Tell us about your deeptech solution. Which media challenge does it tackle and why is this important?
AdHash is rethinking most of the core infrastructure of digital advertising as we know it today. We are on a bold mission to solve ad tech’s biggest problems – the unavoidable opacity, astronomic fees, and proliferating ad fraud. Just this year, ad fraud alone is projected to cost advertisers and publishers close to $30B. On top of that, they pay over 70% commissions through the traditional ad supply chain.
Those losses are suffocating the media industry as it is getting increasingly more difficult to fund the creation of high-quality content and to distribute it globally. And all of that is being done at the expense of consumers’ privacy – when we browse the internet, we get tracked by hundreds and sometimes even thousands of companies.
When we started building the AdHash Protocol, our thesis was a radical rethinking of the ad industry’s underlying technological stack. It is a complex solution involving advanced cryptography, edge computing, distributed databases, big data analytics, and machine learning.
What is unique about your solution? What sets it apart from the competition?
AdHash is the only solution in the ad industry that allows advertisers to rely entirely on first-party data. They don’t have to trust any third parties with targeting, validation, analytics, or any other sort of data. They don’t even have to trust AdHash. They have full control over their information and have the last say when validating whether an ad event should be paid for or not.
This unprecedented innovation in transparency and directness is made possible only by the fact that we create unique ad identifiers for every ad ever served and store them in a distributed, publicly-accessible database. We call those identifiers ad hashes.
All of this allowed us to build the first fully-distributed advertising ecosystem in which each participant is responsible for their own hosting and analytics and their own ad serving. This not only eliminates the risk of fraud and data manipulation, but also makes the entire system much more resilient – there is no single point of failure. Most importantly, by allowing its clients to host and manage their databases internally, AdHash dramatically reduces the costs associated with running a big data operation. And we can then transfer those savings to our clients by changing them a commission that is over an order of magnitude lower than the industry’s average.
Can you shed some light on AdHash’s journey so far? What have been its biggest milestones? What challenges are you trying to overcome?
AdHash’s biggest milestone was launching with real clients from the media and ad industries and seeing how they react to our products. Understanding how our entire tech stack works takes a lot of dedication. We couldn’t expect all of our clients to read everything about us. We knew that our product had to speak for itself when we launched. And we knew that our performance would be immediately compared in direct A/B tests against some of the biggest companies in the world – Google, Facebook, Amazon.
This is why the biggest milestone for us so far came when we launched and we saw years of preparation and work materialise in an actual marketplace with live data. And, we are very happy to say, our clients loved it. All of our publishers have stayed with us, and we have consistently beaten the best and biggest companies in our field when it comes to actual performance. You can read more about it in the case studies on our website.
In return, we have received a great amount of feedback from our clients that has helped us improve our product-market fit.
You have been part of MME for a few months now. Can you please elaborate on your progress and how have you evolved during the programme?
The past few months have been tremendously dynamic for us. We have launched two more stable versions of the platforms, hired some great additions to our team, released a new, much cleaner version of our website, significantly strengthened the internal processes in the company and onboarded new clients. Our mentor, Ruslan Papazyan, has been advising us bi-weekly on a combination of the above topics and learning from his experience has been invaluable.
