The Chief Digital Officer Global Forum (CDX) summit series is gearing up for its next installation in New York. Established in 2013, the summit has set up shop in Chicago, San Francisco, Singapore and, most recently, Las Vegas, with focuses on emerging innovations in mobile, IoT and digital advertising technologies.

To be held on May 11, 2018, in Columbia University’s Lerner Hall, this latest installment will concentrate on advancements in blockchain technology and its application to traditional industries. To this end, the CDX Blockchain Brand Innovation Summit has an extensive list of speakers and panelists both from within and without the blockchain space, featuring representatives from the likes of Hulu, CNBC, IBM and BTC Media.

“CDX has always focused on digital business transformation even when it wasn’t such a catch-phrase,” Drew Ianni, CDX’s founder and event chairman, told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview. “And certainly blockchain [technology] holds a lot of promise in regard to driving digital business transformation across a range of industries so we decided to stage a show on blockchain to help our attendees learn more about its potential,” he continued.

Ianni and CDX have spurred the summit forth at a time when anything to the tune of crypto has reached a fever pitch in popular culture. But to Ianni, this conference isn’t about capitalizing on cryptocurrency’s meteoric popularity; it’s about staying informed.

“[When] you have an emerging technology that is developing quickly and fueling a massive hype cycle, industry education is what’s needed most,” he expressed to Bitcoin Magazine. For such education to be effective, Ianni was careful to not pack “the agenda with a group of pure blockchain cheerleaders.”

The overall goal, then, is diversity, as the summit is designed to “properly frame the debate and discussion about blockchain [technology] and its potential, and bring together some of the brightest minds in the space to help lead the discussion and dialogue,” Ianni indicated.

These debates and discussions will run the gamut from healthcare to blockchain security and enterprise adoption, though the conference seems to have a soft spot for blockchain technology’s role in rethinking how we approach multimedia, especially in the realms of digital advertising and marketing.

One panel, entitled “The Age of Brand Trust: Can Blockchain Transform the Media Supply Chain and Usher in a New Age of Transparency?,” will examine the potential ramifications of decentralized business models and direct product-to-consumer relations for current media brands. MediaCom’s group account director, Charlie Fiordalis, will be taking part in the panel along with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Eric John, Hulu’s Adam Moser and FusionSeven’s Michael Jolly.

“MediaCom is exploring the use of blockchain technology both as a member of WPP’s GroupM and individually for our clients,” Fiordalis told Bitcoin Magazine. And while the business is “focused on educating [itself] and [its] clients and identifying what problems blockchain [technology] is best suited to address,” Fiordalis believes that the blockchain’s “distributed ledger enables a level of transparency beyond the norms of [the] ‘walled garden’ ecosystem in the traditional media supply chain.”

Alanna Gombert, global CRO of the blockchain advertising firm MetaX, shares Fiordalis’s conviction that with the proper application, blockchain technology could invite transparency to multimedia industries.

“[Blockchain technology] flips the paradigm of communication and consensus and brings disparate voices together,” Gombert said to Bitcoin Magazine. “Digital advertising is ripe for disruption. Bad actors, fraud and the economics of digital transactions need to be in the bright light that transparency brings,” she concluded.

Extending beyond digital advertising and marketing, speakers like Amir Azaran will touch on blockchain technology’s role in the future of content curation and monetization. During his talk on “Smart Contracts and the Promise of Permission-Based Blockchains,” Azaran, a partner at Loeb & Loeb LLP’s Chicago branch, plans to discuss how smart contracts could set a new standard for intellectual property rights copyright licensing.

“Blockchain [technology] has the potential to change the way we do business across many industries, and we are seeing some early signs of this in advertising and media. For instance, there are companies trying to implement blockchain-based systems for intellectual property rights management, such as the licensing of images or music. Their offering depends on a blockchain database that provides transparency regarding who has licensed the copyrighted work, the duration of the license, payment of licensee fees, etc.,” he stated in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.

Two days out from CDX’s inaugural summit on blockchain innovation, Ianni anticipates that the aforementioned speakers and the conference’s entire cast of industries-wide talent will foster healthy discussion. Concluding our interview, he espoused his view that the variety of attendees the conference has accrued reflects the myriad advancements in a technology that used to be little more than a synonym for Bitcoin:

“I think it’s a critical inflection point for the broader ecosystem and we are starting to see a much-needed de-coupling of ‘Bitcoin and Blockchain.’ It’s now time to amplify the real-world use cases and proof of concepts that are leveraging blockchain [technology] across a range of industries and companies. And, more than anything, I am simply hoping the event fosters strong discussion and debate both at the show and moving forward.”