Global Marketing and Blockchain
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Global Marketing and Blockchain
Introduction
The advertising environment began as a marketplace where advertisers, publishers, and users were the primary actors. However, advertising has currently been hijacked by brokers, go-betweens, and ad exchanges that have continued to complicate operations. Misfortunes in the advertising industry have led to advertisers receiving poor reporting and targeting. Additionally, publishers continue to lose billions in revenue as fraudsters cause more havoc, particularly due to data as a commodity and product for trade. In contrast, many users have lost their privacy, faced high charges to download ads and trackers, and faced increasing malware risks. This paper is an effort to provide a substantial contribution to the body of scholarship by exploring blockchain’s technology’s possible uses, impacts, and limits, in fields that intersect with social impact. This paper explores the impacts of the overall blockchain innovation and its core operational principles, such as transparency, decentralization, accountability, and equality could play a role in limiting undue online censorship and surveillance and the increasing reliance on online information.
Basic Attention Token
Injurious aspects of key stakeholders have dominated the predominant digital marketplace. The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a new blockchain-based digital advertising platform that uses an advanced and forward-looking, Etherum-based token of utility. By introducing the BAT platform, the marketplace is chanced to witness a more efficient, decentralized, and transparent connection for use by advertisers, publishers, and other users (Casey, Crane, & Gensler, et al., 2019). BAT platforms are founded on user focus, which is fundamentally mental engagement and effectively meets advertising and other attention-oriented advertising. Every evidence indicates that the Internet is headed for a more complicated approach towards a decentralized path daily. BAT is an effort to improve fairness, security, and achieve digital advertising efficiency by using blockchain technology. Although the ideas’ white paper is dated early 2018, as of 2020, the idea is still under development ad has undergone various trials, although certain versions are already available for download (Gupta, 2018).
Blockstack
Blockstack is a commendable innovation that provides the right structure for launching a blockchain network (Casey, et al., 2019). There is an enormous potential that comes with Blockstack; however, the potential hurdles that face the innovation’s future are also huge. Blockstack is an environmentally-secure, private application that gives users the full mandate to be in charge of their data identity by default. All Blockstack platforms’ applications are incapable of transferring or changing a user’s data without their consent. Using the Blockstack allows users to create identities using digital keys on the Blockstack network. Examples of tokens supported by Blockstack include bitcoin and other trending cryptocurrencies available on peer-to-peer transfers available on subscriptions.
Understanding the Impact of BAT Technology
BAT utilizes Ethereum blockchain and a uniquely designed browser called Brave. The BAT token is used as currency on the Brave platform with the ability to obtain multiple advertising services. The engagement is designed to allow exchange between advertisers, users, and publishers. It is founded on an extraordinary concept; however, the most important approach is to benefit advertising firms operating in the digital era: user attention. Casey, et al. (2019) attests that the developers of BAT have the goal of improving how advertising is conveyed in a digital environment. Their approach is based on solving challenges that face advertisers, users, and publishers alike. The most prevalent challenges are associated with ads and trackers consistently subjected to malware, which is increasingly becoming more aggressive, harmful, and powerful.
Before BAT, various legacy publishers have helplessly seen their advertisement revenues face a dramatic decline because platforms such as Facebook and Google cut down information prices while witnessing a recognizable cut of advertising revenue. Also, malware and bots easily inflict increasing damage every year, and credibility crises have oppressed most platforms. Advertisers also lack significant targeting information and techniques to deliver their content effectively, and because most of these functions are monopolized my platforms. However, BAT’s invention has come in with capabilities to track how users engage with digital advertising content and archiving the data as a commodity (Casey, et al., 2019). Archived data effectively enhances the digital advertising experience for involved parties: users, advertisers, and publishers. BAT innovation will be impactful because users will experience lesser ads and content customized, targeted, and tailored to suit them. For publishers, BAT is here to ensure that they find new sources of revenue. And for advertisers, BAT is designed to ensure a better target on specific users, based on archived user interests and information preferences. A wholesome impact of BAT to users, publishers, and advertisers is that they will all avoid fraud more efficiently.
Allgood (2017) argues that BAT has emerged as a digital currency that impacts the entire advertisement and engagement process. BAT is linked with attention value, which is determined based on incremental duration, and the pixels consumed in designing the marketing content. Further, the BAT platform will have more impacts by quantifying and monetizing user decisions associated with future digital advertisements. In anticipation of worries about potential fraud and privacy challenges, BAT’s initiators have developed various security measures into the Brave browser and digital token system to ensure the security of data. This will be achieved by mitigating potential advertisement fraud by embracing cryptography, improved client-side integrity, and transparency enjoyed through open source applications.
