Blockchain has become one of the hottest topics of 2017, disrupting industries from real estate to finance. It was only a matter of time until a company would seize the opportunity to use the technology to revolutionize the adtech industry, which is projected to reach $100 billion by 2020.
Acquired.io, an adtech company that provides a user acquisition management platform, announced today that it will be launching BAEX, a blockchain product for the advertising industry. The company will hold a token sale for BAEX later this year.
Today, most complex, data-sharing advertising deals are done either on Google or Facebook, which together own a significant portion of the advertising market. This is because these types of transactions involve a great deal of trust and negotiation between the different parties. Doing them within a single ecosystem, like Facebook, simplifies this process.
With BAEX, the blockchain will enable advertisers to take part in these types of deals at scale, with many different publishers at once, which was not possible before. One of the most exciting use cases for BAEX is lookalike audiences, a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in a mobile application because they're similar to the app’s best existing users. Lookalike audiences are common on Facebook, but difficult to implement for smaller publishers.
BAEX acts as a decentralized data management platform (dDMP), which means it aggregates a large amount of data in order to predict user behavior and provide targeting. Using BAEX, the advertiser can target Lookalike Audiences across many publishers without having to manually negotiate deals with each one or question whether or not they can trust one another.
“We believe blockchain can redefine the way companies buy advertising, enabling new types of deals, like Lookalike Audiences, across a broader spectrum of channels,” explained Andrey Kazakov, founder and CEO of Acquired.io, in a statement. “This would improve advertiser’s targeting capabilities while giving app developers the ability to monetize their users’ behavioral data at no risk to their business.”
In addition to lookalike audiences, there are two other key use cases that will be enabled by BAEX: targeting users who demonstrate relevant signals (such as paying users), and revenue share based deals.
Kazakov and his co-founder, Maxim Gannutin, have an extensive history in the adtech space. Before Acquired.io, the pair founded adtech company AppScotch, which was acquired by App Annie in 2016.
There has been a significant amount of hype around ICOs and blockchain, with many questioning which token sales are scams and which are legitimate investment opportunities. It’s relatively simple for someone to come up with an idea and publicize their ICO, then never execute on their promises. Acquired.io stands out from the pack, not only because of their team’s expertise in adtech, but also because they already have an existing product with prominent customers, including IGG, the company behind the popular game Lords Mobile.
It’s still early days for blockchain-powered technologies, but it’s likely only a matter of time until they disrupt nearly every industry. The investors who bet on the right companies today will be the billionaires of tomorrow.
