AdLedger, a non-profit research and development consortium for blockchain standards, has laid its first foundations for the use of blockchain in advertising.

The consortium’s Blockchain Education Working Group – which consists of IBM, IPG Reprise Digital, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Media, GroupM, CoinDesk, MAD Network, and others – has put together a white paper addressing questions around blockchain.

Questions in answered in the white paper include ‘what is blockchain?’, ‘how do blockchains work?’, ‘blockchain and advertising: how do they work together?’, ‘what are blockchain’s potential implementations?’, and ‘extreme blockchain: what comes next?’.

Alongside answering these questions, the alliance also set out details of its missions and methods for working together to revolutionise advertising. Examples of the guidelines unveiled by the consortium include the idea that advertising should be free of theft, fraud, waste, and deception; that the advertising industry must truly embrace transparency and trust to thrive and grow; and that blockchains and cryptography are two of the most critical technologies needed to deliver us into the future they envision for advertising.

“Although it’s often overlooked, advertising financed the creation of the internet,” said Christiana Cacciapuoti, executive director at AdLedger. “In the early stages, the ad supported approach was instrumental in driving adoption, but it has also left us vulnerable to the problems plaguing the industry today, like a wasteful supply chain and a lack of consumer data privacy controls.”