CANNES: Anheuser-Busch InBev, the brewing giant, has already witnessed benefits from a recently launched mobile advertising campaign that employs blockchain technology.

Lucas Herscovici, AB InBev’s global marketing vice president/consumer connections, insights and innovation, discussed this subject at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“We are the first brand [owner] to have ever launched a mobile ad campaign using blockchain,” he said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Anheuser-Busch InBev brews up a blockchain advertising future.)

More specifically, the company partnered with Kiip, a San Francisco-based mobile marketing specialist, on a blockchain-powered campaign that went live earlier this year.

Some of the brands involved in this program included Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra and Stella Artois – with the messaging for these offerings targeted at certain “moments” relevant to the target audience for each beer.

Beyond targeting, the use of the blockchain – which constructs a real-time digital ledger of events like data exchanges, information uploads and purchases that can be viewed by all members in a network – has yielded clear pay offs.

One example, Herscovici reported, relates to the need for “more transparency in the process than exists today in media” – an issue that applies to disciplines like the placement and measurement of ads on digital.

“By leveraging Kiip’s platform to be able to target ads in different ‘moments’, and then using blockchain technology to be able to get the results in a more transparent way,” he explained, AB InBev can generate stronger digital accountability.

In the past, Herscovici continued, client-side marketers were often reliant on agencies, ad-tech vendors and digital properties to provide information regarding subjects like consumer exposure and marketing impacts.

“We would need to rely on dashboards from a third party, and they could tweak the results along the campaign if anything happened,” he said.

Thanks to tapping blockchain technology, AB InBev has seen strong engagement scores and programmatic spending efficiencies, while also gaining a clearer view of results and more easily reconciling a campaign’s plan and its execution.

“We can access this anytime we want. It is 100% transparent. We eliminate middlemen. And this, we believe, is the future of what mobile advertising should be,” Herscovici said.

Sourced from WARC