What to expect from blockchain in 2019

Strap in for more blockchain—it’s not going away.

It’s poised to be a goliath year for the technology as those who back it scramble to become the first to successfully roll out a decentralized platform to house programmatic media buying.

In doing so, they hope to eliminate the transparency issues that have long plagued this arm of advertising.

Experts predicted last summer that programmatic will live on blockchain for the world’s most important advertisers by the end of 2019.

Campaign US caught up with a few of those spearheading the technology’s anticipated transformation of advertising.

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Daniel Gouldman, CEO and founder of Ternio

MIT Tech says it's going to be a big year of hypeless blockchain adoption. Gartner has rated blockchain in digital advertising as having the lowest hype of any industry.

I think every almost every major company is going to be using blockchain in ad tech this year and we'll see mainstream adoption among the supply chain. It's happening right now.

The only ad tech companies that won't be adopting blockchain will be the ones who claim to be committed to transparency but are not actually transparent. Because those companies exist today.

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Marc Guldimann, CEO and founder of Parsec Media

Media futures will be represented as digital assets on a blockchain. Ironically, the biggest impact that blockchains have on our industry might be to force us to adopt metrics that are trustworthy enough to be used in future contracts.

Thanks to SEC enforcement and the widespread realization that markets don't need proprietary currencies, we've likely seen the end of ICOs in digital advertising.

If we're lucky there won't be more case studies where blockchains were "used" to track fraud, monitor viewability, record take rates or other times where a simple database or log file analysis would do. This is probably wishful thinking.

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Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive

For MadHive, 2018 was a year of discovery. We partnered with advertising giants like Omnicom, TEGNA and others to successfully prove that blockchain, combined with A.I. and cryptography, reduces data and ad fraud while increasing transparency, eliminating ad taxes and guaranteeing audiences across the advertising ecosystem.

This year also helped weed out some of the less credible players in the space that were feeding into the hype and promises of this technology without creating tangible results.

2019 will be a year of transformation, as the technology begins to scale and revolutionize digital buying with focus on privacy for the consumer, irrefutable data quality and the elimination of waste in the supply chain, while research consortia like AdLedger work to develop standards and best practices for the industry.