Ben Putley, CEO and Co-Founder of Alkimi, shares how his team is tackling programmatic advertising’s biggest flaws, high fees and low transparency with a blockchain-powered ad exchange. We explore why stablecoins, immutable ledgers, and lower fees are reshaping digital advertising, what it means for brands and publishers, and how blockchain can finally become invisible tech that just works.
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The Business of Marketing podcast is brought to you by Path7 in partnership with Advertising Week. Path7 helps brands scale partner marketing with seamless content distribution, real-time lead data, and consistent brand experiences. Powered by partners, built for performance. So I’m delighted to welcome Ben from Alkimi to this edition of the Business Marketing Recorded Live here at Advertising Week Europe. Welcome. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks for joining us. So tell us about your role and what Alkimi does. So I’m one of the three founders and the CEO. So we launched the business four years ago to solve the issues that programmatic advertising faces, namely high fees, lack of transparency. And a blockchain is a really great solution for that has become more and more so as that technology has improved over the last 16, 17 years old. incredible so give me a sense of the kind of size scale kind of clients projects bring it to life for me so we there’s 60 of us now whereas 20 of us based in london and then we have around 40 developers out in bangalore there’s a handful of people dotted around europe as well we do as a blockchain company and an ad set company we’re kind of b2c and b2b to some degree so it’s a funny place to sit um so we do a lot of content production, but then equally ads are planned and booked at scale in London, right? So we have our sales team here, the marketing team here, the founders sit here and we’ve worked with big agencies. So we’re partners with publicists. We work with Coca-Cola, we work with traditional publishers and more and more so crypto publishers. So really helping them understand the value of using a blockchain to buy and sell ads. And That sort of ecosystem that you kind of operate in, you know, tell me a little bit about kind of how important those sort of relationships are and those partnerships are. Well, without them, there wouldn’t be an exchange. It’d just be an expensive bit of kit without anyone using it. So I think it’s been a process of education. I think maybe five, six years ago, people had an allergic reaction to blockchain, I think. With the change of the people that are in charge in America, there’s been a significant 180 on how America views blockchain. That was a big blocker for a long time, regulating by enforcement rather than kind of inviting people in that are in the sector to understand the potential value and application to really any sector. It’s historically been finance, but yeah, we believe that there’s a big impact that it could be made on the monetization of the internet. That has changed in a lot of conversations, and really it’s then been about people seeing the proof in the pudding. We charge lower fees, so if you’re buying ads, you get more media for your money, and if you’re selling ads, you get paid more ads for the ads you’re selling, and then there’s nothing better for transparency than an immutable record of transactions. So the ledger is key in helping people understand what fees are being taken, where they’re being taken, and they don’t need to trust the data. It’s like trustless. I always think that’s a funny… were to talk to people because it sounds like, well, I don’t trust it if it’s trustless, but there’s no need to trust it because it’s verified independently. You can query that data whenever you want to down to a log level. So the granularity that we offer to buyers and sellers is really unmatched as far as the transparency and the lack of trust required in the data that we’re presenting to people. So, I mean, like, you know, you’ve just painted a very, very strong, clear, I suppose, investment case for what you do and what the blockchain can offer. You’ve also just sort of talked about some of the kind of the barriers that have perhaps existed in terms of regulation and sort of top down kind of, you know. what do you think are the other big unlocks that still need to be uh uh you know um yeah smash through broken whatever the word you want to use i think just there’s part of the problem is education right so like you can teach people about things but there’s a difference between like education and experiencing something for yourself like if you think about um big behavioral changes recently like working from home like the proof that you could work from home as effectively as you could in an office actually made the the idea of a commute the idea of ironing your shirt or brushing your teeth significantly more painful than knowing that you could just like chuck on a cardigan join your meeting and not have to commute anymore and the old behavior seemed quite silly that why would i commute if i can do just as good work here as i can in the office now there’s probably a case to be made for both of those things but really it’s now about people experiencing what we’ve tried to teach them about and then they start to see how the old way perhaps doesn’t make as much sense as the way that we facilitate which is buying ads on chain and now once that starts to happen really the buying and selling ads is like the the bedrock upon which actually using a blockchain outside of just buying ads can really afford. You know, like you have the best use case for blockchain, in my opinion, is stablecoins. So the ability to pay people using USDT or USDC or any of the other stablecoins are there is quicker. It’s easier. The fees are lower. And what we’re kind of presenting the beginnings of is like, well, you could just pay for ad campaigns using stablecoins. Now, the great thing about stablecoins is