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“Advertising and marketing technology was created to make marketing easier and save people time and money. But the irony is that the technology is complicating the process and making companies spend a boatload of money on platform solutions.” — Daniel Kim, marketing Guru
Technology is complicating the process and making companies spend a boatload of money.
Advertising agencies are under pressure to change archaic and inefficient elements of their business models. Today, many campaigns are still overly complex in an era when campaigns and ads need to be designed and refined quickly across lots of platforms.
Advertising agencies under pressure
Key problems
- Overcomplicated tools with bad UI
- Too many similar platforms with insufficient integrations
- Too much data
- GDPR regulations
- Ad blockers and ad fraud
“90% of marketing software is not doing a good job on UI,” said Jason Keath, CEO of Social Fresh, during The BeanCast Marketing Podcast.
Jason is totally right. The user interface for most of these ad tech platforms is too difficult. It’s hard to learn what the full capabilities of the technology should be. The excessive offer of marketing platforms makes it hard for companies and marketing agencies to effectively navigate the space. Basically, it’s just all trial and error — there is no such thing as a silver bullet.
In addition, there aren’t many platforms that allow companies to integrate their own data streams or tools to be used inside the platform. This is quite strange as the advertising industry is becoming more and more data-driven. Data analysis is becoming notably important as it’s one of the top skills sought for on website upwork.com. A data scientists will have experience working with statistical programming languages like R, Python, Scala, plus a background in databases. Added to that, he needs some proficiency in the fields of statistics, machine learning, linear algebra, data visualization, and software engineering — quite a lot right?
On the other side of the fence, the multitude of data streams leads to misinterpretation of the data. A tsunami of data leads to many powerful business insights, it’s hard to decide which wave to ride, which insight will give the best results.
GDPR and impact on ad tech industry
The ad tech industry is well-known, in a negative sense, for collecting users data in all sorts of ways. If a company does not comply with GDPR regulations, they will receive high fines.
It is not an easy task for a user to aggregate all the data created online and this is where the GDPR regulation helps them. The data portability clause says that every user has the right to get a digital copy of his or her personal data and can transfer that file anywhere he or she chooses to. However, this clause has a drastic impact on many marketing agencies as it’s not an easy task for them to provide a full copy of all the digital data they own.
In search of innovation
It’s not an easy task to innovate an archaic landscape and provide the needed transparency. Here are a few things to remember:
- Virtual Reality is hot, soon we will see agencies creating VR advertisements.
- Tapad is a project that helps marketers to follow an individual from device to device by using complex algorithms to create a “probabilistic device graph”.
- MediaMath enables a marketing team to buy thousands of ads across half a dozen ad exchanges daily, automating the buy side of ad tech.
Blockchain technology disrupting the ad tech industry
Blockchain offers the needed transparency and gives back control to the user of his personal data. Here are some interesting projects that can help the ad tech industry.
1. Single-page embed layer for ads — Vidy
Vidy has invented the first single-page invisible embed layer for video, run on the Ethereum blockchain. Tiny hyper-relevant videos hidden behind the text of any page on the web. But how does it work?
Vidy constructs a ledger system that measures how long a user watches an ad thanks to holding tracking technology on its embed layer. Vidy then rewards publishers and users accordingly for holding down on ads with VidyCoins, taken as a fraction of the VidyCoin payout made from advertiser to publisher for that video ad impression.
Using this technique, hyper-relevant videos can be hidden behind the text of any web page, unlocking a whole new dimension to the internet.
Vidy makes use of a natural language processing protocol, operated by miners, that will automatically place video ads on a massive scale into publishers pages. The protocol will analyze the text on websites and try to find a match for live ad campaigns.
On the other side, publishers and advertisers get access to a dashboard where they can manage their campaigns and upload their video advertisements. They can rapidly change live campaigns, view statistics and review the ads performance. Ad fraud is impossible as everything is tracked on the underlying blockchain.
2. Blockchain-base data marketplace — Wibson
Blockchain-based data marketplace that enables users to sell their validated personal data directly to advertisers. This provides them with a secure way and environment to sell their personal data. In addition, users are able to track and manage the access to their data using blockchain technology.
Through the release of the Wibson iOS and Android apps, individuals can connect to data sources, such as Facebook and their mobile device location, monitor offers from data buyers, and sell their personal data. “In today’s economy, data equals money. Unfortunately, that exchange hasn’t made its way into consumer wallets — until now,” says Wibson.org founder and CEO Mat Travizano.
“Wibson completely changes this dynamic by restoring ownership over our personal information. Now consumers can access their data, and can choose to profit from these transactions how and when they want.”
3. Self-sovereign identity (SSID) — Civic
Identity wallet where all user’s their personal data is stored on Civic’s blockchain. Civic users choose service providers and individuals they want to share their information with. Civic’s blockchain architecture ensures that this data remains private and practically inaccessible to hackers. Its multi-factor authentication does not require a username, password, third-party authenticator, or physical hardware token. Identity access is only available through biometrics (face or fingerprint).
Civic users choose service providers and individuals they want to share their information with. These counterparties can use the Civic platform for immediate authentication of a user’s identity, without any data transfer, processing, or storage requirements. This eliminates the risks that come with centralized data operations, making Civic’s SSID solution a major breakthrough in data theft prevention and identity protection.
Ad tech industry under pressure — Where to find innovation? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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