Distancia is Pan-African decentralized social audiovisual advert platform built on Near protocol with verifiable metrics rewarding viewers for staying fit through walking, jogging, and cycling. It provides companies with decentralized and verifiable advertising services. The platform by virtue of feature and functionality can be classified as a blockchain fitness app that aligns user’s predetermined interests with target ads and rewards them for keeping fit. It tracks users’ activities through mobile phone app sensors designed to measure burned calories (distance covered) after fueling with fuel points which are then converted into spendable tokens. As a complimentary service, it integrates a social media feature allowing users to share memories, likes and reshare contents among others.
The advertising Industry needs solutions like this that restores the trust in digital platforms and provides adequate results on a budget well spent. Client data isn’t stored or collected for use by the platform. Citizens need to be able to select the range of industries they are interested in on signing up, this is the highest level of personalization which by design is initiated and effected by the client and can be removed or changed anytime he/she wishes. Companies need to be able to derive the highest benefit from every budget knowing it is targeted at prospective customers and chargeable rates are powered by smart contracts.
People hardly watch ads, especially when they can skip it. Yet, advertisers set aside the funds to advertise anyways. This happens in most cases with limited deliveries and no metrics other than number of clicks which can’t truly be verified. The African advertising industry is a multi-billion-dollar setup and it’s constantly experiencing a relatively upward trend in growth. Just like many industries wherever money is involved, there is always an avenue for fraud. In the digital age, it is a shame that digital advertising is classed as one of the biggest frauds in history when in fact it should be the most effective and transparent.
The platform proposes to reward people (potential customers) for viewing adverts and also sharing adverts. So the funds allocated to advertisement are monitored not by automated views, but an incentive model that rewards people with a token for viewing and for keeping fit. These incentive tokens are only provided upon successful completion of the viewing for which the contract executes and releases the fuel token to be used for jogging, moving etc. The second phase of the contract kicks in when the user then converts the fuels in motion to burn calories and then executes to release the spendable token once the milestone is completed. A reward for keeping fit.
The platform offers three distinct services and hence has a wide customer base. For the advertisement services, its customers would be the corporates, businesses and startups requiring marketing services. For the fitness reward system, its customers would be anyone and everyone interested in getting fit and earning tokens which covers a wide age range. For its final services of providing charity donations and gifting, its range of customers include students looking for scholarships, orphanages among groups looking for assistance.