The multinational food and beverage company PepsiCo has conducted a successful blockchain pilot which saw an increase of 28 percent in supply chain efficiency. The trial was done in partnership with Mindshare, Zilliqa Research, Rubicon Project, MediaMath, and Integral Ad Science.
The “Project Proton,” as the trial was called, was launched to test if blockchain could help solve “industry challenges” regarding programmatic advertising.
Media agency Mindshare announced the news on Monday, stated that the trial was carried out on Zilliqa’s blockchain platform to test programmatic end-to-end supply chain settlement.
Mindshare said in the press release that Zilliqa’s smart contracts were used in automating the programmatic supply chain and that,
“These smart contracts reconcile impressions that are delivered from multiple data sources with payments facilitated using an internal Native Alliance Token (NAT) all in near real time, resulting in major efficiency gains and complete transparency for the brand owners.”
The main goal of the trial was the “seamless end-to-end reconciliation of the programmatic supply chain using blockchain for PepsiCo”. Brand transparency was also another issued tackled, as the trial allows advertisers to only pay for “ad impressions that have been deemed viewable, brand-safe, and free from any ad fraud.”
According to Mindshare, the results showed an efficiency increase “in terms of costs for viewable impressions, in running the campaign through smart contracts, versus one without,”.
Other partners involved in the pilot included online advertising firm Rubicon, programmatic marketing company MediaMath and advertising firm Integral Ad Science.
The pilot was held in March in the Asia Pacific area. A second phase of the project is now in plan, which will also feature payments to publishers and additional performance metrics.
Farida Shakhshir, director of consumer engagement for PepsiCo in the Asia, Middle East, and North Africa regions, stated the following:
“We are happy to be partnering with Mindshare to test the application and value add of blockchain in media. It is key that we stay abreast of new technologies, and continue to advance transparency, viewability, brand safety and buying efficiency. The results are encouraging, and we plan to run a few more campaigns under different conditions to verify more hypotheses and measure overall impact.”
Blockchain has many applications, but the supply chain industry is the sector which is the most suitable and has the most benefits from this technology.
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