Los Angeles, California, USA-based Lucidity, a digital advertising blockchain protocol company, has recently announced the public launch of their marketing analytics protocol. They promise to rectify the lack of transparency prevalent in this sector, with their blockchain-based solution.
Globally, digital advertising spend was US $ 229.25 billion during 2017. However, lack of authenticity, fraudulent impressions, attribution theft, domain spoofing, ad stacking, and other frauds are expected to cost a whopping US $ 19 billion in 2018, or approximately 9%! Advertisers are concerned due to large misallocations and long hours spent on reconciliation every month. This isn’t a healthy state of affairs.
A technology solution that allows the industry participants to reach a consensus about which events are valid, and which aren’t, will go a long way in tackling the lack of transparency. Additional products around important areas such as fee transparency, confirming publisher identity, and identifying fake bid requests will certainly help.
Lucidity‘s choice of blockchain as a technology solution is well justified. Blockchain is a decentralized system, where nodes, i.e. computers on the network, maintain a shared distributed database, and every node has the entire information on the blockchain. The system can’t be destroyed by taking out any central server. Also, adding a new block record, called ‘block’, requires a node to solve complex cryptographic puzzle by performing massive number-crunching operations at high-speed, and majority of the participating nodes must approve the transaction, as required by the consensus mechanism of blockchain. This makes hacking blockchain economically non-viable.
Lucidity‘s blockchain-powered solution is built on Ethereum blockchain, and the relevant features are following:
- The advertisers get a unified set of data, free from discrepancies;
- The publishers can own their identity and transparently establish the value of their inventory.
- The protocol, as a result, will resolve data discrepancies, and make billing faster.
- While there are known scaling and speed issues with Ethereum, Lucidity is one of the first companies to implement Plasma, a side-chain processing solution, which allows them to process millions of transactions per second.
- The platform will act as a technical foundation to build new apps and services.
- For the clients, there’s no need to worry about the technical complexity, because they only need to install a dashboard with the data they want.
Lucidity is inviting partners to use their products and bring in greater transparency in the digital advertising space. The advertisers and publishers that use Lucidity can use the well-known advertising platforms, for e.g. DoubleClick, Adelphic, Rubicon Project, and MoPub.
Lucidity was founded in 2017, and their CEO Sam Kim has clarified that Lucidity doesn’t use consumer data, which is a real positive at a time of heightened concern about data theft. Kim strongly believes that the honest players will significantly benefit from using Lucidity, and that’ll be the incentive to drive greater transparency into the digital advertising space.
