It’s conventional wisdom that there is an element of fraud across the digital advertising ecosystem. And some in the advertising sector hoped that blockchain technology, with its open and distributed ledger, would help to improve the monitoring of any unscrupulous activity, eMarketer recently noted. However, it seems it’s too early to determine if this is possible because not enough parties are using blockchain, eMarketer noted.

“For blockchain to effectively combat ad fraud, all parties to a programmatic transaction must agree to use it—and use the same system,” according to eMarketer. “But only 11 percent of the 300 U.S. agency and marketing professionals polled by Advertiser Perceptions in May 2018 had ever completed a transaction using blockchain. One reason for the low adoption, according to 55 percent of those surveyed is that the technology is too slow to manage media transactions.”

The “open ledger” feature of blockchain should can give advertisers more visibility into who is taking a chunk out of their advertising dollars before reaching publishers. And some ad executives even see blockchain as a solution to cutting out middlemen, according to the eMarketer report. Indeed, about half of the 100 US senior advertising executives polled said they believe that blockchain will help reduce the number of intermediaries in the ad supply chain, according to eMarketer.

However, Stefano Vegnaduzzo, a senior vice president of data science at Integral Ad Science, is a bit skeptical. He told eMarketer, “The most efficient and effective way to prevent and detect ad fraud is by using sophisticated machine learning techniques and not blockchain technology. The main challenge with blockchain that needs to be addressed before it can be adopted at scale is latency.”