Toyota sees drop in ad fraud with blockchain-powered campaign

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An initial advertising campaign for automotive manufacturer Toyota tracked by blockchain technology saw visits to the company’s website increase by 21% compared to similar campaigns.

Blockchain advertising analytics firm Lucidity, in a press release, announced its partnership with Toyota and ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi for the pilot campaign, which it said was the “final test” to show if a blockchain-powered online ad campaign could “deliver real results for real brands.”

Toyota National Marketing Communications Manager Nancy Inouye said, “Before today, there was no way to verify with confidence what’s happening behind the scenes in a programmatic buy. We’ve had our eyes on blockchain innovation for a long time, but didn’t have a workable blockchain solution until now.”

The campaign involved an analysis of data on clicks and impressions to find discrepancies, which according to online magazine Ad Age included domain spoofing and bot traffic. With this information, certain sites and apps associated with the discrepancies were blacklisted, and funding was diverted to better performing sites.

Saatchi & Saatchi Media Director Tom Scott said, “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. 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.”

Lucidity Chief Operating Officer Nikao Yang said, “The reality is that programmatic supply chains don’t always behave as intended, and bad behavior comes into play. Our blockchain solution gives partners like Toyota deeper, log-level optics into their ad spend at every point in the supply chain to combat these challenges.”

Yang was quoted in the Ad Age article as saying that Lucidity’s technology allowed everyone in the supply chain a say as to whether an ad impression was valid. “We are not necessarily just looking for fraud. Lucidity exposes supply chain breakdowns… Lucidity allows marketers to optimize away from these breakdowns, which yields greater performance,” he said.

Inouye hinted at a continuation of campaigns with Lucidity in the future. “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,” she said.

According to Lucidity, the automotive digital advertising industry was a $15-billion market this year in the U.S. alone.