ongoing, AB InBev is quite content with the visibility it has with this one of its kind experiment.
AB InBev won’t be the first brand to take hold of blockchain to address the supply chain related transparency issues. AT&T and pharmaceutical giant Bayer are also conducting tests on blockchain based solution to eliminate waste and fraud from their supply chains.
“Blockchain technology has been overhyped with very loose and frankly lightweight use cases,” Wong said. “But it’s also something that can have an immediate impact on a real problem in our industry – something any CMO can relate to and immediately activate.”