that there’s tons of yield available. if you have them. So you start to move towards a world where your marketing budget, if you’re a big brand or dollars you’re responsible for as a media agency, don’t just get spent. They can also earn yield whilst they’re sat idle. So it allows for a system that is additive rather than extricative, which currently all of the incumbents are like, okay, I’m providing a service. I’ll charge you a fee. Value’s being taken out of that. prior to that there’s not really much you can do. yeah what’s great about DeFi can be applied to advertising like you affectionately call it AdFi internally but like the ability for your marketing budget to work for you twice I think could be transformative and the ability for money to be saved that is often like hidden right there is fees associated with using a bank and sending money and there’s a lot of logistics and operational back end that goes on with managing that it’s like ledgers take care of that for you it’s like Tether is one of the largest stablecoin issuers, has like record-breaking revenue per head because their back and middle office is just taken care of by a blockchain. And now if you think how that applies to large businesses like brands or media agencies, there’s quite a lot of bloat in those companies and it can be automated. quite easily using a blockchain and then if you think about the advancements we’ve seen in ai recently like that is quite a compelling like cocktail of products you know like a lot of the back office is automated and you have an immutable ledger of payments and the fees are really low it’s like all of a sudden the capital within advertising becomes way more efficient because i think that walk back from one of the issues i’ve talked about like a lack of transparency and high fees you’re basically just making capital inefficient which leads to inefficient marketplaces and if you can sell for that good things tend to happen and when you talk about education how do you educate and who is it you need to educate there’s a number of ways we have had our own podcast for quite a long time so i’ve had some really great guests that have come on to that and i tend to Sometimes it can feel a little bit of a sales pitch, but like talking about their problems, how we solve them with a blockchain, but just like really taking them on the journey with me. And it’s two-sided, right? If it’s someone that is heavily in blockchain, I can talk to them about the application of that to advertising and then vice versa. It’s going to create that. bigger crossover of people that sit in the middle that understand both because they are very similar in the way where you buy and sell the cryptocurrency versus the way you buy and sell ad like the mechanics of it are quite similar yeah so it’s just drawing that parallel to people and then it’s just like repeating yourself over and over again it is doing the boring stuff well like it’s very well having a shiny product but if your client servicing is terrible doesn’t matter, right? It’s also timing to some degree. Like if you get your timing wrong, you’re just wrong. And I think that we positioned ourselves quite nicely four years ago and we had the idea to now like be able to capitalize on this increased interest, this increased adoption, the technology becoming more ubiquitous and easier to understand and use because you have AI platforms that can tell you exactly how it works and how you can apply it. And you can have an agentic system to take care of transactions for you. So really it’s just like, contextualizing it in a way that’s really easy to understand and removing the UX issue that Web3 has, like it’s not easy to use crypto. There’s a lot of advancements recently that are making it much more simple. So just, yeah, I guess it’s timing and simplicity and just repeating yourself and doing the boring things right is really the process that we do. And who is it we’ve got to educate? I think buyers, sellers, people that are monetizing via ads, I think often publishers eat last a lot of the time and there’s not always that much left, but really they have a very important job around creating content you know it’s like a lot of the blockchain publications that we speak to like understand exactly what we’re doing on chain but are quite nascent in terms of how they’re thinking about monetization like a lot of them will use tenancies still to sell ads which It can be great, but you lose your incentive to create more ad inventory because it’s sold out for the month. It’s like you’ve only got 12 months to sell. It’s like, whereas if you package it up into an audience and then you can sell a specific audience in a specific country, you’ve got more things to sell. So really, people up and down the marketplace, to be honest with you, it’s like, here’s a benefit for brands. Here’s a benefit for media agencies. Here’s a benefit for publishers. Just to… remove what can be seen as quite a high barrier to entry. So that is, yeah, basically all of the people in the marketplace need to understand that there are benefits to using the blockchain and it’s our job to tell them really. And in terms of maturity and like we were talking about, behavioral change and so on, who in the organization chain do you need to influence? I mean, you talked right at the very beginning about the black and white kind of upside of moving and shifting towards this model, right? So my immediate thought is, well, how do you get the CFO on board kind of scenario? So kind of tell me a little bit more about that. Who are those influencers? Yeah, it’s like a staged process, you know, like one of the early problems we had was we were selling features of the marketplace, which is like transparency and low fees, which to us, I was like, well, why wouldn’t you be interested in that? But it’s quite difficult to put that into a plan. Yeah. It’s like, where does transparency and low fees fit into a medium? Because I’m used to buying in this