CANNES — The blockchain consortium solution recently unveiled by Mediaocean and IBM’s iX agency could reduce the margins of many adtech players, but they might realize big gains as a result of an improved system, says Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise. And while blockchain technology in the advertising world is typically associated with digital media, the Mediaocean/IBM offering also works with television, print, radio and out-of-home media, Wise explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“It’s going to rise all tides,” says Wise.
However, some of the boats navigating those tides might be looking at rough waters ahead. “If your business is reliant on margins that are above market value or if there’s fraud being laced within your ad exchange or SSP, then obviously it will hurt your business,” he adds.
It’s okay for the margins of adtech companies to decline in a more efficient and transparent market if the end return outweighs that decline, according to Wise.
“So if your margin goes down ten or twenty or thirty percent but the business opportunity is ten to twenty X, that’s a tradeoff I think everyone would make and I think that’s the opportunity here.”
He cites three main goals of the blockchain consortium: more transparency, interoperability with other blockchain solutions and faster invoice reconciliation.
“A lot of marketers didn’t know how much adtech tax, if you will, they were spending and how much was going to working media. And when they saw that in digital programmatic it can be as high as sixty to sixty five cents on the dollar, they were blown away. So the first thing we’re going to do is make all of that transparent, make the supply chain more transparent,” says Wise.
Interoperability with other blockchain solutions will yield improvements in supply chain management issues, plus problems like fraud and privacy.
As for reconciliation, “We’re going to be able to reconcile much quicker, which means the pipes are greased. We can pay quicker, we can invoice quicker.”
Wise calls the blockchain consortium the “natural evolution of Mediaocean,” whose systems handle some $140 billion in annual global ad spend. “It’s not about Mediaocean, it’s not about what happens to our business, it’s what happens to the industry,” he says.
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions 2018 on the emergence of blockchain in the media ecosystem. This series is presented by Mediaocean. For more videos from the series, visit this page.
