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The rising consumption of digital media, as a consequence of the accessibility of smart devices (IoT) and social media popularity, generated tremendous opportunities for companies to reach audiences in the online environment through digital advertising. However, there is a software haunting these companies, and consequently costing them billions: ad blocking.
According to a report in PageFair, the global number of desktop and mobile devices that use ad blocking services reached 615 million devices by the end of 2016, and it is expected to keep growing in the next years. Consequently, this trend has been affecting publishers, marketers, agencies and other businesses that depend on ad revenue.
What is SocialMedia.Market
In order to bypass adblock, companies/agencies have been researching for digital marketing alternatives. Recently, SocialMedia.Market, a marketing platform, adopted Influencer Marketing as its strategy. The objective is to have brands and products incorporated organically into content from real people. This provides authenticity to the content because real people are endorsing products or services to an audience that has previously subscribed or followed.
Influencer Marketing, defined, is “a form of marketing in which the focus is placed on influential people rather than the target market as a whole”. Society has seen celebrities, bloggers and journalists sharing their own content while building a solid user base of like-minded people. Consequently, advertisers have found opportunities to employ digital influencers that have the potential to motivate followers in the industry where their buying decisions are concerned.
SocialMedia.Market aims to connect publishers and advertisers on a single platform. The project will leverage the Ethereum blockchain in order to create a decentralized ecosystem that will discover, create, perform and analyze advertising campaigns with social media influencers across any social media platform. The blockchain technology will allow the creation of a public and agile platform with an advertising marketplace accessible to everyone, even to up-and-coming influencers, startups and small businesses.
How does it work?
The SocialMedia.Market platform aims for the automation of the processes related to the selection, creation and management of the Influencers’ marketing activities. Beyond the use of the blockchain technology, the platform will also use Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, their own Influencers’ database and Big Data Analytics. Altogether, these components will allow the automation of the processes, without the need for communication between parties. The platform is also designed to automatically find a match between Influencers and Brands, and collect campaign statistics about the user's behaviour and Influencers return on investment (ROI).
The SocialMedia.Market team will provide an interface with templates and tips that will ease the advertisers' task creation and the influencer's marketing campaigns. Furthermore, once a marketing campaign has been created, the advertisers must select an influencer for the campaign. The advertiser can either publish the campaign on the platform making it visible to the influencers who match the target audience or choose an influencer from the platform’s database using advanced search engine and filters.
The influencers data will be stored, and together with big data analytics will allow the platform to find a perfect match between Brands and Influencers. Once the match is found, the influencers will receive a campaign notification with the terms and conditions, which needs to be accepted in order to participate. When the position is confirmed, a Smart Contract is automatically created with the campaign deadline. If the influencer completes the required task in the established period the funds will be automatically credited to his account, otherwise, the Smart Contract is cancelled. In case the Smart Contract is executed, the reward will be sent in Social Media tokens (SMT).
Furthermore, the platform will also feature a decentralized dispute solution system. As the name suggests it’s a system to resolve disputes between advertisers and influencers without a third party involvement. In this system, a list of contracts under dispute will be available for platform experts to review and solve (the solvers have to hold a certain number of SMT tokens to be qualified for it), and in exchange be rewarded with SMT’s tokens.
SMT Token & ICO
The SMT token is an ERC-20 token that aims to create a self-driven economy based on constant cooperation between influencers, advertisers, marketing agencies and agents. Beyond the features previously mentioned, it will also be used as the medium of exchange to rewardiInfluencers for their campaigns.
SocialMedia.Market will divide its ICO into two phases. The first phase will occur on the 7th of December, 2017 and is expected to end on the 14th of December, 2017. The token supply for the first phase represents 20% of the total token supply, so there will be a total of 10,000,000 tokens available, for 0.00125 ETH each during the first phase. The second phase will occur on the 9th of February, 2018 and is expected to end on the 23rd of February, 2018. The token supply for the second phase represents 60% of the total token supply, so there will be a total of 30,000,000 tokens available, for 0.00143 ETH each during the offering.
To learn more about the SocialMedia.Market ICO click here.