The Digital Advertising Blockchain. XCHNG is an open and unified blockchain-based framework for the digital advertising ecosystem. Designed and deployed by Kochava Labs SEZC (or simply, “Kochava”), a research and development subsidiary of Kochava Inc., the XCHNG™ framework is centered around a common Ricardian Smart Contract with an open blockchain implementation to persist transactional history and provide supporting utilities required for maximizing efficiency through the lifecycle of the IO. XCHNG™ establishes a common set of rails available to the entire advertising community to buy, sell, measure, rate, and pay for digital media.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is XCHNG™?
What is the XCHNG™ core value proposition?
Reduce Intermediaries, increase efficiency and transparency. XCHNG™ dramatically reduces the need for third party intermediation in digital advertising and unifies all transactions related to digital ads on a common ledger. Whether advertisers, publishers, or other industry players, all parties stand to benefit from a more transparent, efficient marketplace using a common ledger with permissioned access. Advertisers in particular, frustrated with today’s cumbersome and wasteful system, are demanding that the industry move in this direction. XCHNG™ secures and standardizes the process of buying and selling digital advertising through decentralization, removing reliance upon central intermediaries. The system is protocol based and is by definition is designed to be trustworthy as it enables party-to-counterparty interaction. It facilitates the workflow of buying and selling ads through a smart contract IO, enables the related targeting and activation of audiences, and bolsters ad-spend efficiency and security. It will usher in a next-generation advertising system of record for all participants, and it will create an opportunity to tokenize the framework to treat digital ads as a true asset class.
What is Kochava?
Global Leader in Digital Advertising Measurement & Attribution. Founded in 2011, Kochava Inc. is the leader in digital advertising measurement and attribution. Today, Kochava Inc. provides measurement for over $6 billion in ad spend annually, for major enterprise brands across industry verticals. The company is independent and already has all the touchpoints of supply and demand throughout the ecosystem. Kochava Inc. also has the largest independent data marketplace in the Kochava Collective, on a scale comparable with the biggest players in the field. Finally, while XCHNG™ is architected as an open framework for third-party verification, Kochava Inc. is uniquely positioned to offer the industry-leading measurement right out of the box.
What is the relationship between XCHNG™ and Kochava?
Created for Independence. XCHNG™ is an independent framework designed and deployed by Kochava Labs SEZC (or simply, “Kochava”), a research and development subsidiary of Kochava Inc. XCHNG™ is an open source project which will ultimately have contributions from many XCHNG™ partners. Similar to other members of the digital advertising community, Kochava Inc. is contributing leadership, development expertise, and data to XCHNG™.
Why native blockchain for digital advertising?
The live demo of XCHNG™ showed speeds of 180,000 transactions per second per IO. Because customers can have unlimited IOs, and XCHNG™ offers unlimited side chains as needed, the team demonstrated that XCHNG™ can handle millions of transactions per second globally. This is well beyond today’s transaction volume requirements within digital advertising and has been received well by leading advertisers and suppliers alike.
How will XCHNG™ ensure transparency and efficiency for all its participants?
The Smart Contract IO. Blockchain is, first and foremost, a technology of trust and transparency. It is for this reason that it is being applied to so many different industries, disrupting the status quo and decentralizing processes so that all participants are on an even playing field and can trust the related transactions. One of the major concerns in digital advertising is the lack of consistency and reliability of the Insertion Order process. Blockchain-based smart contracts significantly improve the efficiency and reliability of buying and selling ads. The XCHNG™ framework is open source and offers opportunity for third-party verification and unprecedented transparency, something that is very lacking in the current advertising ecosystem.
What does XCHNG™ mean to me or my business?
- Buyers/Advertisers
Buyers or advertisers (also referred to as marketers), purchase media for the purpose of digitally advertising their apps, games, services, ideas, web sites or products. - Publishers
A publisher (company or individual) is an entity who has a published website or app where it displays advertisements to its audience. These ads typically are provided by an advertiser in order to promote its products, services, or apps to the publisher’s audience. The publisher provides a certain number of ad units within which the ad is displayed (banner, video, interstitial, content, or some other unique unit type). For the purpose of this white paper, we refer to an ad unit as an ad slot. A web page or app may have one or more portions corresponding to ad slots for displaying ads of various formats. - Aggregators
To support the scale of exposure required for a typical ad campaign (also called an “ad buy”), an advertiser is likely to engage with more than one publisher to achieve its campaign objective (i.e., access to enough ad slots). The advertiser may also engage with any number of ad networks (also called supply-side providers or SSPs) who aggregate ad slots from multiple publishers in order to provide the advertiser with greater scale to buy ad slots across a broader audience base. In a similar manner, a publisher with more than one ad slot may engage with more than one advertiser to all its ad slots. Conversely, a publisher may engage with an advertiser aggregator (also called a demand-side provider or DSP) who aggregates advertisements from multiple advertisers to all available ad slots. Furthermore, SSPs also interact with DSPs to provide even greater economies of scale. This system of aggregation is entirely centralized today.
What advantages does a Smart Contract Insertion Order have over a traditional Insertion Order?
- Identification and pre-verification of inventory being bought, sold, or traded with associated targeting capabilities against an open blockchain framework
- Identification and pre-verification of the buyer and seller of the media with unique keys
- Embedded and programmable terms for the agreement that address tracking and brand safety verification, targeting (from 1, above), allowance of re-brokering, flight times, payment approach: CPM (Cost per Mille—impression-based pricing), CPC (Cost per Click), CPI (Cost per Install), CPX/CPA (Cost per Action) and other details for the digital ad buy; General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance
- Identification of the associated ecosystem partner to be used for the purpose of measuring performance of IO terms (called the measurement provider)
- Identification of the optionally associated ecosystem partner to be used as the ratings provider
- Identification of the optionally associated ecosystem partner to be used as the payment provider (for clarity, Kochava will not serve in this capacity on XCHNG™)
- Identification of the optionally associated ecosystem partner to be used as the Arbitration Service in the event there is disagreement between the buyer, seller or measurement provider upon delivery
