Blockchain-based consortium AdLedger has on-boarded The Hershey Company, a leading American chocolate production company, media outlet AdWeek reported on March 26.

Hershey, along with French media group Publicis Media and The Global Audience Based Buying Conference & Consultancy (GABBCON), has reportedly joined AdLedger. AdLedger was founded by IBM, Tegna and blockchain company MadHive in 2018, and is a nonprofit consortium that develops shared ledger technologies for the digital advertising market.

Apart from advertising, Hershey’s deployment of blockchain technology could be expanded to the operation of chocolate factories, facilitating tracing of cacao “from bean to bar,” according to Vinny Rinaldi, head of addressable media and technology for The Hershey Company. “This would be a fundamentally massive shift in the way that we think,” Rinaldi reportedly added.

As Cointelegraph reported last August, advertising lacks the transparency of data and process. Blockchain can purportedly address these issues, making sufficient information available to everyone within the ecosystem on how publishers verify their traffic, and the processes that ad agencies and other intermediaries follow to ensure that they work with publishers with verified traffic.

Last year, IBM and Salon Media piloted a proof-of-concept blockchain product dubbed “The Campaign Reconciliation Project” created by AdLedger. The product is set to short-circuit intermediaries between advertisers, publishers and consumers, which currently render the industry vulnerable to high-tech ad fraud, such as bot fraud and domain spoofing.



Last October, Japanese car manufacturer Toyota partnered with blockchain advertising analytics firm Lucidity to cut down on fraud when buying digital ads. Through the partnership with Lucidity, Toyota and global ads agency Saatchi & Saatchi were reportedly looking to attain transparency in Toyota’s digital ad campaign buys and eliminate wasted spending.