Toyota To Use Blockchain to Minimize Fraud in Digital Ad Campaigns

Toyota, the renowned Japanese car manufacturer, has entered into a partnership with Lucidity, a blockchain based advertising analytics firm, to minimize fraud while purchasing digital ads. Los Angeles-based Lucidity, formerly called as KR8OS, was established in 2017. It offers an Ethereum blockchain solution to monitor supply chain remittances so that advertisers can track how their funds are distributed.

By means of the new joint venture with Lucidity, Toyota and international ads agency Saatchi & Saatchi are supposedly looking to reach lucidity in Toyota’s digital ad campaign buys and get rid of unnecessary spending. The value of the automotive digital advertising market was evaluated at nearly $15 billion in the US in 2018.

Nancy Inouye, Media Director at Toyota Motor North America, apparently told advertising trade magazine Adage that the promotion with Lucidity has caused a 21% percent increase in visits to Toyota’s portal. Lucidity was able to flag web sites and apps with a great level of impression and click discrepancy, reflecting fake or bot penetration, to move cash to sites with superior performance.

Inouye also stated that Toyota “wanted to go deeper into the programmatic space in particular because it is an area [where] quite frankly, we don’t have transparency and visibility.” As per Adage, the company now intends to expand its agreement with Lucidity further than the originally planned three-week test. Inouye added:

“We are in discussions to take it to the next step and [test] further with additional campaigns for a longer period of time. We feel that if we go longer we would see stronger results.”
Media Director at Saatchi & Saatchi, Tom Scott, stated “even with high standards of anti-fraud and viewability filters already built in, Lucidity was able to deliver significant value-add by further optimizing the campaign.”

Scott further stated

“The ability to have access to a transparent, clean set of data from across the programmatic supply chain is game-changing. We’re empowered to take action, and this is the first time we’ve been able to use blockchain technology to eliminate waste and optimize our ad buy in this way.”

Blockchain has been effectively deployed within the media sector to address clarity issues like bogus traffic counts, bot (automated) clicks, domain spoofing, as well as audit ad dealings. In June, international ad software giant Mediaocean collaborated with IBM to utilize blockchain to bring lucidity to the “entire lifecycle of an advertiser’s media dollar flow.”