MAD Network Review: Interview With Rebecca Lerner – Vice President at Madhive & MAD Network
The train of blockchain innovation, is no doubt, causing disruption in every industry its goes through. Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) makes possible, a level of transparency, security and privacy that could only be imagined before now.
Blockchain solutions are now been touted as the future of money, of fintech, supply chain, healthcare. Blockchain is now making major inroads in the very sophisticated, obscure, fraud-prone business of internet advertising.
In an interview with Salih Sarikaya of Smarterum TV, Rebecca Lerner discussed the problems faced in programmatic advertising and how blockchain can reform the industry. Lerner is the Vice President of MAD Network, a key player using blockchain to transform the ad tech space.
The Problem with Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic Advertising, and its underlying protocol, open RTB was once heralded as the way-forward in internet advertising as it enabled open standards for real-time bidding of ad impressions. But as time progressed, this protocol is being manipulated because it was not transparent enough. As Lerner puts it, this lack of transparency causes a sort of ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ where people as incentivized to cheat because no-one sees what’s actually going on.
Privacy is also a big concern in today’s advertising protocols. Lerner explained that personal data of consumers are collected and stored in centralized data management systems and used to target them for ads. So advertisers pay to be able to ‘throw’ ads at the consumer. Goodnews, Lerner says, it’s that blockchain has the ability to reverse this.
The need for Blockchain-enabled Ad Tech
Speaking of her introduction to blockchain, Lerner expressed excitement about how markedly different blockchain solutions were from technologies she had worked with in the past.
“It’s the first time was the first time in a while I could say that we were that the technology that we were working on was doing something other than just improving the bottom line of the company that we’re selling it to.”
She is a firm believer in the potentials of blockchain technology. According to her, blockchain-based innovation that has the potential to recreate the entire advertising value chain by redefining its underlying framework. This is exactly what her company, MAD Network is working to achieve.
“MAD is the first protocol for digital advertising with privacy by design based on blockchain,” she noted.
An overview of MAD Network
The team at MAD network not only believe that ‘Privacy is a human right’, they have made it a duty to build a privacy-first ad protocol.
Lerner explained that most blockchain projects in the media space were merely auditing the current system. MAD Network, on the other hand, is creating a decentralized protocol—a system built on true trust. She explains:
“What we’re doing is actually decentralizing…by replacing the fundamental protocol that programmatic is built on called openRTB [Real Time Bidding]…with something better that allows for true decentralization and therefore true trust”
How does this work?
MAD ad protocol reverses the present system to place control in the hands of the user. Instead of “‘I know who you are I’ll push the advertising to you’ its is ‘I know who I am and I will pull the advertising in to me when it’s best what is best for me.’”
Instead of buying user data, an advertiser deploys a machine learning model across the MAD blockchain and pay an ‘agent’ that lives on the user’s device to run that model. If the user is within the advertiser’s target group, then the user’s agent would actually work on the user’s behalf to pull in the advertising.
MAD Token Sale and Roadmap
MAD network raised $25 million from the Initial Coin Offering for its ERC20 token, MAD which took place from February 28 to March 1, 2018. The project led by Adam Helfgott is totally open source and is currently on the second version of its technical, some proof of concepts, and updating its code library.
