Be BRAVE: swapping Attention for Purchases
The Brave ecosystem has something to offer that many other browsers simply don’t. As a browser user, it deals with all my obvious browser related issues — a) I can get information super fast b) I can guarantee some sort of privacy from 3rd party tracking and c) I can directly reward good content (… although probably not as much as i should!! sadface).
To the latter point and from my POV as an ad tech specialist, I know that there are specific barriers to get brands advertising on Brave and thus ensuring that publishers maintain a steady stream of revenue. In fact while we can all do our best to nudge this browser along, and even if adoption was substantial, I highly doubt that the Brave eco could replicate the amount of money publishers currently receive. Therefore, getting Brands to advertise at a healthy rate on Brave is as integral as cultivating an ecosystem of goodwill.
I have previously written about a series of barriers to Brand/advertiser adoption. In this post, I am going to focus on just one, and provide two possible solutions (fair — right?).
From my previous post (link), I highlighted the lack of ROI in Brave ads as an impediment to ad investment. Specifically:
- Attention doesn’t equal revenue since it is not linked to subsequent customer transactions — in fact, it could be negatively related to revenue. I can watch Shia’s Nike ad a 100 times, and each time hate Nike a little bit more…
- one BAT purchased by an advertiser might be valued totally differently by another advertiser
- this uncertainty in valuation of Attention Tokens will push away investments
I believe that the solution for the above is a simple reworking of the BAT to function more as a BASIC PURCHASE TOKEN.
What do I mean by that?
The ideal in advertising is — you see my ad, you purchase in my web store. Then I know that my ad, whether it was meant to drive intent or meant to drive awareness, converted the said tactic into bottomline revenue.
The world of advertising does this through Attribution and third party tracking:
1) a cookie is established across all of the impression you were exposed to on the web
2) an attribution algorithm runs on top of that data, determining which impression was most likely to drive any subsequent conversion
Third party tracking has played a strong part in the increase in investment in digital over last few years. Brands have been able to directly measure impact, as well as automate many of their campaign optimizations.
Of course, third party tracking goes out the window with Brave, rightfully so.
My humble, first suggestion in increasing ROI measurement with BRAVE and BAT:
1) Payment Request + BAT
Chromium has payment request API already set up where a browser can be used by a user to complete a purchase. Integrate this with Brave:
- Nike runs an ad for CoolAirNikesStuff, links it to its Nike store product
- Ad accumulates attention, and viewers accumulate BATs
- When one viewer buys coolAirNikesStuff, Browser shares that information with Nike — how is this allowed? Brave has been open about the fact that they will share certain signals from your Browser data to an advertiser
- Nike knows who saw CoolAirNikesStuff ad and then purchases the shoes
PRO: easy to report performance back to a Brand
CON: While Brave has been open about the fact they will be using browser signals to advertisers, I don’t think the public will take this well. At the same time it is better than 3rd party tracking: Nike won’t know what site I was reading at the time, when it happened, how many times I saw the ad… while it still links me back to an ad campaign.
2) Brands distribute their own branded BATs to ad viewers!
- Nike runs an ad for CoolAirNikesStuff
- Nike creates its own BAT NIKE tokens
- anytime you see a Nike ad, you get Nike BAT tokens
- when you purchase CoolAirNikesStuff, you deposit these Nike tokens to unlock a small discount / extra service / etc… too small to really cause any distortion
PRO — data is safe and Nike gets analytics on its ads
CON — depending on the incentive, might have small distortion by lower income consumers more incentivized to look at ads (however, no more so than the average BAT viewers)
Ultimately, Brave is on to something. However, it needs to move fast. There are other CCs, like repay.me for example, launching this spring and offering consumers a market place for their private online data. Their incentive scheme looks a lot like 2), and I personally know a few brands that would find this proposition really interesting as it can directly be valued in hard sales.