way, right? Exactly. And it’s like, we then changed the way in which we package that up based off the features that we had. So we have a… a product that we call 100% share of screen. Now that is we can buy all of the ad units on page. So it’s similar to your high impact formats, but exists through existing IAB formats. reason we’re able to do that is because our fees are low our net bids are high so we can be very competitive in the auctions in which we are submitting bids so we can win all the pages quite consistently and actually that’s a great product for portfolio companies that have multiple brands that might be bidding against each other and cannibalizing their bids or it might be good for luxury brands that don’t want to be seen against any other brand when they’re buying you know like remoa for example might not want to be seen against some say louis vuitton but the same company like any other luxury suitcases, not LVMH. And that has been quite a slow, painstaking process. You know, it’s like you have to go speak to the publishers individually. It’s tough to scale that. It can be quite expensive. So really creating a product that was easy to buy, move the needle with the planners and buyers. And then you start there. It’s like, okay, well, we’ve done a good job for a planner and buyer. And then you talk to the account director and then you talk to the trading directors. And then in some instances, we deal directly with Coca-Cola, but James worked at IPG and was one of the first people that tested with AWS. So it’s like, we tend to start at the front line, which is the buying and selling. And then as we prove out success, you kind of slowly move up to the decision makers and they, okay, this does make sense. And I can see that my team is using it operationally. And it is like, I always say we have to like put off the first no for as long as we possibly can. I always used to sell software. So it was like, getting stakeholders in you don’t want them to say no because then you’re kind of the deal’s dead so it’s just like putting off that no for as long as possible then it kind of becomes inevitable because the results speak for themselves so it’s And that takes a long time. In media, that is a long time. Firstly, there’s a lot of entrenched behaviors. And then secondly, if you want to run a test campaign that lasts for a month, you’ve got to wait a month for that test campaign to finish before you can then talk to them about the results. So it’s like time is the number one thing that we’ve been working against. And we’ve moved quite quickly. We have an ad exchange. We’re kind of four years in, but we’re still waiting for campaigns to finish, being able to prove the results, and then looking to expand that. So, yeah. Really interesting. And, you know, I think you mentioned publicists at the beginning and you just, you know, you can for the second time, you just mentioned kind of Coke. And I was just wondering about, you know, because obviously going in at an agency or a group level, you know, publicist gives you access to the entire portfolio of brands in theory, you know, or you’re going direct to Coke and then Coke says, oh, yeah, let’s go and talk to Essence, whatever. Right. So what have you found to be kind of the most successful kind of routes, you know? It’s when you have the brand and the agency on board, like the Being able to, again, because our fees are our fees, we’re very transparent about that. It doesn’t create any contention between those. So we can say, okay, well, we’ve been doing work with Kraken recently, whose agency is Media Hub. And we speak to both Kraken and Media Hub and help them deliver what they need to deliver for Kraken and equally provide a good service to Kraken. So it’s coming from the top down and the bottom up. It’s just the easiest way when you’ve got all of the stakeholders agreeing that this is a good thing to do. You just, again, to go back to what I was saying, like no one’s saying no. And that just generally expedites things quite significantly and providing knowledge basically specifically for crypto. Like we understand that we’ve built our own layer too. That’s very much down the rabbit hole, but like we speak blockchain languages because we’ve built one. So like when you’re speaking to Kraken, who’s like, big crypto exchange to ipo you know like have done very well sponsored football teams what have you then we can say okay we understand how you think about blockchain and then we also understand ad tech so like we are i always jokingly say and i think it’s perhaps the wrong analogy but like there have been people that have seen the well-reported issues in programmatic advertising that understand blockchains and like we can sell for all of that without necessarily knowing the nuances of how deal-making is done in advertising. And I came from AdTech, Charlie, our co-founder came from AdTech, Changi built Virgin and Sky Media’s TV ad product. So we understood AdTech, figured out blockchain to solve that problem. So to some degree, we’re like born vampires. We understood the market. We weren’t bitten and became them, which I think has happened in the past when people have looked to use a blockchain to solve problems in AdTech. Yeah, I like that. That’s a really good analogy. Vampire seems better. You know what I mean? It needs a bit of work, but it’s getting there. It’s close. We’ll go with it. Yeah. Um, so I’m a marketeer and I’m listening to this conversation and I’m thinking about, okay, you know, uh, how do I make that first step leap? Whatever. It feels like a leap, but you know, how do you make it feel more like a step? I think we, from the get go, we wanted to make the way in which you worked with us feel very familiar. So it is ad formats that you’re used to. We know the planning and buying process, so we can help you put plans together. We can help you find your audiences. So it doesn’t feel that different at the very beginning. There’s a lot that happens differently on the