media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to Pilira Mwambala, ad operations director at digital media execution business Mark1, about blockchain’s possible impact on advertising, and other important changes taking place within the digital advertising space in 2018.

In order to understand how blockchain will impact advertising industry, it is first helpful to know what blockchain is. Blockchain, according to Dataconomy.com, is a public ledger where transactions are recorded and confirmed anonymously. It’s a record of events shared by many parties and, once information is entered, it cannot be altered.     

How important do you think blockchain will be to the marketing and advertising space?

Where blockchain will become relevant in digital media is in adding security and verification in areas of user identification and audience definition. Blockchain will also lessen fraudulent activities in areas of website mining, personal data hacking, and phishing.

Programmatic advertising has long been plagued with non-transparent auction bidding as well as inabilities to disclose all ad exchanges that are part of a winning bid, and how much they charge in each transaction.

Blockchain is able to verify all transactions of an auction, bringing trust and transparency to online transactions, offering media buyers and sellers a way to audit a transaction in real time, and indicating where money is spent or invested in each impression auction.

This technology is still in the research and development stage, so it’ll take a few more years to become the norm.

How much of digital advertising is manipulated by Google-Facebook duopoly, and how big a threat are ad blockers to the space?

There is no denying the fact that Facebook and Google control the digital advertising market. Between them, they controlled over 65% of the United States ad market share in 2017, and these numbers are not too far off in other markets.

It is no surprise that this revenue comes in via paid search and display advertising, with the mobile device being a major catalyst. Initially, ad blocking seemed to be a threat to PPC ads. An association called the Coalition for Better Ads was set up to oversee and improve consumers’ experience with online advertising.

It highlighted that not all online ads are bad and will be blocked, only the very intrusive and annoying ones. It’s a win-win again for companies like Google who work with publishers because they have been on a path to introduce native ads as a way of combating ad blocking.

You referred to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a way to ensure online advertisers don’t abuse personally identifiable information (PII). Where is South Africa in terms of GDPR?

Europe has the GDPR and South Africa has the POPI (Protection of Personal Information) Act, which was actually passed into law in 2013, but hasn’t been affected as of yet. POPI serves to hold institutions accountable regarding collecting, processing, storing, and distributing individuals' or businesses’ confidential information.

The POPI Act, just like GDPR, will enforce, among other things, that personal information only be used for the purpose agreed with online consumers, employees, and other approved third-party entities.

The price of data is high in South Africa. How can the big telecom providers be convinced that lowering data prices is in their best interest?

Movements such as #DataMustFall and other similar petitions have been forcing ICASA to act quickly on behalf of consumers. Companies like BiNu seek to change the status quo, conducting pre-negotiations with mobile networks – MTN, Cell C, and Vodacom – to have advertisers pay for a user’s mobile data.

These guys are using something known as a ‘sponsored data’ model, using reverse billing of the data costs all the way back to the publisher. A small catch is that publishers require the recipients of the free data to watch video ads as a trade-off for the free data.

This is something that is presented as one of the solutions to the price of data problem, which many South Africans just cannot afford.    

Beyond data, which other technologies do you think will also have an impact in 2018?

Video consumption will increase in 2018 due to a rise in video entertainment services. These services came with their own media streaming devices. Late 2017, Telkom South Africa launched LIT TV. Liquid Telecom launched Kwese Play – an official partner of Roku & Netflix in Africa. Cell C launched Black.

Coupled with DSTV Mobile and Apple TV, South Africans now have a lot more choices to make in terms of how to stream their favourite content; and consuming their favourite content in video format on demand on their favourite device at a convenient time.

For more information, visit www.mark1.co.za.

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The POPI Act aims to protect personal information, and marketers should know its implications. Read more in our article, The POPI Act: a breakdown for marketers.