The team here at MEDIA Protocol are deeply committed to creating a more direct, transparent and secure ecosystem for content creators, publishers, and consumers through the revolutionary application of blockchain technology. We’re here to connect the worlds of marketing and technology for everyone’s benefit.

We’ve got love for both worlds, but from our own experience we know that they can sometimes feel, literally, worlds apart. So we’re committed, not just to connecting them, but to creating a common understanding between them.

This series of articles aims to explain the relationship between marketing and blockchain to help everyone — the marketeers, the technologists, and the content consumers — understand the principles behind this game-changing technology.

We want to help educate by demystifying the potential applications of blockchain technology. The MEDIA Protocol team feel it’s vital to highlight and clarify the potential of blockchain in the marketing world; how it provides transparency, efficiency, reliability and accuracy.

Strap in, and welcome to the MEDIA Protocol Blockchain Marketing Programme.

Part 3 — The Potential Impact Of Blockchain On Marketing: Variety

In the previous two articles in this series we looked at the Volume and Velocity of Big Data. Now, we turn our attention to Variety.

What Do We Mean By Variety?

Historically computers, particularly over networks, were used to transfer the kind of data that could readily be stored in a simple spreadsheet or database. These days, a quick glance at the internet, or even your own phone, will confirm how many more types of data we’re all handling on a daily basis.

Broadly, this breaks down into; text, audio, video, and graphics. Within these categories of data, there are countless file types and extensions, all of which may require particular software or conversions to be accessible and usable.

How Does Marketing Currently Handle This?

Data is broadly divided into forms: structured and unstructured. By structured we mean the neatly contained, properly arranged, machine-readable data mentioned above, that is readily identified and stored as is.

Unstructured data is more complicated. It’s the stuff of human interactions. Emotive. Tangential. Messy. And often rambling. Not at all easy to systematically categorise and organise. And when coupled with the sheer volume and velocity of Big Data, processing unstructured data for valuable content is rapidly expanding beyond human capacity.

What is more, this is set to become even more of an issue with the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the behavioural data gathered from that.

At present this means that a lot of potentially valuable customer data is being discarded or ignored in favour of the most obvious and easily processed.

How Does Blockchain Do It Better?

Blockchain is uniquely suited to large scale projects requiring an abundance of resources. Again, its decentralised nature is an asset, with the load of processing and storage spread across limitless nodes rather than held in one centralised location.

It provides ways to automate processes with checks and balances built in at crucial stages — using digital signatures and smart contracts to verify the data it’s processing (we’ll cover more on this in the next part of this series).

There’s also great potential for deep learning processes on blockchain, whereby users are effectively teaching the computers how to think. This would allow for systems to be built around blockchain technology, enabling computers to spot patterns and identify useful data from the unstructured quagmire, effectively mining data that would otherwise be discarded for being too varied.

What’s Next?

From Variety, we now look ahead to the fourth V and one of the most crucial overlaps between blockchain and Big Data: Veracity.

Our next post in the Blockchain Marketing Programme will explore the ways in which blockchain verifies and validates your information.

Read All Parts In Our Blockchain Marketing Programme:

Part 1 — The Potential Impact Of Blockchain On Marketing: Volume

Part 2 — The Potential Impact of Blockchain on Marketing: Velocity

Part 3 — The Potential Impact of Blockchain on Marketing: Variety (This article above)

Part 4 — The Potential Impact of Blockchain on Marketing: Veracity Coming Soon

You May Also Be Interested In Our Blockchain Education Programme:

Part 1 — Blockchain: Is It Secure?

Part 2 — How Does Blockchain Apply To Cyber Security?

Part 3 — How Does Blockchain Create Transparency?

Part 4 — How Blockchain Ensures That No-One Can Impersonate The Owner Of An Address

Part 5 — Different Ways Of Handling Real-world Identity On The Blockchain

Part 6 — What Sybil Attacks Are And Possible Mitigations

Part 7 — Improved Confidentiality and Data Integrity

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