Google Sees Future Of Advertising In Blockchain

Google’s most senior advertising executive revealed that the company is looking into incorporating blockchain, but there are no official announcements at this time.

“This is a research topic, so I don’t have anything super-definitive to say. We have a small team that is looking at it. The core blockchain technology is not something that is super-scalable in terms of the sheer number of transactions it can run,” Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, said at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London, according to CNBC.

According to an October report, Google’s parent company Alphabet — along with SBI, Overstock.com, Citi and Goldman Sachs — is one of the biggest investors in blockchain. Alphabet also has investments in Ripple.

“The promise of blockchain, of course, is…friction-free value transfer — you can think of it as money transfer working at scale with no friction, and that can have an amazing effect on society, because it’s hard to move money. It always costs 2ish percent in most Western countries to move money,” said Ramaswamy.

“I think there is a lot of promise in things like that. Blockchain as a recording technology also has promise,” he added. “It is super early for us to say whether they are going to become products just yet. We are actively looking at it. We don’t have really any product announcements to make on this front.”

CNBC noted that Google’s research comes as advertising agency Truth announced it had run a programmatic media campaign enabled by blockchain, the first of its kind, according to the agency’s chief technology officer.

“We deploy(ed) a legally-binding contract to the blockchain that records all the fees, all of the suppliers that are allowed to be involved in this chain of events,” said Oliver Southgate at Advertising Week Europe this week.