ADK, EnvisionX announce first successful blockchain campaign with Unilever Japan

Unilever House, London, seen from Blackfriars Bridge

Leading Japanese advertising agency ADK and UK-based adtech vendor EnvisionX have announced their first successful blockchain campaign with Unilever Japan.

According to a press release CoinReport received from Jargon PR, EnvisionX’s communications agency, the PoC was conducted using EnvisionX’s EXChain platform, the firm’s blockchain proposition directed towards delivering improved campaign transparency, accountability and fraud protection.

The PoC was performed as a full end-to-end undertaking, with all the related digital advertising stakeholders i.e. publisher, SSP, brand, DSP, technology vendor and agency being included. The fully automated campaign also independently settled the participating SSP and DSP platforms’ fees with the agency, proven by EXChain to be 100% accurate.

ADK Digital Business Product Department director Naohiro Seike said in the news release we received, “We are fully aware of the industry’s experiments of moving into a more transparent ad buying experience and the EXChain platform comes at exactly the right time, being the first such project we have seen with a ready-to-go and fully functioning platform to support us to make the necessary changes,” said Naohiro Seike, Director of Digital Business Product Department at ADK. “We understand moving the industry to a more transparent trading model will take time and effort, but EXChain has all the necessary attributes to join us at the start of this journey.”

EnvisionX’s EXChain solution aims to close the advertiser-publisher gap, which brings about the so-called hidden “ad tech tax.” Within EXChain, ADK and the publishers joining in saw every single dollar spend and their return in real time to make certain that the technology platforms charged only the authorized fees. The agency and the publishers also reconciled their spend and return allotments easily in real time directly in EXChain minus any manual effort.

ADK media planner Taku Nakano stated, “It is a groundbreaking technology which will enable us to carry out our day-to-day work in a completely different and productive way. For the first time we have a centralised place where we can work with the commercial deals and not have to worry about the manual execution and subsequent verification of the result.

“The new efficiency allows us to reinvest our time and efforts in supporting our brand clients in more important areas where our agency skills really add value. Should our existing or new brand clients want to work closer with more premium publishers, pay their advertising spend on a transparent basis and collectively drive the advertising ecosystem towards a healthier trading relationship, we expect EXChain to play an important role in it.”

The PoC also showed that ADK was able to customize spend verification criteria to either accept or reject an impression in real-time against pre-agreed conditions with other campaign stakeholders, totally eliminating the requirement for ADK and other stakeholders to spend time taking care of discrepancy disputes and invalid spend on bad impressions following the campaign.

EnvisionX Business Development APAC director Ai Nakama commented, “We believe the new opportunities EXChain brings to advertisers and publishers will open a new era of digital advertising as it enables both buy and sell sides to regain full control of their spend and revenue. This lays the cornerstone for the future of advertising with integrity protected and technology advancement enjoyed.”

Unilever stated, “EXChain expands upon Unilever’s approach to piloting Blockchain to invest in the next frontier of solutions in driving a more quality digital advertising ecosystem. Unilever’s initial exploration in this space is to identify if Blockchain has the potential to provide us one auditable source of truth of our campaign delivery, that all parties and intermediaries can agree to in this transparent system. Unilever is looking to uncover how to maximize the accuracy of our digital campaign reconciliation while minimizing the manual resource required. We believe that a truly scalable application of Blockchain for media has to be in partnership with key players i.e. our media agencies and intermediaries.”

EnvisionX CEO Zheng Zhang said, “We decided to build the EXChain platform as a result of the challenges we faced with our legacy marketplace product but also to use our detailed market knowledge to provide an innovative solution to meet the demands of the market’s primary players: the advertisers and publishers. We feel that the combination of technologies EXChain is built upon is the right solution at the right time to support ADK’s transparency initiative. We are pleased to be able to partner with ADK and collectively be the first to push out this fully transparent and reconciled advertising buying model globally.”

Image credit – Arild Vågen  (CC BY-SA 3.0)