The Silicon Review ^Asia

The American multinational technology company IBM joins hands with Mediaocean to introduce a blockchain-based pilot for tracking digital media transactions, earlier this week.

“The blockchain pilot will help track the flow of money among multimedia players and eliminate unnecessary intermediaries,” said Babs Rangaiah, IBM’s global marketing partner.

The launch by IBM will provide more transparency and control cost in the Ad industry. IBM is looking forward to clean up the media buying industry by implementing the blockchain. The transaction tracker is designed to prevent digital ad fraudulent by preventing payments from being diverted.

The network will first focus on authorizing transactions between marketers and agencies before eventually expanding more broadly through the ad-tech supply chain with publishers and measurement companies.

 “The way we’re looking at the pilot is to prove out and to close the supply chain,” said Bill Weiss, CEO Mediaocean. “We might start with just a handful of campaigns, we might look at it across all of our media spend,” he added.

According to Mediaocean, the tracker will be applied in its entirety by the majority of the digital media industry by the end of 2019. It is expected that by 2020, there will be a solution to make it fully operational and will be adopted by most industries.

“The idea is that once identified where the money is directed, what they do with them, who are the players, there will be some redundancies in the supply chains that will allow much of the money now to pass to the intermediate players and reach the editors,” added Mr Rangaiah.