Mindshare has announced that it has a formed a partnership with Zilliqa, a blockchain protocol, which will see the WPP-owned media agency use the platform to address advertising in relation to fake news, develop strategic initiatives around data privacy and develop an industry-wide tokenisation program.

Zilliqa, which is headquartered in Singapore, is designed to scale securely in an open, permission-less distributed network and support thousands of transactions per second, in contrast to 3-7 transactions per second in bitcoin and ethereum.

"Blockchain technology is going to influence the media and entertainment industry at a much more rapid pace than we ever thought possible,” said Gowthaman Ragothaman, global chief strategy officer at Mindshare’s integrated performance unit FAST.

“There is a popular saying that in technology we often overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten years. Mindshare is absolutely delighted to partner with Zilliqa to test this technology and its possible future application in the media and entertainment industry.”

“We have a set of hypothesis that we want to prove either right or wrong and to build some tools that will eventually benefit the business of advertising and technology, especially when it comes together to influence consumer behaviour,” added Ragothaman.

The Drum recently spoke to experts about the merits in using blockchain in marketing and advertising, especially when it comes to clearing up fraudulent advertising inventory and improving transparency in the marketplace.