ProMark: Ensuring Transparency and Privacy-Awareness in Proximity Marketing Advertising Campaigns

Advertising campaigns are crucial in business development, but most marketing techniques target online purchases (e.g., Google Adsense) and rely on a centralized architecture to store and process the campaign's data and check its effectiveness. Recently, proximity marketing has become more popular thanks to the widespread use of smartphones. It exploits the short-range communication (e.g., Bluetooth) between smartphones and beacon devices to collect and send marketing information to customers. However, this might create privacy issues for customers due to the potential leakage of sensitive information (such as locations associated with time). In this paper, we propose ProMark, a privacy-aware blockchain-based platform to verify the effectiveness of proximity marketing campaigns by ensuring transparency, decentralization, and privacy in the measurement process. We implemented ProMark and carried out experiments that show that ProMark can be used in super-regional malls even during peak hours.