Understanding the Impact of Blockstack Technology
If a user could imagine a situation in which they do not have to upload information on external platforms such as social media network sites, and yet they can share the same information with friends and other users. Blockstack uses the power of blockchain and has impacted engagements by offering a new array of opportunities on the Internet platform, where all decentralized applications can run locally on the browser from the user’s end, and users have the freedom to own their data in the form of images, texts, files, or videos. Through Blockstack, these pieces of data are stored locally or connected to the user’s storage hosting providers; therefore, the user has the freedom to retain full control of the data as a commodity. Additionally, Blockstack has positively impacted the sharing of content through an encrypted and secure medium.
Blockstack ensures that user data is correctly used as a commodity. According to Allgood’s (2017) definition of a commodity, data has been transformed into commodities and used as homogeneous products or interchangeable goods for various goals. As a commodity in the business industry, personal data has been seen as a scalable commodity used to secure decent returns on increasingly thin margins. However, this unfriendly ecosystem might soon be tackled through the use of Blockstack technologies by ensuring that users become owners and controllers of what to do with their data. Anticipations are high that users, advertisers, and publishers will embrace the use of Blockstacks to witness the innovation’s benefits (Gupta, 2018).
Collective Impact of BAT and Blockstack Technology
Blockchain technologies have been prevalently used within the banking industry for a long time now. Every financial transaction, including trading, bank deposits, insurance, custody, clearing, and settlement, depending on blockchain technologies. Blockstack is responsible for carrying out all computation and storage of information outside of the blockchain and relies on blockchain technologies only as a shared source of truth between relevant users (Redman, 2018). Within a delicate industry such as banking, customers pay for the trust and always expect their transactions to be conducted fairly and safely. The repetitive, time-consuming, and costly operations within the banking industry have been solved by exploring the use of blockchain within the existing models. Leading financial institutions are aiming to significantly reduce the costs incurred in back-office operations. BAT and Blockstack technologies continue to challenge banks to embrace their transparent, faster, and affordable services. The two technologies have effectively managed to capture and achieve the use of data as a commodity by significantly increasing the shares of the market within the payment industry. Collectively, the ever-changing and competitive market has proven that blockchain is generally an important subject with all banking institutions.
Singularly, the Basic Attention Token has achieved brave and privacy centered browsing while ensuring that data is used as a commodity. As a native token, BAT is used on an open-source, privacy-centered browser that blocks invasive cookies, trackers, and potential malware. The browser uses blockchain technologies to securely and anonymously track user attention, which is interpreted to rewards by publishers (Gupta, 2018). Users’ attention, in this context, implies that their engaged mental sharpness on digital content like sales marketing is logged through the Brave browser. To this point, a user’s personal information and tracking are archived only on the user’s machine or node; therefore, the data becomes anonymous and private. Additionally, the Basic Attention Token rewards publishers of digital sales marketing in unique ways. The more effective a marketing content is targeted at generating sustained user attention, the more the revenues experienced through improved targeting.
Conclusion
There are few research findings that explore blockchain technology’s user-centric paradigm in allowing the use of multiple applications, particularly in industries such as banking. Both BAT and Blockstack have contributed massively towards ensuring that users, publishers, and advertisers enjoy an environment in which all the three parties have optimum freedom and peace to operate. Currently, publishers continue to enjoy monetizing attention through an explicitly complex network, characterized by actors players via advertising networks and related tools. With the emergence of uncontrolled parasitic intermediaries, revenues by publishers have drastically gone down. A new system under BAT and Blockstacks will ensure proper data value and user attention. Lastly, the two technologies will ensure that users are rewarded and protected while giving better conversion to advertisers and higher revenue ratios to publishers.
References
Allgood, B. (2017, April, 10). The Commoditization of AI and The Long-Term Value Of
Data. Forbes.
Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/04/10/the-commoditization-of-ai-and-the-long-term-value-of-data/?sh=58e8880a159c
Casey, M., Crane, J., & Gensler, G., et al. (2019). The Impact of Blockchain Technology on
Finance: A Catalyst for Change. London: Centre for Economic PolicyRe-search.
Gupta, M. (2018). Blockchain for dummies (3rd Ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Redman, J. (2018, May 18). Blockstack Launches Decentralized Applications Store.
Bitcoin.com
Retrieved from https://news.bitcoin.com/blockstack-launches-decentralized-applications-store/