Upcoming ICOs in Advertising and Marketing Industry

Businesses are now spending more than $200 billion every year in order to attract traffic to their websites.

The conversation on how to attract more traffic and buys on the website is already around the use of metrics, data, and information in improving advertising precision, ROI and customer loyalty.

And with the launch of several AI-based ad and marketing platforms, the conversation is likely to get real technical in the near future. The end result is better ad and marketing powered by tech.

There is huge frustration among marketers today because out of the people who visit a site, only 10 percent manage to register and just less than 3 percent of leads convert into buyers. Therefore, 97 percent of the budget falls through without any income to advertisers.

Surprisingly, this percentage comprises of customers who are actively looking for products they wanna buy but cannot find the right match in the businesses they contact. To make matters worse, global ad fraud costs will clock 50 billion in the next 10 years. Compare that with the 30billion needed to solve worldwide hunger!

The pain points for the industry are numerous: transparency in the advertising industry is very low, the characters in every link do not trust each other, issues around whether the data is true, issues around whether the advertising estimates are meaningful or not, and most important the poor privacy treatment of users and their data even as advertisers hunt for personalized advertising and targeting.

And then there is also the data islands, intermediaries, traffic fraud, settlement delay, user hate and so on.

As the conversation gets around the value of data anyone who will have valuable data or using valuable data will be more valuable for marketing systems of the future. But at the center of that lies the problem with overly centralized ad and marketing platforms. So blockchain will revolutionize ad and marketing in many ways, most certainly by bringing the customer more into the perspective.

Below are upcoming ICOs in the area of ad and marketing

ACA Network

ACA Network wants advertisers to use the platform to maximize on their ad revenues, optimize their ad campaigns and get more transparency on advertising data -- all with the power of avoiding currently exploitative pricing and ad fraud that siphon their budgets. For instance, fraudulent actors in the ad industry use bots to make it seem as if an advertisement has been done public when it was not, which is, therefore, a form of fake advertising.

Fake advertising is projected to siphon a total of 19 billion USD per year from marketers and advertisers as of this year. There is also the possibility in legacy systems, to adjust distribution frequencies and ad prices, which affects advertisers.

To achieve said results, the platform will use ACA-AMS advertising control system, the ACA-EX automatic matching exchange, and the ACA-NET advertising network and SDK as the elements to help advertisers achieve better ROI. Advertisers will, in addition to increasing ROI and efficiencies, use ACA token that can be lent to other users.

The company has 10 years of experience in the advertising industry in Japan and want to use the experience to make better the advertising space.

ACA Network will hold a pre-ICO on July 14 to July 27 and an ICO starting from August 4 to September 30.

AffiliateCoin

As the name suggests, AffliateCoin uses smart contracts to revolutionize the way affiliate marketing works. With it, instead of being unsure that their budgets are burned on tasks and networks that do not work for them, brands can benefit from clearly defined tasks and publishers will ensure that their efforts are rewarded.

It will also help reduce ad fraud, increase trust between advertisers and publishers, and solve the issue of disputed payments through smart contracts. Publishers and advertisers can also relate more thanks to the machine learning based recommendations for both.

AffliateCoin pre-ICO happened between May 26 to June 4 and the ICO is on until July 4, targeting a hard cap of $30 million.

AIRBLOC

AIRBLOC is a platform that will let users monetize their data while advertisers can buy these data to conduct targeted marketing campaigns and get higher ROI. Basically, the platform will facilitate the collection of user data from apps and this will be sold on the data marketplace and be bought by enterprises to conduct targeted advertising.

The data will include installed apps list, location data, app usage time, browsing the history, apps store transaction history, etc. For instance, the data, for instance, can show trends in purchases or provide other marketing insights.

Of course, users will need to approve permission for data collection, selling, and usage. This will be done through the DAuth

protocol. Once this data is monetized, smart contracts will be employed to distribute rewards to the users.

In addition, enterprises will be able to initiate data campaigns to collect more granular and direct data about users.

They currently collect more than 100,000,000+ data points besides being tested on more than 40,000,000 mobile devices in Korea.

The pre-ICO took place on April and May while the ICO will take place Jun 19 and June 29. They have already raised 2,300,000 USD from equity funding with investments from ICON, Korea’s most successful blockchain project pioneered by The Loop; Coinplug; Amber AI; Blue Block; Signum Capital; FoundationX; and Deblock.

