Yesterday, the blockchain advertising platform Lucidity announced a partnership with blockchain marketing firm Aqilliz. Under the agreement, Lucidity will be integrating its existing solution with the Zilliqa blockchain, the technology that Aqilliz uses.
California-based Lucidity is using blockchain for ad verification for digital advertisers. It has a partnership with Toyota and ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, following a 21% ad performance improvement during a test. Additionally, It ran pilots with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab’s blockchain pilot program. During this, it found that about 48% of ad clicks were wasteful and could not be confirmed.
Meanwhile, Singapore-based Aqilliz is a blockchain firm created in collaboration with Zilliqa and exclusively uses the latter’s protocol for its clients across the digital advertising and marketing ecosystem. Aqilliz is Zilliqa written backward.
Last year, Zilliqa ran a pilot for PepsiCo as part of Project Proton, an advertising initiative led by Mindshare, MediaMath, Rubicon Project, and a few others. In the pilot, Zilliqa enabled a 28% increase in cost-efficiency for verifiably viewable impressions.
“As we look towards the future, it’s crucial that we work together as an industry to build the right infrastructure to ensure long-term sustainability,” said Gowthaman Ragothaman, CEO of Aqilliz, who previously worked at GroupM.
Lucidity’s solution aims to eliminate fraud, build trust in the media supply chain, and maximize return on investment for companies. Its platform was initially developed to work with the Ethereum blockchain, and last year following a $5 million investment, the company announced it would also support RChain.
With the partnership with Aqilliz, Lucidity will add support to the Zilliqa blockchain. It is widely known that Ethereum has scaling issues and Zilliqa markets itself as a highly scalable blockchain protocol. It was one of the first blockchain platforms to utilize sharding as a scaling solution.
Sharding is similar to turning a single lane street into a multi-lane highway. It involves dividing components of the network and its functions into smaller consensus groups known as shards. The idea is to move the linear execution model of a blockchain to a parallel execution model, without the risk of double-spending. Zilliqa claims to be 1,000 times faster than Ethereum in processing transactions.
Aqilliz and Lucidity will begin onboarding enterprise partners upon launching in the second quarter of 2020.
“For the past two years, Lucidity has had the privilege of helping major North American brands and agencies gain greater transparency into their media spend,” said Sam Kim, CEO of Lucidity.
“With an established foothold in the Asia Pacific region, this partnership with Aqilliz not only provides us with an automatic global footprint, but also allows us to benefit from the scalability and cost effectiveness of their infrastructure.”
