Blockchain is ‘disproportionately important’ to our conversations

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With blockchain on everybody’s lips these days, it’s no surprise that this word featured at the top of a survey on the subject. Many recall the heady days of November and December 2017, when the cryptocurrency market made 200% rises and this undoubtedly led to an unnatural and surreal interest in the world of blockchain. All sorts of projects mushroomed – each of them claiming to change the world as we know it and like many in the space, they simply disappeared in 2018.

The maxim ‘Blockchain not Bitcoin’ seems to have caught on in a big way these days as can be attested to the constant bashing of the cryptocurrency by top industry fund managers and executives. It’s also interesting to note that crypto continued to perform well as a word with a third placing in the Research Intelligencer by MediaPost.

Blockchain consumed a disproportionate share of industry conversations in 2018, which may be one of the reasons it was also named the most overrated word of the year by ad execs surveyed.

Full details of the findings, including predictions of 2019’s words or terms of the year, can be found in today’s edition of Research Intelligencer, which fielded the survey following the Association of National Advertisers’ release of its annual word/s of the year — “brand purpose” — in order to measure how the rest of the industry thinks, including ad agencies, and also to find out what words or terms have been given too much weight.

Advertisers (31%) were half again as likely to feel “blockchain” is overrated than agencies (22%), according to the study, which interviewed 120 marketers and 181 agency executives in January. This is no surprise with the inordinate amount of press releases on the topic being bandied around like there’s no tomorrow. 

The second most overrated word of 2018 was a tie between “AI” and “programmatic,” with a “crypto” a close third. “People-based marketing” came up fourth. Detailed rankings and agency/client splits, as well as all the other datasets from this study available in today’s Research Intelligencer.

Interestingly, the most important word of the year, according to the study, was “transparency,” which was also a runner-up to “people-based marketing” among the ANA respondents, and was also their word of the year for 2016.

“Influencer,” another runner-up in this year’s ANA poll, ranked second in the Research Intelligencer’s. This is no surprise with the vast number of ‘blockchain’, ‘ICO’, ‘STO’ and ‘Crypto’ experts around. “Brand purpose” ranked fourth in the survey, just behind “AI.”