BehaviourExchange

BehaviourExchange is an AI and blockchain-based platform connects web visitors, websites and B2C businesses such that it identifies and profiles web visitors in real time and customizes website content to present them with personalized product and service offers.

With the platform, users will avoid viewing irrelevant content and can get what they are looking for as fast. They will be rewarded BEX tokens for engagement with the personalized content. In addition, customers can use the BEX tokens to buy products and services from various companies.

On the other hand, web owners and managers will be able to know who is visiting their websites in real time and can effectively engage with them to show them the right products and services offers, all with some expected increased sales. Those who receive payment of goods and services with BEX tokens will earn discounts.

The company held a pre-ICO on February 23 and will end on June 30. The ICO will start off after the pre-ICO.

Credit Coin

Content creators, brands & publishers will use Flatlay to let content creators, brands & publishers do what they love most. More specifically, brands and merchants can integrate their products into the network and then hire content creators for promotions. Content creators can earn tokens -- in form of commission on sales -- by promoting goods and services within posts & collections.

Promotions are done on user generated content & a community of advocates to maximize sales and brands can also create networks with influential creators. The platform also enables creation of networks among independent craft makers, corporate retailers & premium publishers.

Publishers can also use more engaging content (AR, AI and 3D) to increase brand engagement. Merchants or advertisers can save money by paying lesser fees and this enables them to create better and more promotions for publishers and end users.

Advertisers can search and invite publishers to campaigns.

Their ICO date is not yet announced.

Emmares

Emmares (Email marketing rewarding system) connects email marketers with email recipients to establish a email marketing rewarding system on the blockchain.

It helps achieve new value for branding, lesser spam and ability for recipients to receive desired high quality content, with marketers increasing marketing efficiency, building more valuable marketing relationships, and reducing their budgets or getting more benefits back for their budgets.

Publishers try to build reputation by sending content while target audience evaluate them and rewarded. Once they evaluate and rate, the system will ensure recipients receive emails from top-rated marketers and publishers can thus be encouraged to send high quality content.

The pre-ICO ended on May 5 while the ICO ends on September 5.

Exchain

Exchain, like many other digital ad platforms on the blockchain, wants to the various challenges in the advertising pace including ad fraud, non-transparency, and slow payments.

It will provide full transparency of ad spend and impression volumes at every stage of the ad chain using blockchain decentralized storage mechanism. It will improve better usage of funds by advertisers who will be able to avoid ad fraud through their gateways. It will use smart contracts to replace traditional settlements that take time and are expensive.

Advertisers can pay lower fees and optimize their ad spend on the platform as well as avoid hidden fees while knowing exactly how much they pay to each participants in the ad chain. Advertisers can also avoid manual processes of having to keep and updating their whitelists to purchase traffic from quality suppliers. This takes more time and is more costly.

The system will provide full audit support in addition to anonymizing and storing all ad event data and spend transactions on a public ledger.

At the same time, web publishers and app developers can earn tokens from their work. Service providers such as DSPs, SSPs and DMPs can attract more premiums and spend as well as establish a better reputation and gain wider industry collaborations.

Exchain is holding an ICO that started on May 7, to run until June 24.

Impetus One

Impetus One is introducing the concept of Pay Per Mission and is a reward-based advertising platform powered by a cryptocurrency called Nudge.

In short, advertisers come up with brand missions and post them on platform for potential customers to complete. In addition to advertisers paying low fees, there is access to a global network. The ad publishers where customers joined the mission and the customers will share the fee.

For instance, customers are able to complete tasks that are paid for by the advertisers on the platform. These tasks are hosted on the platform and those completing them get paid in Nudge tokens on completing these custom missions. They can then cash out the tokens in their preferred cryptocurrencies.

Advertisers will avoid wasting their budgets by improving on efficiency, click-through rates and user-attention. Publishers will use the platform to deliver ads to audience and get paid when the missions are completed through them.

It will feature iOS and Android apps (to be released in the last quarter of this year) and a developer's SDK kit for publisher apps. The alpha version of web app will go up in the late quarter of this year, when they also release the Phodrop Android app and first implementations of Impetus SDK.

Their ICO will start on July 4 and end on August 4. They will be offering bonuses.

