Havas Media, the main media brand in the Havas Group, has partnered with tech provider AdsDax to implement blockchain advertising technology into Havas Media’s most recent campaign based in India. The campaign, which began two weeks ago, uses AdsDax’s advertising platform to introduce a media-heavy ad that promotes Indian food delivery service, “Swiggy”, throughout the cricket season.

Over the course of the campaign, 2.3m mobile device users interacted with the advert, and AdsDax was able to directly track all user engagements from user’s mobile devices on a public blockchain. By using a blockchain tracking layer, advertisers were able to more clearly see progress towards their campaign goals.

All key payable event data collected during the campaign is sent from the user’s device to the blockchain. From there, the data is validated by third-parties and then stored on a secure ledger. The data is almost immediately made available to the advertiser, allowing them to see what users are purchasing in real time.

“The biggest issue with current blockchain propositions is that there are a lot of theoretical concepts and ideas but not a lot of live products,” said Rohan Chincholi, head of media and business head, Mumbai and Bangalore, Digital, Havas Media. “Speed and scale have been key arguments for blockchain detractors who have argued that blockchain isn’t robust enough to support features such as real-time bidding and fraud prevention, however, AdsDax has an end-to-end tech platform that, thus far, has met the speed and scale expectations of the advertisers who have used it to run campaigns. AdsDax has a live platform that solves the issues of speed and expense on the blockchain while delivering the key features: transparent, immutable tracking and payment.”

AdsDax CEO Ian Mullins said, “There have been several challenges for us to build a platform that can meet the expectations of the ad industry. We have undertaken R&D into several different blockchain protocols and public blockchains and a lot of them simply could not meet the demands and throughput required by a live, commercial platform.”

“Although we are still in R&D to constantly increase the throughput and scale of our live platform, we believe we now have a solution that is successfully meeting the requirements of the ad industry. Our partnership with Havas Media on this campaign is simply further confirmation that blockchain is the future of media buying.”