Pepsi has been working with Mindshare to see how the process of digital advertising can be more efficient and cost effective. Only a small proportion of the money spent by advertisers is productive, as there are numerous intermediaries “taking a cut”. Also, a considerable amount of the money spent on digital adverts is fraudulent or inaccurate as it includes activity from "bots". Pepsi, in March this year, ran a trial in Asia and discovered that there was 28% improvement "in terms of costs for viewable impressions, in running the campaign through smart contracts, versus one without” . There are a number of other firms exploring how Blockchain can help in the advertising world including Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer, Unilever and AB InBev.
Meanwhile, Coca Cola has been running various projects for over a year on how it can use Blockchain technology to improve the transparency of labour conditions among its work force. Coca Cola has been working with the US State Department to create a digital secure database on which to hold workers’ contracts and employment rights. There is a growing interest, especially from millennials, to know the provenance of what they are consuming. Furthermore they are prepared to pay extra if they can be sure of what they are buying, where it has come from and how it has been produced.
If a cup of coffee is more your thing, then look no further than Starbucks, which continues to embrace technology by using Blockchain technology to enable greater transparency over its supply chains and provenance of some of its consumables, like coffee beans. According to the International Labour Organisation, nearly 25 million people work in forced-labour conditions worldwide, with 47 percent of them in the Asia-Pacific region. Therefore, platforms using Blockchain technology to reduce exploitation of labour have been widely welcomed.