• by Joe Mandese , Today

When Jersey Mike's opened a new sandwich shop in Cambridge, MA last quarter it launched more than just another franchise outlet. It also launched a new form of agentic media-buying -- the first utilizing "smart contracts" on the Blockchain -- guaranteeing that advertisers paid only for ads seen by people who also showed up and bought one of its famous submarine sandwiches.

The $2,000 media buy opening the Cambridge, MA store was the beta test for BlockVantage, a first-of-its-kind AI-powered media-buying system being unveiled this morning by Blockboard, a six-year-old ad tech company that may be the only one still utilizing "smart contracts" to process programmatic media buys that are guaranteed on the Blockchain.

What makes BlockVantage different is that it is completely automated, utilizing a proprietary AI system to generate, contract, execute and fulfill audience buys end-to-end, guaranteeing that advertisers only pay for the audiences -- and the terms -- contracted for and delivered.

"What we did for [Jersey Mike's] was drive a $12-cost-per-order," boasts Matt Wasserlauf, a serial ad tech entrepreneur who launched Blockboard in 2019, because he believed media buys executed and fulfilled utilizing smart contracts on the Blockchain are the most transparent form of media-buying possible.

While Wasserlauf has backed off the Blockchain pitch, focusing more on how Blockboard performs head-to-head with conventional DSPs (demand-side platforms), its smart contracts its point of differentiation and what enable it to outperform conventional DSP buys.

Because Blockboard's smart contracts guarantee 100% delivery of campaign targets, Wasserlauf says it eliminates waste and drives acquisition costs down.

Blockboard's biggest client to date is acne treatment brand Proactiv Skincare, which has been utilizing its smart contracts for programmatic media buys for more than two years.

"They were unhappy with their cost-per-acquisition across digital media, which was running about $130 per acquisition," Wasserlauf explains, noting, "From the start we eliminated ad fraud through our pre-verification and we got the $130 down to $90."

Since it began utilizing AI to power Proactiv's buys, it has taken the $90 cost-per-acquisition down to $50," Wasserlauf shares.

What makes Blockboard's new BlockVantage system more effective is that it is leveraging AI on all ends: In the generation of campaign targets, acquiring those audiences across the programmatic marketplace, and fulfilling the campaign objectives based on actual consumers acquired based on terms outlined in smart contracts and fulfilled in real-time.

One reason BlockVantage performs better is that it's not reliant on the audience targeting data customarily offered by the programmatic ad marketplace, which can be inexact at best. Instead BlockVantage's AI generates unique audience targets based on the brand and campaign objectives, determines what publishers are most likely to fulfill them and then matches them with the audience attributes offered by SSPs (supply-side platforms). The audience targeting process is completely unique, synthetic and proprietary to each advertiser using BlockVantage.

While speed isn't necessarily the objective of the new AI system, it is one of its benefits on all ends.

During a demo for MediaPost on the eve of this morning's announcement, Blockboard CTO and co-Founder Tarun Yadav created a live campaign in about 30-seconds.

Utilizing Blockboard's older manual system, he said it would have taken at least 30 minutes to generate the same campaign.

More importantly than the set-up time, the campaigns run -- and clear -- in real-time, which means more sandwiches sold for Jersey Mike's in Cambridge, MA.