• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 18, 2018

What began as a discussion about the role that blockchain technology likely will play in removing friction and increasing transparency for business turned into a conversation about the value of leveraging consumer data to do research or market to them

“Does anyone know what the medium value of the consumer data is?,” Chad Andrews, global solutions leader for advertising and blockchain at IBM, said during a panel at MediaPost’s Blockchain Marketing Forum on Wednesday.

Andrews wasn’t asking his fellow panelists, but the forum attendees, several of whom chimed in with estimates.

“About 50 cents per user, per use,” Dan Kidd, Chief Revenue Officer of Datawallet, which specialized in compensating consumers for using their data to market to them. He said the explicit value depended on the consumer segment and the marketing category seeking their data.

“Eighty-five dollars for Facebook, $3 for everyone else,” ReedSmith Partner and panel moderator Gerard Stegmaier offered without providing a time frame for those values.

“A range of somewhere between $50 and $1,500 a year,”  GfK Director of Data Assets Rolfe Swinton suggested.

For his part, IBM’s Andrews said, “Annualized, it has to be about $500. Somewhere around there.”

Whatever the true market value is, Andrews real point was about leveraging it in a way that changes consumer behavior.

“The reason I ask is because people are inherently lazy, and at what point do they actually change their behavior based upon the perceived value of that action?” he said, adding: “And that’s where I think Brave is very interesting, because it doesn’t require a massive change in behavior.”

By Brave, Andrews was referring to the fledgling web and mobile browser, which also leverages a blockchain-based form of cryptocurrency known as the Basic Attention Token (BAT), that enables consumers to effectively make micropayments to publishers whose content they use without any friction involved in the process.

Beyond that example, Andrews didn’t seem clear on what the inflection point would be for consumer adoption of explicit data trading models, though he did tease about an announcement IBM plans to make June 18 during the Cannes Festival of Creativity in France.

“We should all be up in arms on the street demanding lots of things in this country right now -- one of them being ownership and transparency of our data,” Andrews said, concluding: “I wonder where the tipping point is going to be? When is it going to matter?”