I’m Alan Wolk and I know nothing about blockchain. Or I didn’t anyway, until I sat down with the TVREV team to start researching and writing the brand new Special Report we did with Adledger.The thing is, I’m not alone.Many, many, many people in the media and advertising industry have a very limited understanding of what blockchain is, how it works and where it fits in the advertising ecosystem.So they’re busy faking it, nodding their heads assiduously whenever they hear words like “immutable ledger” and “smart contract.” (I feel you—I was guilty of that myself.)That’s why we’ve created a primer on blockchain and advertising. Our special report is aimed at people who hear the word “blockchain” a lot, get pitched by companies using blockchain, get asked by their bosses and co-workers about blockchain, and want to have a really solid understanding of it. The secondary audience is people who already have that solid understanding, but want to be able to talk about it to their colleagues and clients in a way that everyone can understand.Never fear friends, your salvation is here.My own personal salvation in terms of blockchain, came at the hands of Rebecca Lerner and Adam Helfgott, the EVP and CEO, respectively, of MadHive, one of the driving forces behind the AdLedger coalition and two of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to how blockchain can work in the ad ecosystem.(They’re not just being theoretical either—MadHive has actually launched blockchain related ad products in conjunction with the likes of Omnicom and Beachfront. Click on the links to find out more.)Speaking of Omnicom, guess which other major agency holding companies are part of the Adledger consortium.All four of them: Omnicom, IPG, Publicis and WPP.(In other words, watch out for flying pigs.)Other members of the Adledger consortium, which was designed to promote the use of blockchain-based technology (read the report to understand when you should say “blockchain” and when you should say “blockchain-based technology”—there’s a difference) include Meredith, Beachfront, MadHive, Slate Media Group, Tegna, iSpot, Pluto, SpotX, ComScore, Clypd and (wait for it) IBM.That’s an impressive line-up and it shows the breadth and the quality of the companies who believe that blockchain is the future of advertising.OTT and BlockchainThe general assumption is that blockchain is an ideal fit for the nascent OTT advertising market. That’s partly because the market is still new and so introducing new systems will prove less disruptive and partly because the digital nature of OTT makes it ideally suited to the adoption of blockchain-based systems.MethodologyIn order to write the report, we spoke with dozens of top industry executives, both on and off the record, in order to get a sense of what was going on with blockchain, what people people were most confused about, what they were most hopeful about, what issues they felt less worried about and what was keeping them up at night. We took that and combined it with the results of a larger survey we did and used all that data as the filter though which we wrote our very detailed, very user-friendly report.You can download it for free right here.