"To effectively work together, marketers and publishers need to know how media is purchased, how it’s being delivered and that payment is being made. Blockchain can restore confidence in digital advertising and help advertising dollars go further by creating greater transparency –providing a single source of truth –across all members of the supply chain.”

Digital advertising is considered the main form of advertising. At the conception of capitalism, the idea of digital devices that could be tapped into for the purposes of advertising and message generation would literally have been a utopian paradise for many business owners. As we now know, digital advertising is literally woven into the fabric in which we live. Our mobile phones, our cars, our laptops, our tvs, our tablets, our cities, literally filled with interactive, intrusive advertising. You literally can’t escape it. As an advertising psychologist myself, I understand that fundamentally, this is a technology that has a profound effect on our behaviour, the potential for profit is huge. However- Advertising is a very competitive world, agencies need to generate new ideas in order to actually make profits and win over their clients. That’s where the blockchain comes in. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, international firm IBM, have linked up with online news outlet, Salon Media and blockchain company AdLedger in order to establish a project that will use the blockchain to make digital advertising more transparent. As we know, many ad firms use sneaky tactics to mine our data in order to ensure their ads have the highest psychological impact on us. Whilst this isn’t illegal, it’s frowned upon and serves as a gross misuse of our online assets. The project, spearheaded by IBM will establish a format for transparent record keeping and smart contract generation. Meaning, agencies using the platform will have their contractual agreements stored on the blockchain, in a transparent accessible format. Within this, the agencies will be bound to stricter rules and regulations , something that AdLedger has already been working on. By having such information on the public blockchain , the advertising agencies are far more responsible for ensuring they stick to their word and only operate in a fair and rounded way. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, Chad Andrews, the Global Solutions Leader for Advertising and Blockchain at IBM has said:This project aims to produce one central solution to the controversy that surrounds digital marketing and advertising at present. Once the blockchain becomes a fully established medium for digital advertising then we should hopefully see some fair controls established which will, in turn make advertising less influential and less of a pest. The overall goal is to make advertising something enjoyable, something which we choose to consume to allows us to make informed decisions, as opposed to the current format of aggressive product placement which we see today.