To say that digital marketing will benefit from blockchain is an understatement. Digital marketing needs blockchain to course-correct its conflicting relationship between platforms, brands, advertisers and consumers. And blockchain’s underlying infrastructure technologies need digital marketing to unlock use cases with mainstream accessibility.

While the attention is currently on DeFi (decentralized finance) as the mainstream gateway for cryptocurrency, digital marketing is a less hyped, but arguably even more influential opportunity for speeding up adoption. The digital marketing industry is currently valued at $340 billion — up from $290 billion the previous year. It’s a profitable industry, but the profits have largely been pocketed by centralized intermediaries that essentially exploit user data to target advertising. Such practices could not be more at odds with changing consumer attitudes towards privacy and ownership of personal data. As increasing numbers of decentralized alternatives emerge onto the market (and given digital marketing’s numerous b2b, b2c and even c2c use cases for blockchain and crypto, they will continue to do so) it is only a matter of time before many of the MarTech and AdTech practices of today become redundant, replaced by blockchain alternatives that reach deep into consumer markets. To put it in perspective there were already more than 219 blockchain marketing companies on record by 2019.

These projects and DApps are being developed for integration without any prior need to understand blockchain or crypto and they are reaching across mass media, social networks and ecommerce platforms. Such projects enable consensual and more accurate customer profiling, prevent click-fraud, deliver clearer conversion data, and provide greater transparency and accountability over brand promises and values. Arguably the most important opportunity for blockchain to course-correct digital marketing, however, is the transfer of data ownership to the individual.

Control of Data Ownership
We all know that centralized intermediaries, such as Google and Facebook own, collect, store and monetize untold volumes of personal data with no transparency over what is actually being collected and sold, or to whom. We know that they know all the sites we visit, the links we click, the comments we leave and that they resell this to the highest bidder. It’s an agreement based on blind faith and no one has any control over whether that data is resold to political parties, insurance companies, or elsewhere

With decentralized alternatives this can’t happen — the data never leaves people’s devices and the individual owners have the sovereignty and the security to choose which personal attributes (their age, country, gender and so on) they wish to share or not. Better yet, they themselves, rather than any intermediary, can choose whether they actually want to sell their personal data to companies for analysis or marketing purposes, and the companies can pay an access fee for the privilege.

One example is blockchain-based web browser Brave, which blocks ads and tracking software and enables users to earn BAT (Basic Attention Tokens) by choosing to view adverts that they control. Viewers can then contribute the tokens to support content creators, meaning the creators can earn back the revenues lost to ad blocking. With an estimated 27 percent of the US population using ad blockers this provides a more mutual content monetization model that’s accessible to all creators and publishers.

Podminers, meanwhile, is a podcast and live streaming platform which plans to use blockchain to address issues such as fake analytics, ad fraud and fake reviews within the growing podcast industry. Smart contracts enable creators to earn its internal cryptocurrency, the PodMiners Token, for their content, with micropayments received from consumers for monthly subscriptions or individual downloads of episodes. Content consumption is recorded on the ledger, enabling only those who have paid and consumed content to leave reviews, while advertisement analytics data are recorded on blockchain with a publicly available timestamp for anyone to verify.

Another example is the WOM Protocol, which provides a user-generated marketing channel that simultaneously addresses the needs of marketers, publishers, consumers and ecommerce platforms. It is based on the premise that consumers and their genuine word-of-mouth recommendations about brands and products are the most effective forms of marketing and that people should therefore take ownership — and have the ability to monetize — their own product marketing content.

The project has so far developed two consumer-facing apps, YEAY, that enables creators to earn native WOM Tokens based on the performance of their content, and the WOM Authenticator, which enables people to rate the user-generated content for its honesty (among other quality controls) before it can start earning. Both the creators and the authenticators are rewarded for their efforts and the tokens can be taken to exchanges or converted into gift cards directly on the apps. These gift cards can be spent online and in-store across household brands and it is these examples of ease of use that have appeal far beyond the existing crypto community.

This week a collaboration of lifestyle and crypto influencers, including Keemokazi (18.7m+ combined social followers), swagboyq (11.8m TikTok followers), Alexyoumazzo (6.1m TikTok followers), and dayynaa (5.1m TikTok followers), have moved into a creator house in LA. Together, they are combining their 40m+ reach, to educate their communities about crypto, while inviting their young communities to follow them to the YEAY app with collaborative incentives that encourage network growth by enabling everyone to increase their token earnings through collaboration.

This in-turn creates organic demand from brands and advertisers who can pay into the system to feature the content in their marketing campaigns with full consent and fair remuneration for the creators. Ecommerce platforms, meanwhile, can access tools to feature this word-of-mouth content alongside their product listings to boost conversion and offer customer rewards. Such partnerships require no knowledge of blockchain technology and mean that integrations can happen en masse and crypto monetization can quickly spread.


Digital Marketing Is the Blockchain Underdog

Niche as the relationship between blockchain and digital marketing might seem, the industry’s easily-integratable and consumer-friendly use cases make its reach extend far further than the self-contained crypto and spectator communities. As a force majeure driving a significant portion of global GDP, digital marketing is also far from a niche industry for blockchain to have on board.


Read more about the influencers bringing down the barrier to mainstream blockchain adoption

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