Digital2Go looks to blockchain to rev up consumer engagement in A/NZ

A US-based consumer engagement and marketing intelligence firm that aims to leverage the use of blockchain in marketing, particularly consumer engagement, is pushing into the A/NZ market.  

Digital2Go (D2GO) provides location-aware contextual data on consumers to use for engagement and insights. 

Its CTO, Dan Voyce, said the company has raised over $1 million from the NEM blockchain community fund in a bid to develop its blockchain-based platform, called LocationCore.

D2GO helps businesses better understand target market and behaviours by collecting non-identifiable information from mobile devices. The data is then used to inform business decisions, such as marketing campaigns for certain demographics in specific locations.

“Brands will be able to come to us and not only buy the segments of data they actually want to target, but actually gain a better understanding of what the target consumers are actually doing,” Voyce told CMO. 

In the US, D2GO has worked with brands including BMW, Best Buy, Walmart and RCI, a division of international hotel chain, Wyndham Resorts.

“We build predictive personas of customers to all of our brands to market to the kinds of segments that they feel people will engage with their products," Voyce explained. “We realised early on this kind of information that companies are taking from consumers is a kind of ‘black hole’. You sign up to Facebook, you essentially sign away most of your rights to whatever data you provide them."

Voyce said the idea is to to use the public blockchain to democratise its segment of the data, let users decide what they want to send the company, then reward them at the point of collection, an important move in being transparent on the public blockchain.  

“Billions of users are currently sharing their location data as well as other personal information every day without any form of monetary compensation. The type of data collected is often not fully understood to the mobile device user yet provides significant revenue to the companies that collect and sell this data," he continued.

“The NEM blockchain infrastructure will enable D2GO to bring this to life for both businesses and their customers.” 

As a result, brands get access to even greater insights - and not just on a narrow segment of data - which will ultimately lead to greater customer engagement, Voyce claimed. 

“For instance, if we know this consumer is likely to buy a certain type of car in the next 30 days, we can actually intersect with other data we have about them to give the manufacturers an idea about what kind of car they might want to buy," he said.   

Ensuring the ‘provenance of the data’ is accurate is very important for brands to achieve, Voyce noted. “Anyone can make up this kind of data... One of the good things about blockchain is it allows us to essentially notarise where the data has come from, and therefore prove its provenance.”   

As part of the A/NZ push, D2GO is setting up a blockchain development centre in Melbourne, where Voyce is based, and where a bulk of the R&D will be done.

The company is also on on the hunt for four senior developers and will bring on-board business development staff down the line.

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