Digital marketing spending has been setting new historic heights every year in recent memory. In 2017, total marketing expenditures shot above $500 billion, and digital marketing spending actually surpassed that of television for the first time on a global level.
Market forecasters expect digital advertising expenditures to continue its double-digit growth in years to come, but rampant fraud across digital formats looms as a major contender to this prediction.
Fraud in digital advertising accounted for over 20% of total ad spending. Digital marketing fraud manifests itself in a few different ways, most commonly through the use of nonhuman bots to generate ingenuine impressions or form submissions. Marketing experts are aware of these perpetrators, although the sophistication of these bots has made identifying and cracking down on fraudulence in advertising incredibly difficult.
The rise of blockchain technology has allowed developers to create effective, decentralized networks and breath new life into nearly every industry in which use cases have been proposed.
Beyond the financial sector, healthcare, computing, content, and many more areas are quickly researching and adopting blockchain-powered business solutions. Now, ClearCoin is using blockchain to address the problem of ad fraud and inaccuracies in digital advertising.
Powered by ClearCoin tokens (CLR), ClearCoin’s global marketing platform connects advertisers and publishers, tracking all transactions on its distributed proof-of-history ledger to create a system of trust and transparency in the digital advertising community. The proof-of-history ledger has the power to solve this issue of fraudulence in digital marketing just as blockchain solved the double spending problem.
By recording all digital advertising impressions that the platform has access to, the ledger is able to separate real impressions from fraudulent ones. The introduction of blockchain to digital advertising guarantees every transaction and impression is accounted for, while ClearCoin can ensure the privacy and security of each user’s information through smart contracts and data encryption.
An additional benefit of blockchain’s application to this industry is its ability to drastically improve the supply chain in global advertising. The ClearCoin platform removes intermediaries from the process by allowing users and publishers to transact directly.
In this way, ClearCoin removes spending inefficiencies in the global advertising ecosystem. Furthermore, this means ClearCoin caters to more than just marketers and media publishers. The platform offers solutions for brands and agencies looking to securely and transparently grow their consumer or client relationships. ClearCoin also benefits supply and demand side platforms and publishing networks in need of aggregating digital media bids and inventory.
By virtue of existing on the blockchain, ClearCoin operates in real time. This allows both the supply and demand side of the digital advertising industry to always transact and continuously track live data to improve marketing strategies.
As decentralized apps continue their massive wave of development, ClearCoin is seeking to stay ahead of the curve. While ClearCoin’s platform is the foundational layer for this global marketing solution, they also intend to become the partner of choice for decentralized apps in need of filling advertising inventory. ClearCoin also has supply and demand APIs for partnered decentralized apps to provide valuable data for market analytics.
ClearCoin’s platform creates a great user experience by making purchasing and tracking your advertisements easy for any user. Integration with major digital publishers such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Display Ads simplifies the process of ad placement, while on-board tools including artificial intelligence and machine learning, demographic, and sentiment cohorts offer users access to advanced statistics to deepen understanding of each media buy’s impact.
ClearCoin also supports a multitude of digital advertising formats. Native, mobile, video, audio, virtual reality, social, and search ad formats are all options for media buys, and barriers to entry are removed by the platform accepting dozens of crypto and fiat currencies.
The ClearCoin team is leveraging their past entrepreneurial and tech careers and experience in major corporate marketing, previously working with brands across a wide range of sectors including Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy. As a whole, they are able to increase their network effects through their strong business connections.
The ClearCoin token sale launched in mid-November with a total supply of 1,000,000,000 and is set to close on March 31. The platform is currently only allowing media buys for over 5,000,000 CLR, but will be open to all users beginning in June. As they continue to add on new advertising partners and develop innovative solutions for fraud in the ad industry, they will demonstrate a clear value proposition for any investor.
Advertising has been a rapidly evolving space over the last few decades, but as data has allowed advertisers to make more informed decisions, they inherently learned about some of the problems with existing structures.
Ad fraud has long been a difficult problem for the marketing industry. With ClearCoin’s unique approach of monitoring ad performance via the blockchain, marketers can trust the ad dollars they spend are translating to genuine performance.
