CANNES – Rob Master is excited about the promise of transparency, visibility and measurement for Unilever as it helps to pioneer a blockchain consortium with IBM and Mediaocean. To him, it’s all about prioritizing dollars.
“The digital ecosystem is fraught I think, as we’ve all seen with a host of challenges,” says the VP of Global Media. “We believe that the blockchain is a potential opportunity to help give us a better understanding of how the whole ecosystem works and really empowers us to make better business decisions as we go forward.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Master talks about Unilever’s efforts to monitor ad viewability, weed out non-human traffic and seek brand-safe environments. “There’s a host of things in that ecosystem that we’re tracking,” he says.
He’s hoping blockchain will provide a more efficient and effective way to manage and monitor the whole process.
“It really starts with us as the advertiser with that dollar, and how much of that dollar is actually spent showing our great creative to the consumer. Where along the way are we spending that dollar to make sure it gets to the consumer in an appropriate way?”
Given the circuitous route that “a great piece of creative” can take on its way to a publisher and, ultimately, an audience, “Along the way I think there’s a lot of different things that have to take place to make sure it’s seen by humans.”
Gaining a better understanding of how the amount money invested with various publishers and platforms actually performs will help Unilever determine which ones are most valuable. “And it allows us to prioritize our dollars,” says Master.
“We spend a dollar and a host of things have to take place to understand how that dollar’s being spent. If we could do it much more efficiently and effectively, we could understand much quicker what’s working and what’s not.”
As it stands, it’s not uncommon to be waiting “waiting weeks or months to understand what was spent, whether it was seen. In a potential blockchain solution, we could do it in a matter of hours or days and the efficiency of our spend becomes that much better.”
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.