Oyster PRL

Oyster PRL is based on IOTA Tangle and Ethereum. With the innovation -- what they refer as a single line of code -- website visitors can contribute some of their CPU and GPU power to enable users' files be stored on a decentralized and anonymous ledger. The owners of these websites are then paid indirectly by the storage users and website visitors can thus enjoy an ad-free browsing experience.

In other words, because ad banners have been everything -- intrusive, tangential, privacy invasive, and distract from the cleanliness of a website -- Oyster want to change advertising models for good. First, people or companies will pay some portion for a distributed storage space for their data.

Then, instead of seeing the advertisement on the visited page, the web visitor will give up some portion of storage space -- by consent-- and the website owner (who was to get some referral revenue when a visitor sees an ad on their website) now gets payment from the visitor's surrender of some storage space.

Definitely the race will turn from installation of ad blocker to fighting malware, may be, or having to contend with a slower PC or computer. Hopefully, the use and storage of data on the IOTA tangle will deal with this. This is in addition to storing an excess of redundant duplicates through the network topology of the Tangle and therefore mitigating data loss threat.

And with all concerns around illegal personal data sharing as companies try to leverage personalization of ads, the network will be zero knowledge, meaning there are no personal information, usernames, nor passwords that will ever used. Instead, it will use private seed keys for uploaded data. The platform will also use mixer contracts for payments.

Those wanting to pay for data storage will pay in Pearl Token (PRL) which are shared by website owners willing to monetize their web content. These tokens are pegged on the market value of storage prices and no reserve will back it up.

The user wanting to upload data for storage will pay the Oyster Pearls to two Broker Nodes. These files are securely, reliably, and anonymously stored.

The Oyster Protocol will be published in September this year. The Oyster Contract which mints the Pearl PRL Token (which is already trading) will be audited and reviewed in October this year.

The token crowd sale will take place in October 21.

RadioYo

RdioYo is an open-source broadcasting and services platform based on the blockchain where content creators can receive rewards in tokens for the content they create while developers, users, hosts, service providers and advertisers can track ownership of this content. Developer can add functionality through APIs and Dapps while companies can reward listeners and viewers for interacting with ads.

Thus it can facilitate monetization of private shows and other user-generated content (hosts, musicians, voice-over talent, artists, journalists, and authors can create and monetize content) for instance.

It is also applicable in tipping a well as granting access to applications and services (where users can purchase and unlock features from developer marketplace using discovery and AI on the platform and RAO crypto to pay), and branding.

In the latter case, brands can reward users for completing simple tasks such as signing for advertiser's services, answering surveys and creating themed content or curating content and listening to brand-sponsored engagements and audios.

The ICO is ongoing until August 2.

Rawg

Rawg is unofficially known as the 'IMDb of games' and is video game database and discovery platform that already has more than 50,000 titles from across different genres. It currently host 56,850 games on the database and hopes to become the largest cross-platform by end of this year, hosting over 100 k games.

With the social platform that creates a community of gamers, users are able to track their games, follow friends and celebrities, and get cross-platform recommendations.

It let gamers earn tokens after completing in-game achievements while watching ads that are purchased by advertisers and marketers using RAWG tokens. Besides, gamers can trade these tokens with partners for other crypto or exchange them for games and in-game items, goods and services.

So far, gamers have been able to complete 7,500,000 achievements on the network.

The platform native tokens also define the price for advertising on RAWG platform with 100 tokens worth 1000 impressions of a banner ad.

The pre-ICO tarted on May 22 and runs until eptember 4 while the ICO will proceed until October 5.

Ternio

Ternio makes it easy to verify users, instantly pay publishers, and protect advertisers from ad fraud.

Ternio is a blockchain-based ad network that aims at ending domain fraud, bot traffic, and lengthy payment models in digital advertising. The platform will use Ternio utility token (TERN) as a verifiable and decentralized asset to enable advertisers to verify spend through intermediaries and thus optimize their benefits from the ads. Publishers on the other hand, get payment on delivery without delays.

Pre-ICO took place from 2018-01-01 to 2018-03-30 and the ICO is on-going.

Trivver

Trivver is a platform where users can monetize 3D, augmented, mixed and virtual reality for the benefit of content publishers, advertisers, brands and consumers. It packs all the benefit of cryptocurrencies with own tokens Trivver (TRVR) used to incentivize users and indicate growth of user data value in the system.

