We are excited to officially announce the addition of Will Rand, Praneet Sharma and Shailin Dhar to the adChain roster. All three individuals possess an incredible wealth of Ad Tech knowledge and technical expertise. Their ability to break down the mind-dizzying vernacular of Ad Tech into layman’s terms offers us all a much-needed reprieve from the status quo.

Praneet Sharma holds a BS in Computer Science from UC Davis, and his journey into Ad Tech began in 2012 when he co-founded a company called Brandcast, “a powerful cloud-based platform that allows professional designers to create code-free websites.”

His journey continued, and in 2015 after departing from his Lead Engineer role at Pixlee, he joined New Relic as a Sales Engineer.

At New Relic Praneet was tasked with a unique role to build ad monitoring, and video monitoring for the companies media vertical. He says that’s when he, “really saw the internals of the Ad Tech environment.”

“I always knew how it worked (Ad Tech) using the internet architecture, but never how much it was exploited. Seeing it all from the publisher’s side gave me a very unique look because most people in the Ad Tech world have the tech stack, and the advertisers angle, but not many have the publishers angle.”

Shortly after peering under the hood of the mired Ad Tech world, Praneet phoned up his long-time friend Shailin Dhar who was working as an ad fraud consultant, to find out just what was going on.

Why was one person viewing 100 ads in a 1-minute session? How could that be?

Shailin is one of the world’s most elite individuals in analyzing and exposing digital ad fraud, and so he was happy to enlighten Praneet about what he was seeing. The two later formed a partnership called Method Media Intelligence which, “empowers clients with the training, tools, and intelligence needed to ensure that their media investments are spent wisely on quality supply channels.”

When asked about why he decided to work with adChain, Praneet replied,

“The Ethereum blockchain is a foundational technology and its a standard. That’s something that doesn’t exist in the Ad Tech ecosystem or the internet as a whole. There’s a lot of different currencies out there for various use cases. There’s a cryptocurrency for storage, and one for distributed computing but the one thing that could benefit the most and the largest thing that could benefit from it is advertising and adToken. Maximal revenue is in advertising, it also has the least data transparency, so it’s a perfect combination. You can apply this technology (adChain), and if it becomes a standard, suddenly a whole new avenue of opportunity opens up for the economy of the internet at scale.”

Shailin Dhar is the author of works such as Uncommon Sense For Ad Tech, Compendium of ad fraud knowledge for media investors and Mystery Shopping Inside the Ad Fraud Verification Bubble. Shailin works in close collaboration with Fortune 500 companies to root out the source of their media spend as it tracks across the supply chain.

For the past two years, Shailin has tried to fix the problems in digital advertising on a case-by-case basis for specific clients. When asked about why he decided to come on board with adChain he said,

“I see this as a solution that can fix the problems in Ad Tech across the market rather than on a case-by-case basis. So if we change the way the advertising gets transacted on and how those transactions are recorded, it not only removes the prevalence of fraudulent behavior, but also makes it way easier to audit and detect it.”

Shailin, along with Will and Praneet, is helping put together a roster of partners across the industry to join the adChain beta program and setting up internal tests that leverage Ethereum to provide advertisers and publishers with valuable insights and data transparency.

“The value of having someone like Shailin on the adChain team cannot be overstated. Shailin uses the scientific method to back his claims with overwhelming supporting evidence. His ability to lay out the entire process of his reports in terms everybody can understand is incredibly powerful. We are excited about the scientific studies he will build around adChain and the results it will show.” -Ken Brook CEO of Meta X

You can follow Shailin Dhar on twitter @ShailinDhar

After spending the last decade in Ad Tech, Will Rand has seen and worked on every aspect of the digital advertising supply chain.

He began his career in 2007 working for emarketer and in 2010 transitioned over to PulsePoint where he worked as a Business Operations Analyst. In 2013, he joined the mobile app company Paltalk as a Director of Ad Operations and Yield Management.

Will has worked with agencies and consulted with Demand Side Platforms, Publishers, and Supply Side Platforms. His latest project, Programmatic Intelligence, seeks to educate the industry by acting as, “a knowledge base and intelligence hub for all things digital advertising.”

When asked about why he chose to devote his resources to adChain, Will replied,

“There are a tremendous amount of companies in online advertising, and they are actively doing the wrong thing, whether they know it or not. And they aren’t interested in changing what they are doing, and because I’ve spanned so much of the online advertising sector, I know what a big help to the industry this technology will be. Fraud and attribution are significant problems in digital advertising. Having a universal data set provided by adChain is the bright future I am looking towards building”.

Will is also a contributing author to www.admonsters.com You can read his articles here:

Written by Hunter Gebron

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Thanks for reading. We will continue to keep the community informed about the latest adChain developments as we move forward in building the adChain vision.

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