With the popularity of Bitcoin comes an increasing interest in blockchain technology, with the former being the first functional application of the latter. However, what most do not know is that blockchain can help improve processes and systems across all industries by providing safe, cheap and instant micropayments, as well as giving transparency, security and integrity to data. The advertising industry is one that has been plagued with such issues throughout its history.
And a panel discussion held as part of the most recent CoinGeek Conference broadcasted live from Zurich Switzerland examines how the BSV blockchain can resolve the problems of delayed payments and data overload and discrepancies in affiliate marketing and performance advertising, respectively. The panel is composed of Lee-Ann Johnstone, CEO and founder of affiliate marketing agency AffiliateINSIDER, Frank Vertolli, co-founder and managing partner of Orlando-based ad agency Net Conversion, and Luke Rohenaz, co-founder and CEO of promotion marketplace TonicPow.
The panel is moderated by Becky Liggero Fontana, a lead iGaming industry reporter who also has a background in affiliate marketing. After discussing major problems in the advertising industry despite efforts to streamline systems and processes by innovative marketing technologies, Fontana commented how the issues she faced 15 years ago are the same headaches being enumerated by Johnstone and Vertolli.
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“There’s so many people on the planet all creating content. Every single one of those people could potentially learn how to become an affiliate. And then, how do you work with all of those people? The database just keeps growing and growing and growing. So, I think, reporting transparency is something that can really, really be beneficial in the affiliate space… It’s starting to become a very messy ecosystem that we’re all waking in and we need to start looking at solutions to fix when I say that ‘the Internet is broken,’ because we need to find ways to scale with transparency,” Johnstone explained.
“Every company is faced with this, from small local organizations to international organizations. They’re faced with so much data from all these systems beyond marketing, just the operations of their business now all produce vast reams of data. And there’s value in there, but the real challenge is organizing it in a way that it’s structured, open and readable so that you can make practical business decisions on a day-in, day-out basis to make the business better, to reach consumers in a more efficient [and] effective way, to really just make the business better. While we’ve made strides, there’s still a lot of work to do,” Vertolli added.
According to these advertising industry experts with decades of experience behind them, the line from brand to consumer is muddled by so much data that effective advertising has become difficult to measure. When it comes to affiliates, there are middlemen or operators who provide data analytics that show discrepancies, further making data analytics and corresponding payment systems problematic.
“When all of this is done through smart contracts, it’s going to be incredible for affiliates because everything’s going to be crystal clear and transparent. There’s going to be no misunderstanding in terms of what’s going to happen when you refer a player and how you’re going to get paid for that. Everything is open and transparent,” Johnstone explained.
The BSV blockchain, which is a public ledger that records data in an immutable and chronological manner, can provide this transparency. The data is there for all stakeholders to access and it is practically impossible to manipulate. With this, it is a lot easier to organize and make sense of data. On top of this, because BSV continues to scale, it can accommodate big data and offer low-cost micropayments, with a current median fee of $0.000091 per transaction.
“But what I think is becoming more possible is larger data sets or more visibility into what happened along that consumer’s journey and how to compensate accordingly for attention, for engagement and for actual conversion. So I think that what [blockchain] does, it kind of creates a higher level single source of truth, which is ubiquitous across all industries. Everyone’s looking for that,” Vertolli pointed out.
