BehaviourExchange already does much of what Forbes is predicting for blockchain in 2018

Over the past couple of years, buzzwords such as ‘Bitcoin’, ‘Blockchain’, ‘ICO’ and ‘crypto’ seem to have dominated the marketing discourse.

It has become apparent that blockchain is about to change most industries in one way or another, therefore a team of PR, media strategy, creative and advertising executives from Forbes Agency Councilhave summarized their predictions for 2018 in a listicle, titled ”10 Ways Blockchain Could Change The Marketing Industry This Year”.

It sure sounds intriguing, so lets take a look at what the ways blockchain might change the marketing bussines in 2018 are, according to the smart people at Forbes.

FORBES: Blockchain will change the marketing industry in 10 ways

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1. Brands will be able to better target their customers and, because of blockchain’s transparency, regain trust. It might take a while before middlemen like Facebook and Google are pushed out of the game, but emerging platforms such as BehaviourExchange already use blockchain for consumer profiling.

2. According to Marc Hardgrove from The HOTH, ”JavaScript-based cryptocurrency miners have already been found in the wild, wasting visitors’ CPU power to send “coins” back to website owners. 2018 will see an explosion of this type of shady ad to top-tier sites,” Hardgrove concludes. He believes that because ad blockers have made it difficult for website owners to monetize traffic, they will look for other ways to make money – such as using visitors’ CPU power for coin mining.

3. New agreements between users and advertisers regarding privacy will be possible; studies have shown that if users are asked for permission, they are more likely to share their information with advertisers etc.. That is why BehaviourExchange decided to reward users who share their information with the decentralised profiling platform with tokens. Especially after scandals like the one around Cambridge Analytica the marketing community must work on restoring trust – and this can only be done through transparency.

4. Emerging marketing and advertising startups in the blockchain space such as BehaviourExchange, ”aim to tokenize user behavior and offer a sort of credit system between advertisers and the consumer, which completely removes the massive middlemen managing big media,” says Trevor Chapman from Trevor Chapman Group. Instead of through advertising campaigns in the media, businesses will be able to access their customers directly – which saves money and effort (and above all, spares online users a lot of junk advertising that is not even meant for them).

5. ”Blockchain will allow us to verify who, how and where ads run,” says Ashley Walters from Empower MediaMarketing. Today it is impossible to tell how much of the advertising traffic was created by bots. Businesses pay for impressions and clicks but can’t really be sure where they come from. Blockchain will enable fraud verification companies to separate the wheat from the chaff.

6. Content producers ”will love how they can control how their assets are delivered and ensure it’s properly tracked,” says Todd Earwood from MoneyPath Marketing. Blockchain tech will enable new content distribution systems that will to cut out the middleman to more fairly compensate content creators.

7. Marketers’ claims will become more transparent and verifiable. Through the implementation of Blockchain, it will be possible to analyze those ‘impressive results’ from case studies and negotiate fair advertising contracts.

8. Influencers are all the rage these days. But guess what, many of them will have to get a real job. Just like any other advertising campaign, influencer campaigns are going to change dramatically as marketers will be able to see if the influencer’s followers are true people or just bots. As Loren Baker from Foundation Digital puts it, ”it will reduce the number of influencers but leave the top influencers at the top.”

9. Michael Weinhouse from Logical Position returns to point 5. as he claims that the use of Blockchain will increase publishers’ accountability. Because advertisers will see exactly where their traffic is going, there will be less room for fraud and, above all, there will be lots of new information available.

10. The list ends with a general prediction that Blockchain will solve many issues the marketing industry deals with today. Emerging blockchain projects promise solutions around payments, fraud prevention in advertising, measurement, invoice reconciliation and publisher/advertiser transactions through token economy (such as in the BehaviourExchange ecosystem through its BEX tokens).

(Original list was published by Forbes)