InBev, the World’s Largest Brewer Puts Budweiser on the Blockchain to Track Ad Data
The world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev has launched its first blockchain powered ad campaigns through the Kiip mobile marketing app and new product Single Ledger, which uses the Ethereum blockchain to track ad data.
The campaign, which started two weeks ago, marks the world’s first blockchain mobile ad campaign and is built to enable all players in the mobile ad sales chain to view and audit campaign data directly.
Lucas Herscovici, AB InBev’s Global Marketing Vice President of Consumer Connections, Insights and Innovation said:
“This campaign will increase transparency in programmatic ad buying and support the ways our brands earn consumers attention.”
The brewing giant is testing ads for five of its most popular brands, including Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra and Estrella, with the aim of using blockchain technology to redefine the digital advertising supply chain.
The Single Ledger platform has been developed using Ethereum‘s blockchain to track ad data and offer different metrics, including impressions, engagement and price by the hour.
Using the platform, clients like AB InBev can ensure that they only pay for the ads that meet their criteria, and reduce the amount of time that its campaign’s organisers spend on tracking the metrics. AB Inbev’s Lucas Herscovici stated:
“We’re building a company to last for the next 100 plus years, and that can only be done by disrupting existing paradigms through innovation and putting consumers at the heart of everything we do,”
Kiip, set-up by Brian Wong, the youngest person to ever receive venture capital funding at just 19 years old, has already been pioneering programmatic advertising, working with over 500 of the world’s biggest brands.
Kiip technology was originally designed to move advertising away from the historic model of interrupting consumers, toward an earned and owned mobile media strategy, relying on data to target and deliver content to the right audiences. Kiip CEO Brian Wong stated:
“When we started digging into the potential of blockchain, we began to realise that if Kiip was started today, it would be built on blockchain technology,”
Single Ledger promises to eliminate the potential for fraudulent reporting by third parties and ad servers, whilst streamlining the reporting and payment process. Kiip’s Wong stated:
“We saw this technology’s potential to impact several major areas of the advertising world, including supply-chain transparency, campaign data reconciliation and view-ability verification. Single Ledger, quite frankly, is just the beginning for us.”
As well as Kiip, other ad-tech companies have been developing their own blockchain-enabled ad networks, such as NYIAX and MetaX, the company valued at $175 billion in 2017 and best known for developing the adChain open protocol, that enables decentralised applications (DApps) to be built for the digital advertising industry.
