Foodpanda pilots 'world first' blockchain-powered DOOH campaign

G-Man's blockchain solutions provider Aqilliz and digital out-of-home adtech firm Moving Walls have partnered to launch what they claim is the "world's first blockchain-powered DOOH campaign".

Food delivery company Foodpanda is piloting the tool, which is designed to offer a brands an aggregated, real-time view of campaign performance in the fragmented world of DOOH.

Aqilliz chief executive, former Mindshare exec Gowthaman 'G-Man' Ragothaman, told Campaign Asia-Pacific that currently, brands that buy DOOH campaigns are provided with two separate performance reports: one from the DOOH screen aggregator (in this case Moving Walls) laying out when slots aired in the screens, and one from the verification partner, verifying which ads were delivered. This is a lot of information for a brand to take in, especially when it involves data on hundreds or even thousands of screens.

"Now we are saying these two sources can be reconcilled into a single source of truth, so actual impressions are recorded from a campaign point of view, and nothing is lost in translation," Ragothaman said.

Here's how it works. Each partner in the supply chain—the media owner, the verification partner, the agency, the brand—submits data into a transparent ledger on the Zilliqa blockchain. The ledger keeps a record of each step in the journey, displaying in a single place how many spots were promised and how many impressions were actually delivered. Zilliqa’s blockchain will allow stakeholders to verify the performance of their campaigns in near real time, enabling greater cost-efficiencies across the DOOH media supply chain, the company said.

Ragothaman is hoping the pilot will prove how blockchain can provide greater transparency in the murky world of digital advertising.

"As a fully viewable, immutable ledger of transactions, blockchain can foster greater trust between stakeholders, be it media owners, buyers and solutions providers, effectively repositioning OOH investments as more transparent and accountable," he said.

Foodpanda's campaign will be run on 2750 digital displays operated by three different media owners in Singapore, including Target Media screens in lifts and lobbies of condominiums and housing board blocks, Focus Media’s network of office lobby screens, and Moove Media’s in-taxi entertainment screens. It will be powered by DOOH media supply-side platform Location Media Xchange (LMX).

Moving Walls founder and group CEO Srikanth Ramachandran said: “For far too long, OOH has existed without an independent means of verifying ad delivery. As an industry, we tend to point at online ad fraud to advocate for greater OOH spends but there are more fundamental issues of fragmentation and a lack of transparency that need to be fixed. This campaign gives us the exciting opportunity to implement emerging technologies in order to solve these long-standing infrastructural problems to the benefit of all participating partners across the OOH supply chain.”

Foodpanda's APAC head of marketing for offline channels, Hasnain Babrawala, said OOH has been a "major channel" for the brand and that it is "excited to see what benefits blockchain can bring by way of providing a real-time, independent view of OOH ad delivery in order for us to better strategically plan our marketing expenditure.”