In short, advertisers and marketers can post ads in 3D, VR or AR and these change in shape, size and lighting and orientation depending on the environment contexts they run. To achieve this, the platform will be using a patented tech known as Branded Smart Objects (BSO) that helps deliver organic 3D ads into extended reality environments.

It will also feature an ad exchange where buyers and sellers of XR (extended reality) ads can trade them.

XR Developers will earn TRVR tokens by creating low volume 3D assets and indexing the assets on the Trivver Smart Object Catalog. Publishers who host ads (from advertisers) on their content will also get paid in tokens for their work. The platform uses Trivver blockchain and the C/S content-ad matching tech that allows to match ads with content.

Advertisers who use variety of ad types to engage users will improve their ROI and also get audit and reports about performance of their ads.

The ICO started this month on June 15 and will take place until September 28, targeting a hard cap of 33,333 ETH.

Ubex

Ubex wants to bring the good of artificial intelligence and neural networks to advertising using distributed technology. It hopes to overcome a variety of challenges in current advertising industry including presence of annoying ads that hurt viewership, high cost of advertising, high risk to scammers who use coercive and provocative methods of advertising,

For advertisers, there is currently an uncertainty of achieving results as they are forced to pay for clicks and displayed ads without guarantee of actual sales. Besides, marketers and advertisers need to hire marketing staff given that they must figure all available ad channels.

Besides, some of the existing channels are ineffective. On the other hand, publishers struggle to find advertiser to fill all ad slots, get low earnings and inability to forecast future payments from advertisers, while dishonest advertisers delay payments to them or fail to pay anything at all.

The platform will have the Ubex tokens used for payments and transactions and will feature a wallet.

The token sale will be May 21 until August 13.

VendiCoins

Vendio is a video advertising ad network that uses proprietary tagging algorithm to maximize ad viewership for advertisers. The tags are appended to a video at specific times during the duration of the video selected by a publisher. These tags describe the visual content being displayed during that duration.

The data within the tags can be shared to advertisers as chosen by the publisher. The advertiser can then choose best advertisement to match the specific content tagged by the publisher.

Video Interactive Platform (VIP) will have its token called VendiCoins - VENDI for transactional purposes. They expect to roll out the platform in the Q2 2018 -early Q3.

The pre-ICO took place from 2018-02-16 - 2018-03-03 and the ICO launches in July/August.

XCHNG

XCHNG is a platform that allows users to buy, sell, measure, rate, and pay for digital media.

The platform will bring 5 key improvement to the digital ad space. First, it will enable users to buy and sell ads using smart contracts; secondly, it will improve the targeting of audiences; third, it will bolster ad-spend efficiency and security; forth, it will facilitate adoption of next-generation ad platform, in addition to tokenizing the framework to create a true asset class.

Advertisers, publishers, or other industry players will be able to benefit from more transparent, efficient marketplace using a common ledger with permissioned access.

XCHNG runs on the Kochava Labs SEZC or Kochava, which is a leader in digital advertising measurement and attribution. It currently provides measurement for over $6 billion in ad spend annually, for major enterprise brands in different industries.

Their pre-ICO will take place on Jul 20 and the ICO dates are not yet announced.

Zero State

Zero State is an emotional intelligence platform that links users to product manufacturers and service companies. Users get rewarded in ZSC tokens when they write reviews for products and the recipients can exchange the ZSC for ETH or sell it on crypto exchanges.

Reviewers write a single word to review a product and reviews also contain signs of feelings and emotions or evaluations of products and services reviewed. Thus advertisers and marketers can use the platform to increase visibility for their products. They simply do so by creating promotions on the app and receiving feedback on the products to increase ranking and sales.

The company will use 20 percent of its profits to repurchase the tokens and this will increase their popularity.

It will deliver a completely new search engines where users can search for "how it feels" instead of "what" like in Google. It will also feature a social network and an Uber-like ad platform. Advertisers can get reviews, and ranking, and a detailed product analysis can also receive user feedback.

The app is already available for download on the iOS and Android app-store and has attracted more than 700 k downloads since the beginning of this year and has about 40,000 active users.

The pre-ICO raised a total of $2 million while the ICO will start on June 21 with bonuses of 40%, 30%, 20%.