back end. So I think if you’re a marketer and you, put it another way, like the best brands know when to innovate and they do it deliberately and considered, And I think we’re probably getting to that inflection point with blockchain. So it’s like, okay, this is something that started off as a science project. It’s now got some record-breaking ETFs in terms of some of the asset classes that have been created off the back of it. It feels like the groundswell is at a point where you should start taking it seriously and do some research. And it might just be like, what is it? And we can help you understand what it is. And then if it makes sense for you to try it out, which it may well do because our fees are lower and we can tell you exactly what’s going on with your media buying. That’s the case really. It’s just, we’re looking for people that are inquisitive and then we can just meet them where they are in the market and then just slowly take them on the journey with us. So they don’t feel like it’s risky. They feel confident we can deliver what they’re going to. We can show them the case studies of people that we’ve worked with now. It’s just about not rushing people into it because it’s all very well to get one campaign live, but if that blows up, you may as well not have bothered because it was a waste of time for everyone. And at a time where there are pressures on sales and making sure dollars are spent effectively we don’t want to put people in a position where they screw that up because no one’s getting fired for buying ads on facebook or meta but if you use the blockchain and it went horrendously wrong you might well get fired for that so we just want to make sure people know what they’re getting into understand the benefits it feels familiar and then we just deliver again the boring stuff quite well like they get the reports when they need them, they can look into the platform, see how campaigns are performing, you know, just like the stuff they’d expect, like the service levels that you’d expect from anyone. Um, we look to match that. And getting that first campaign, you know, through without blowing up and delivering, um, to then becoming kind of the default, like describe that kind of process journey. We’re probably not quite there. It’s like a default. I’d love to be, I think that’s the goal. Um, I think it’s just setting out the expectations ahead of the campaign and ensuring that timeframes are agreed upon. And I don’t think this part is rocket science, really. It’s just like, do the boring stuff really well. I keep saying that, but it’s just that. It’s quite simple, you know? Just like, under-promise, over-deliver, all the classic adages that you get. You know, it’s just like, do what you say you were going to do when you were going to do it. If there’s some additional performance benefits, great. It’s like, it’s not… complicated to explain, it can be difficult to deliver. But really, it’s, yeah, just to keep it simple, really interested to do the boring stuff while I keep saying that. No, I think that’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because almost it’s largely irrelevant, the how, right? Yeah. That’s kind of where you want it to get to, right? Exactly right, yeah. It’s like you see it often, and then more so in the crypto space, right? Like people will want to know specifically, like what wallet did you use and what chain did you use to swap and… you buy something you don’t describe the way you bought it because who cares you just were able to do what you wanted to do and i think that really is what we’re trying to do it’s like you want to have a more effective and efficient means to buying ads it’s on a blockchain but so what that’s just the way in which technology is delivered it doesn’t necessarily matter that that’s happened it’s just the results speak for themselves so um where i was going with that but yeah it’s um Yeah, it’s almost invisible, right? At the end of the day, we don’t want to think about the how when we’re buying this. What we want is the outcome. We want efficiency. As you said, we don’t want to be fired. We want to be promoted. We want to be delivering serious ROI for our clients. That’s what we care about. And I think it was Peter Thiel that said that, right? It was when technology is good when it becomes invisible and feels like magic. And that’s really the goal, right? It doesn’t matter that we use a blockchain. It just matters that your marketing becomes more efficient. That’s it. And I think that’s where people have… i don’t want to generalize but where people have got blockchains wrong in the past it’s like we can do this many transactions per second it’s like who gives a shit about that no one who cares you know like you can build anything on our platform but like what does that like what is anything that becomes quite a higher barrier to entry and it’s like whereas like With us, it’s like you come to us and you buy ads, or you come to us and you sell ads. Like, there’s a specific purpose for infrastructure, which just takes away a lot of that, like, so what do I do? You know, it’s like we come to us and you buy and sell ads. That’s it. Boringly delivered, right? Yeah, exactly. Just like, yeah, just make it easy for them. I think that’s… Otherwise, you’re just pushing water up the whole time. Again, just take it back to Kipter. It’s like, well, how do you get a wallet? It’s like, yeah, I’ve downloaded Metamask. Like, well, how do you put money on it? It’s like, well, you have to use… In the past, it was like you had to send stuff in an envelope to someone that you met on Reddit or wherever it was, and then you hoped that a bit of Bitcoin showed up. But it’s come a long way since then, and there’s been a lot of improved rails. But still, there’s like… I think particularly over the last six months or so, there’s been some technologies that allowed for heavy speculation on tokens with virtually zero value. And… For some people, that was their first