Automatically releasing advertising budgets

Sector: Tertiary sector · Industry: PR and marketing agencies · Organisation: TRUTH, Avocet, Sonobi · Maturity level: Pilot

In March 2018, TRUTH carried out a ten-day trial run for a blockchain-supported advertising campaign together with partners Avocet and Sonobi. The aim of the pilot was to reconcile digital advertising delivery data between different platforms in a tamper-proof manner and to trigger billing processes on a rule-based basis. Neither ongoing production operation nor concrete quantitative performance indicators were publicly documented for the project after the trial run.

Documentation status

Description

The marketing agency TRUTH, together with DSP provider Avocet and SSP platform Sonobi, trialled a blockchain-based approach for verifying advertising data. In digital advertising, figures between buyers' and sellers' systems frequently diverge, leading to time-consuming manual checks and delays. The technology was intended to provide a shared dataset to make budget releases transparent and traceable.

In March 2018, the agency TRUTH, the buying platform Avocet and the provider Sonobi conducted a ten-day field trial for an online advertising campaign. The aim of the trial was to record delivery data directly on a shared ledger and thereby reconcile the data basis between the media agency, technology providers and publishers. The joint validation was intended to ensure that payments were only made on the basis of impressions actually delivered and consistently recorded. The pilot run served primarily as a technical proof of concept for the interaction of different actors in the programmatic advertising chain. No verifiable quantitative metrics on increased process efficiency or return on investment were published following the ten-day test, and ongoing routine operation is not documented.

Perspectives

B2B — organisations perspective

For companies and agencies, shared record-keeping provides a neutral data basis for billing programmatic advertising spend. Invoice audits and disputes over mismatched impression figures between demand-side and supply-side platforms can thereby be reduced.

Employees perspective

Employees in media agencies and ad operations teams spend less time manually reconciling divergent spreadsheets and platform reports. The time saved can instead be used for quality control and operational campaign management.

Benefits

General

B2B — organisations

Employees

Challenges

General

B2B — organisations

Employees

Technology foundation

Use of distributed ledger technology for shared record-keeping and cryptographic validation of delivery proofs between the demand side and supply side in the programmatic advertising market.

Implementation examples

Ten-day advertising campaign pilot by TRUTH, Avocet and Sonobi

Due to a lack of transparency and differing measurement methods, reports from advertising buyers and sellers regularly show discrepancies, which delays budget release and incurs audit costs.

In March 2018, TRUTH trialled an advertising campaign with blockchain validation together with Avocet and Sonobi to reduce billing discrepancies.

As part of a ten-day test campaign in March 2018, TRUTH, Avocet and Sonobi joined forces to jointly record digital ad delivery data on a blockchain. The participating demand-side and supply-side platforms reconciled recorded impressions directly in order to establish the basis for automated billing. The trial run demonstrated the technical feasibility of the concept, although neither a transition to routine operation nor specific metrics on error reduction were published afterwards.

Discrepancies between ad server data from demand-side and supply-side platforms, as well as time-consuming manual invoice verification processes.

Tags

Digital Advertising, Smart Contracts, Budget Release, Transparency, Media Buying

Sources

  1. TMG's TRUTH Launches World's First Blockchain-Enabled Advertising Campaign

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