Answer: Digital advertising is inefficient. Campaign reporting and invoicing typically occurs at the end of a campaign manually through a cumbersome process. That can be several months after an order begins. Besides the operational inefficiencies, reporting delays result in budget inefficiencies.

Learning in seconds rather months down-the-road which advertising impressions are billable and performing, and which are not, allows digital advertisers to allocate their budgets to the highest-impact sources more quickly. Likewise, when publishers learn quickly which ad impressions are billable and which are not, they reduce opportunity costs by more quickly responding and increasing the percentage of billable impressions delivered to clients. This also helps publishers sell advertising inventory to other marketers which may have a different standard for billable impressions.

Finally, by automating the reconciliation process between digital advertisers and publishers, visibility is provided during the campaign on viewability, brand safety, audience and pacing.

Answer: Automation can simplify work-flows, but the outstanding question is trust. An automated system that creates final accounting for media investment dollars must be one that is trusted by fiduciaries at agencies and publishers. Stakeholders with potentially conflicting interests need to be assured they can access and trust this single data source, while maintaining strict data security. Blockchain allows a secure, shared ledger to be used for verification within seconds and relied on by both marketers and publishers for their most critical data needs.

Answer: Smart contracts are binding agreements with specific terms for the purchase and sale of digital advertising.

Once smart contracts are agreed upon, a hash of 64 alphanumeric characters is published on a public blockchain where it is time-stamped and confirmed. This hash serves as a verified proof of the agreement that is one-way encrypted. The buyer or seller is able to easily recreate the hash with a SHA-256 conversion of the underlying order document. However, it is mathematically impossible to recreate the original document from the hash.

For more information on smart contracts, please view the simple explanation on Wikipedia or a more detailed explanation at the Nakomoto Institute website.

Answer: Insertion orders include information such as the ad units, targeting information, flight dates, price information, viewability, brand safety, and geographic objectives of an order and its underlying line items. Importantly, the smart contract specifies which independent advertising measurement will provide official reporting for the campaign and which objectives are required for a delivered ad impression to be billable.

Answer: For programmatic preferred, orders may be terminated at any time as publishers are not guaranteeing inventory.

For guaranteed direct orders, the termination rights for the marketer are specified and agreed upon in the smart contract. The publisher may not terminate a guaranteed order without the marketer’s consent, however, they can propose a modification to the marketer.

Answer: Two privacy settings exist in AdNode as follows:
1. Shared: Organizations with which we are connected on AdNode.
2. Private: Organizations participating in a specific advertising order through AdNode.

When shared is selected, organizations may share data with the specific firms they have actively connected with on AdNode. For example, a publisher can share their average viewability or click-through rates with a new marketer in order to win new business, or a marketer can share campaign averages with publishers.

When private is selected, data is only shared between the buyer and seller for the particular transaction.

Answer: You may termination a connection with any firm, for any reason, provided your organization does not have any open orders currently in process with that firm.

Answer: AdNode is flexible software and our only limitation is that we support smart contracts between marketers and publishers in the following currencies:
• North America: USD, CAD
• Europe: EUR, GBP, NOK, CHF, DKK, SEK
• Asia-Pacific: HKD, JPY, AUD, NZD, SGD
• South America: MXN, BRL

In our discussions, marketers and publishers budget their advertising spends in fiat currencies. We haven’t heard a request yet from a client to use crypto for payments. If this starts to be regularly requested, we will evaluate adding crypto currencies as a payment feature.

Answer: Advertising measurement is provided by independent and established companies that are the existing vendors of marketers or publishers. The marketer and publisher agree on the ad measurement companies which will be providing official reporting for performance in the smart contract.

Answer: No. All advertising measurement is provided by independent third parties that are selected in smart contracts by marketers and publishers. The smart contract establishes that the data provided by validators is final and governs invoice generation.

Answer: AdNode records on the blockchain legal agreements (such as advertising insertion orders) and machine-driven data reporting (such as advertising delivery information from ad measurement companies). All data verified on the blockchain is anonymous. It is tied to public keys of account holders. Identifiable end-user data (such as IP addresses) is never captured or stored by AdNode.

Answer: AdNode has an abstraction layer allowing transactions to be recorded on the blockchain-of-choice for the marketer and publisher, provided it meets our security and scalability requirements. AdNode’s default blockchain is EOS. EOS is a secure and popular public blockchain that works well in AdNode’s configuration with high throughput, low latency and strong scalability.