Could blockchain technology, with its security and transparency, cure the ills of an often-murky digital media ecosystem? GroupM\u2019s Rob Norman believes the attributes of blockchain will be a focus of the upcoming DMEXCO advertising and media trade show because of “an inevitable demand” from advertisers and agencies for some type of open ledger system for data.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never really come across anything in my career that has caused as much disturbance as the concern of advertisers about the money flows and the validity of the traffic they are buying,\u201d GroupM\u2019s Chief Digital Officer says in this interview with Beet.TV.<\/p>\n
Blockchain, which is the underlying technology of the digital currency Bitcoin, refers to an open, real-time database or ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data or transaction records. When a new transaction happens, it is instantly pushed to all participants in the distributed network.<\/p>\n
At this year\u2019s Cannes Lions festival, Comcast unveiled<\/a> its Blockchain Insights Platform, developed in collaboration with NBCUniversal, Disney (USA), Channel 4 (UK), Altice (USA), Cox Communications (USA), Mediaset (Italy) and TF1 (France). The platform is designed to help advertisers use aggregated insights from data sets, including their own, for ad planning and buying, without having to give away their own precious customer data to traditional data warehouses.<\/p>\n Entities as varied as GroupM, the Internet Advertising Bureau and the Nasdaq are already experimenting with blockchain systems, as ADWEEK reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the word blockchain is going to come up at DMEXCO and it\u2019s not that we\u2019re suddenly going to move to a blockchain trading system,\u201d says Norman. However, it\u2019s clear that \u201cthe industry needs to move to some kind of secure, permanent and transparent ledger to record what\u2019s occurred in the processes that we\u2019re involved in.\u201d<\/p>\n This will become \u201can inevitable demand from advertisers and from agencies and all of the people in the ad tech business are going to have to get their heads around that.”<\/p>\n