Anheuser-Busch InBev, the brewer, saw various positive results from an innovative advertising campaign that applied blockchain technology to the mobile channel.

Laurel van Tassel, AB InBev’s director of programmatic marketing, discussed this initiative – which tapped the blockchain, and featured several of the company’s brands – at Advertising Week New York 2018.

For this effort, the beer giant partnered with Kiip, an in-app advertising firm, and used a virtual ledger – where all blockchain members can see real-time data on information exchanges – to tackle some thorny marketing pain points.

One example involved assessing cost discrepancies between a media plan and the actual digital inventory that was purchased by demand-side platforms (DSP).

A gap of 10% in this area, van Tassal suggested, typically indicates “there’s a problem”. The blockchain campaign, however, excelled on this metric.

“Taking a look at the impression and spend data in Adobe, we saw a 4% discrepancy,” she said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Blockchain technology delivers marketing benefits for Anheuseur-Busch InBev.)

“And then in BrightRoll” – a video-advertising platform owned by Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon – “we saw a 1% discrepancy,” she continued.

Putting this quantitative information into qualitative terms, “it shows that the blockchain is working,” said van Tassel. “Everything that was being written into the ledger was basically parallel to what we were seeing in the DSPs.”

Online advertising viewabilty – the name given to the problem of whether an ad that is served can be seen by the consumer – is another issue the blockchain can prospectively help in addressing.

And Moat, the analytics provider, measured the results of AB InBev’s blockchain campaign for display ads run on behalf the Bud Light, Stella, Michelob Ultra and Estrella brands.

It returned a 78% viewability level, “which is about 40% higher than their benchmark,” van Tassel said, “and is also much higher than what our AB [InBev] benchmark is as well.”

Sourced from WARC