experience. But even that’s like, hey, we have to use a Telegram bot and then you have to go on to pump.fun and then you have to try and figure out why couldn’t I buy that? It’s like, well, because there was slippage, there’s not enough liquidity. It’s just like even that sentence, there’s tons of assumed knowledge in just transacting with blockchains, which fundamentally just create barriers to entry. So it’s just like, suck those away. make it really easy to use, and then your people will use it. Give me a sense of the timeline that you think is going to play out to that point of which it becomes almost ubiquitous, default, invisible. I wish I knew that. I think what I will say is that the blockchain wallets are being created at a quicker rate than the internet and mobile phones are being adopted so it it makes sense because you need the internet to have transfer of value online it’s kind of assumed and it’s easier to do that on your mobile phone than it is at your desktop pc because it’s more mobile so it’s standing upon the shoulders of giants and i think that if it continues trending at that rate, maybe it’s over the next five to 10 years where you just use stable coins to buy things. It’s no different, right? It’s just an easier transfer of value than in the same way that Cath was harder to use than Monzo, for example, you know, like it’s just like the natural progression is it just becomes easier. There’s less people involved. The fees are lower, the money arrives sooner, you know, like, And you never go back, right? Yeah, exactly. Because it’s… We did it recently. We were waiting for a transaction and it was coming from America. And I was like, I’ve instructed my bank and that took two days. I’m like, this is insane. If I had your wallet address, I could send you money in 20 minutes and it would cost me $2. Like that. And I was like, now I can see how… And I do it all the time. But I’m like, that is obviously a better user experience. Now there is… and we still send the test transaction, do you know what I mean? We still went through the processes that we would use on a blockchain. It just took longer and the bank was closed. Do you know what I mean? It’s just like… That doesn’t happen on-chain. You can do it whenever you want to do it. And now there is… There’s no take-backs in crypto. So if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. And I think that does frighten people. So yeah, I think it’s… And you’ve seen different take-up rates from different types of clients, from different markets. So we’ve had a big… big success recently and i’m very optimistic about the future of this market but like large crypto brands that historically had worked with formula one teams or football clubs and done like big endorsement deals and then had spent a lot of time on their performance marketing through affiliates in social platforms and like perhaps hadn’t looked at the open web as a means to raise brand awareness, or change purchase intent, or like, it’s a key part of the funnel though, like you’re missing people’s intent all the time, right? And you’re missing out on that. We’re now seeing brands look at that in a much more significant way than they ever have done, to tie the, my logos on a Formula One team to this is how much it cost me to convert a customer, to provide some more attribution throughout the funnel. So I think you’re talking about businesses that make a ton of money, like they’re still SMEs to some regard, but… with massive budgets. So like that is one thing I’m very bullish on and kind of pleased to see it happening is that you’ve got crypto brands that are moving into the open web and the associated advertising in a way that hasn’t happened so far. Because naturally you would expect them to be incredibly adept and have that kind of understanding in the same way that perhaps some of the big innovations that happened in ad tech were from gambling and other kind of industries, right? Exactly right, yeah. They have a lot of money, you know, they generate a lot of fees, they have obscene amounts of trading volume, like… I mean, Bybit got hacked for some ungodly amount of money about two months ago and survived. It was like $1.6 billion and they still exist. So that’s another kettle of fish. They’re resilient businesses. They’re serving a purpose. People are interested. And I think you just have to capture attention. And it’s now like kind of big blue water in terms of like moving into this market. And we can help crypto publishers be in a position to capitalize on that demand. And equally, we can help advertisers capitalize on the attention that people are getting from certain websites that exist. So you said you’re bullish. So I’m just going to one last final question, really, which is kind of like, what are you most kind of excited about right now? I think the rate in which advertising, well, I didn’t anticipate the adoption of blockchain has happened in the way that it’s happened. Like even when I think six years ago, it was hard to get your hands on crypto and people weren’t talking about it in the news. Certainly the president hadn’t created his own token. So that is a big change. I would never have guessed that would have happened and whether the individual is the anomaly or whether it’s just like adoption that is taking place. But you’ve seen it from then TradFi institutions with these big ETFs that have captured more dollars than any ETFs in history. I didn’t have that on my, this is what will happen in the next four years, bingo card. So I think if it continues at the rate that it is continuing at, everyone will just start using it forever. And there’s not many people use it right now. It’s still, we’re still, it’s a bit of a cliche, but like everyone in crypto says, good morning, because we’re still early. Right. And it’s like that. I think that it’s just 100% true. Ben, thank you for your time today. Thank you very much. Cheers. Appreciate it. 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