PALM SPRINGS, Calif — Blockchain technology may be commonly associated with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but there are a host of vendors out there trying to bring blockchain benefits to other sectors, and advertising is not missing out.
Among the use cases cited for blockchain in ad-tech is improving transparency by making transactions supremely recordable and viewable in an authenticated ledger.
That is also the pitch from Amino Payments, a startup founded by the former CTO and co-founder of Integral Ad Science.
“After I left there, I started to explore blockchain technology,”Amino Payments CEO Will Luttrell
“It occurred to me that a lot of the concepts around supplied chain provenance and tracking transactions as they flow through different systems could be directly applied to some of the challenges I knew still were outstanding in the ad tech industry.”
Amino Payment’s feature set includes:
- Wallet: “ensures that everyone in the media supply chain is who they say they are”.
- Ledger: “follows the money from buyer to publisher”.
- Payments system: ensures “everyone in the media supply chain gets paid at the same time”.
So how do they fit together, and why? That depends on whether you are a buyer or seller.
“When a big brand puts in $10 million into a large ad campaign, we’re going to give you complete view into where all that money went all the way down to the publishers,” Luttrell adds. “As a DSP and SSP resellers, they’re all taking their cuts that you’ll get to see where every penny that $10 million went and to make sure that it wound up where you thought it was supposed to go. From the sell side, we represent fast reconciliations and fast payments.”
It would be tempting to consider it too early for concrete deployment of what appears to remain a peripheral technology, still swirling from association with turbulent tokens and crypto coins.
But Luttrell claims to have made strides.
“We have six of the top 10 global programmatic spenders either live on the platform or in verbal ‘yeses’ or in legal right now,” he says. “Where the source of the money is, is really what drives a lot of adoption throughout the rest of the ecosystem.
“Likewise, we have huge publishers that are signed on as well as a pretty significant presence growing in the long tail because they’re running their own tests and seeing dollars being siphoned off to people representing them in the exchange environment when it’s not actually them.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
