Marketing hype around the benefits of blockchain have largely focused on the financial sector. However, the promise of opportunities for all industries and commerce in general is often advised. In brief, blockchain provides more efficient financial and informational transactions. It also facilitates greater transparency and accountability. And all for lower cost.
The fact that blockchain can also eliminate or minimize middlemen along operational or supply lines will disrupt the world by itself.
But what are the benefits of blockchain for the marketing and advertising sector?
The following article, How Blockchain Can Help Marketers Build Better Relationships with Their Customers, expands upon the following even further. In brief, here are four blockchain benefits for marketers.
- The Marketing Impact of Near-Zero Transaction Costs: Are 3% payment processing fees really worth it? Especially when margins for many companies are getting slimmer all the time? With blockchain those fees are practically nonexistent.
- Ending the Google-Facebook Advertising Duopoly: In 2018 it’s hard to imagine a marketing plan that does not include Google Ads or Facebook Ads, or both. But it wasn’t that long ago that Facebook ads didn’t exist. It wasn’t that much longer ago when Google Ads didn’t exist. But what if we could connect directly with consumers and pay them for their attention? They are rightfully the ones who should benefit from the marketing relationship. Personally, it’s hard for me to imagine Google and Facebook going away and it’s highly probable they have some of their best minds working on how they can use blockchain to still be relevant to marketers in the future. One thing is for future. The marketing and advertising landscape will be changing and both consumers and marketers will be the primary beneficiaries. (Especially consumers).
- Ending Marketing Fraud and Spam: Two blockchain factors will be working against fraudsters and spammers: Transparency and micropayments, enabled by point 1 above (near zero transparency fees). It will be much harder for bad actors to hide in a blockchain world. Although I wouldn’t suggest that it will become impossible, it will be fundamentally more challenging. The internet, up to now, has made it ‘not’ challenging to be an anonymous bad actor online. The inherent transparency of blockchain will force some bad apples to go straight and others to go elsewhere. And the fact that that there could be an opportunity for companies to pay for consumers to click their links means that spammers would be pushed aside due to unworkable economics.
- Remonetizing Media Consumption: Paying true content creators for their work is an overdue promise of the internet and may finally be delivered via blockchain. Rightful ownership of property via smart contracts is a cornerstone benefit of blockchain. Figuring out how to manage the commerce of such is being figured out in the present.
In recent years I have started becoming jaded about the internet, which may have taken me longer than others, since those of us who jumped on the internet in the mid ’90s would have been pioneers of that earlier world-changing technology. And although the world was indeed changed in profound and meaningful ways, personally, I found it disheartening to find such a massive opportunity for good also be used for less than good, as well.
Blockchain has reignited my own earlier vision of not only what the internet could be, but what a better world could be.