Josh Engroff @jengroff the Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer of @themediakitchen has pre­sent­ed a tru­ly inno­v­a­tive way to solve the cur­rent tedious back end issues for billing and record keep­ing for Pro­gram­mat­ic adver­tis­ing.  Use the Blockchain.  We’ve cov­ered Blockchain Tech­nol­o­gy before on MediaJobs.com but this is the first time I have heard it applied to Ad Technology.

Josh states that the use of the Blockchain would “1), improve pro­gram­mat­ic adver­tis­ing effi­cien­cy, and 2) evolve sta­t­ic busi­ness models.” 

Pro­gram­mat­ic adver­tis­ing has done a great job min­i­miz­ing the inef­fi­cien­cies of the media buy­ing and place­ment process (ie: place­ment, speed­ing exe­cu­tion) as well as now pro­vides an amaz­ing array of data nev­er before avail­able in one place.

How­ev­er when it comes to the back­end, Engroff states that “The process by which pay­ments are set­tled between par­ties in these trans­ac­tions – brands, agen­cies, and media com­pa­nies – has not evolved in decades. I’s is still a labo­ri­ous process requir­ing invoic­es, accounts payable and receiv­able, pay­ment terms (30, 45, 60?) and many, many people.” 

We’ve all heard of Bit­coin but most do not real­ize that Bit­coin is pow­ered by the Blockchain, which is a dis­trib­uted data­base of data records.  It’s this approach to man­ag­ing all the back end require­ments that could help sub­stan­tial­ly reduce the hours as well as min­i­mize the errors between all the dif­fer­ent par­ties involved in Pro­gram­mat­ic adver­tis­ing transactions.

Engroff talks about using Bit­coin in the Blockchain as well as oth­er options includ­ing loy­al­ty point pro­grams.  But, instead of using Bit­coin, why not use the good old US Dol­lar?  I think the use of the Blockchain to address these issues is very smart and has enor­mous poten­tial for the business.

You can read Engroff’s arti­cle Pro­gram­mat­ic Media And The Blockchain on MediaPost.