Dr. Mihaela Ulieru: Blockchain creating new incentives in marketing

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There were plenty of age old problems that seemingly had no solutions until blockchain technology, perfected by Satoshi Nakamoto, came along. Dr. Mihaela Ulieru of the Impact Institute joined us to talk about her history with blockchain technology, and how through smart contracts, it can help improve the marketing world.

Dr. Ulieru was looking for solutions to problems through intelligent systems well before Bitcoin started. “I was in need of an infrastructure that can actually coordinate these systems,” she explained. “I tried and tried, and developed step by step, bits and pieces of the technologies, until Satoshi Nakamoto put them all together into this wonderful infrastructure called blockchain.”

Now, because of the power of Bitcoin and blockchain, Ulieru sees solutions to age old problems. Using artificial intelligence and smart contracts, new possibilities open up. “With the GDPR, general data protection regulation, don’t give your data, they will use it for something nefarious, and so on and so forth, all against your will for that matter,” she explains as the problem. The solution:

“Blockchain enables, for example, through a smart contract, to solve the transparency versus right to be forgotten paradox. Because, through a smart contract, you can simply arrange and enforce the deletion of the information which you do not want if a certain condition is fulfilled. So problem solved, and there are many others.”

The marketing industry sorely needs this is kind of innovation. Blockchain enables a new accountability for advertising that never existed before. “They work together lovely, but to the benefit of the individual, and of course, to the detriment of the centralized, powerful behemoth, Google, Facebook, who are actually absorbing all of the income from the brands, and not delivering actually to the customer, because the wrong advertisement goes to the wrong customer,” she told us.

The full accountability that blockchain now provides allows tracking that was never there before, and with it, new ways of creating incentives “With blockchain, you can have a direct linkage to your customer and incentivize them, through tokens, through Bitcoins if you want, or any kind of tokens you design, in order to look at your brand, but if they look at the brand, and for those, you can offer them directly, and not pay Google, but from that amount of money, you can take a portion and do a discount for that person, who really is interested in your product.”

Now, content creators, in this case, advertisers, can monitor the full value of their contribution, and create new business models that could have never existed before. “One company which I advise, which is called Sapien NSetwork, is creating this Facebook on blockchain, solving this advertisement problem, but also solving another big problem which is fake news, because they designed a proof of value protocol,” Dr. Ulieru told us. “Because on blockchain, you can account for everything, you can account also for the value of hosts. You can also reward curators who are curating. It’s like a Wikipedia on blockchain, you can reward curators, and then curators receive a reputation, and you can trust them much more next time.”