Working Together to Combat Ad Fraud with Blockchain
Blockchain offers tremendous promise to fix the growing ad fraud problem, but it will take greater collaboration among industry players to drive its progress. According to a CNBC report, ad fraud will cost brands $16.4 billion globally this year, and nearly 20 percent of total digital ad spend was wasted in 2016.
As a technologist, I keep a keen eye on how our industry can harness the power of blockchain. As such, we at TEGNA along with MadHive and IBM are founding members of AdLedger, the adtech industry’s blockchain consortium. Our consortium meets regularly to drive our blockchain agenda forward to bring increased transparency and data security to the ad tech supply chain.
Working with MadHive, we are building out a path for blockchain technology to help reduce fraud and costs in the advertising supply chain, in areas such as; alleviating manual reporting and reconciliation and improving reporting accuracy across ad serving technologies. By taking a leadership role in applying blockchain technology to advertising, we can bring greater trust and transparency to our advertisers and content partners. For Premion, we see the potential to create a decentralized network amongst our OTT content partners where both impression data and audience data can be shared in an anonymized, yet secure network.