Perceived Online Advertising Disruption: Examining the Role of Blockchain Technology among Indian Firms

ZIA UL HAQ^*Zaid AltafMehak Manzoor

• Central University of Kashmir, Gāndarbal, India

The Internet has been the strange nominee for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. The odd nomination is a testimony to the fact that the internet has penetrated deep into the lives of the global citizenry. Making the internet a medium, millions of businesses around the globe elevated their fortunes. In 2020, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide (Daniela C, 2022). The mad rush of businesses and individuals joining the online business bandwagon is phenomenal, and well-established brands have been weighing the trade-off options of balancing the brick-and-mortar and online space. The industry has used the internet broadly for two purposes: selling and advertising. Zenith forecasts the ad market to increase by an additional 9.1% to a total $769.4 billion against worldwide ad spending of $705 billion in 2021 (Brad A. 2021). The ever-increasing advertising spending on the internet has not yielded the expected results for the dollars spent. Advertising clutter and bombardment of the same messages on multiple landing pages and a user visit have been identified by various scholars as one of the main reasons for low advertising effectiveness in the online space. The significance of digital ads is wildly oversold. A large-scale study of ads on eBay found that brand search ad effectiveness was overestimated by up to 4,100%. A similar analysis of Facebook ads threw up several 4,000% (Sinal A., 2021). This paper will examine the scope of blockchain technology in breaking advertising clutter, as the technology has the potential to create non-editable blocks that could help the industry precisely track how many users watched the advertisement and the number of times the same advertising message was repeated. Sam Danley, Product Manager at BuiltIn, suggests that the blockchain has become a helpful tool for advertising and marketing. Blockchain's decentralised ledger technology offers a lift in advertising cost transparency and deeper insights into audience interactions with ad campaigns. The paper will examine the impact of blockchain on advertising, specifically in relation to single accounting of real-time metrics from all landing pages.