Austrian Tourist Office Trials Blockchain Ad Fraud Solution

The Austrian National Tourist Office decided to trial the blockchain solution provided by Adbank, an Ethereum-powered platform that aims to prevent ad fraud.

The Austrian National Tourist Office (ANTO) is currently conducting a digital ad campaign by leveraging blockchain, becoming the first national tourist office in the world to do so. ANTO is trialing the technology with Adbank, a blockchain platform fueled by the ADB token. Adbank relies on the Ethereum network and aims to prevent ad fraud, which causes advertisers to waste a total of $51 million each day according to recent estimations. The platform is meant to cut fees by ad tech intermediaries, some of whom boost the ad price by over 70%.

Angelo Dodaro, Adbank co-founder and chief marketing officer, commented:

“It's exciting to see a country like Austria acknowledging the powerful use case that exists for advertising on the blockchain. This level of transparency between advertiser and publisher is unprecedented, especially for an organization like ANTO. For the first time, advertisers like them can see where their money is going, rather than going into a 'black box' that shows data we know for a fact is questionable.”

ANTO started to show interest in the blockchain startup when the latter launched a marketing campaign for its initial coin offering (ICO) back in December 2017. The Adbank team created a video that soon became viral.

When the Austrian agency spotted the blockchain firm, it immediately wanted to test its technology. ANTO reportedly stated:

“The Austrian National Tourism Office (ANTO) is extremely tech-savvy and are known for pursuing innovative solutions in the digital advertising space, so working with them made a lot of sense for a company like Adbank that’s focused on an emerging technology such as blockchain.”

Recent studies have demonstrated that a digital ad network can charge up to 50% of every dollar spent, and this is without counting ad fraud. The latter is a separate challenge, as 56% of all website traffic is non-human. However, blockchain can fix this by ensuring transparency and removing middlemen,

Adbank put the last notes on its blockchain-powered payment protocol back in March. The system will work along with their proprietary anti-fraud artificial intelligence (AI) technology.