Isobar India tests scaling of media-rich ads via blockchain

After a four-week trial campaign in January and February, Isobar India and its UK technology partner are claiming success in a bid to scale up running rich-media ads on a blockchain-enabled platform. 

"We believe this is a major milestone in what is likely to be the start of a journey to explore how digital ledger can improve efficiency,” Shekhar Mhaskar, Isobar executive vice president, said in a release.

The test campaign for Ceat Tyres sent large video banner mobile adverts to consumer devices from the blockchain-enabled platform run by AdsDax, a UK-based marketplace. It received more than 2.67 million ad impressions, recorded to a public ledger. This gave the agency and advertiser immediate and transparent access to events in the campaign as they unfolded.

Blockchain has long been touted as a way for the adtech industry to provide more transparency in what is often a still murky programmatic supply chain by decentralising the whole ecosystem, allowing participants including advertisers to directly have secure access to an open ledger. 

One of the roadblocks has been to create an interoperable platform that works efficiently enough given the amount of complex data passing through the chain quickly in large-scale media-rich campaigns. 

Mhaskar claims this test proves the platform can track live ad campaign events at scale on a secure ledger with transactions recorded in real-time directly from the rich-media ad creative.  

In an earlier release, CEAT Tyres senior markeing VP Nitish Bajaj called the promise of such platforms "an absolute win-win situation where we put our media investments to maximum use without any spillage, in addition to tracking the campaign at every stage.”

"Blockchain is still an incipient technology and there is still progress to be made by many blockchain protocols," noted AdsDax CPO Ryan Davies. "However, this test has shown significant progress towards a blockchain solution for advertising with enough resilience and efficiency to handle the sheer amount of data generated during the advertising process, and at a low-enough cost to make it commercially viable.”