• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 29, 2017

WPP Group's agency, Mindshare, on Wednesday announced a partnership with Zilliqa, a blockchain technology platform developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore.  

The exclusive partnership means Mindshare and Zilliqa will test whether the blockchain protocol can be used to address challenges in the advertising industry such as identifying and serving contextual advertising in relation to fake news and developing strategic initiatives around data privacy.

"We have a set of hypothesis that we want to prove either right or wrong and to build some tools that will eventually benefit the business of advertising and technology, especially when it comes together to influence consumer behaviour," stated Gowthaman Ragothaman, global chief strategy officer at Mindshare’s integrated performance unit FAST.

Engineers at Mindshare and the university also plan to develop a "tokenization" program that will score online content for authenticity. It will enable the companies to classify the digital inventory and secure placement of Mindshare's client advertisements.

Every transaction is typically run by automated algorithms that control fraud and where and how to serve ads, among other actions and transactions. Advertisers are charged electronically through tokens per event. BPC (Blockchain Programmatic Corp.) cofounder and CEO Pavel Cherkashin explained in a separate interview earlier this month that the platforms are built to take a small percentage paid by an electronic token created in accordance with a "smart contract."

Mindshare and researchers at the National University of Singapore are not the only researchers working to develop blockchain technology for the advertising industry. Cherkashin said the company will launch a new blockchain technology on December 1.