By using the freemium ads model, people could adopt Facebook, YouTube, and Google products risk-free. fast forward 15 years and by now, people can’t imagine their lives without them. The transformation into the digital world is what has created the Web2.0 economy, which mostly focused on the interactive applications that allowed us to socialize, interact and make connections through the internet. that presented us with innovations that are now an inseparable part of our daily lives.
All of that infrastructure didn’t come cheap, over 1T$ has been spent on digital marketing over the last years, accelerating and driving the growth of the big tech companies. Marketing became the buying power of traffic which resulted in the capitalism of data. Facebook and Google became the strongest companies in the world that can manipulate us, turn our data against us, and sell that feature for the highest bidder. That ability got abused several times in the past (search for “Cambridge Analytica”) and left the reputation of the marketing industry mostly damaged.
A lot of people think that marketing is about manipulations and tricking techniques, but that’s a big mistake. What marketing is all about is matching the right brand with the right audience. Creating meaningful exposure for both sides, which will mostly drive brings ways of making life easier\better for the audience in exchange for their money. It is a must-have department in every company that ever existed, and probably one of the hardest arts to master.
Every one of us has met a company and thought to himself, “If they just had good marketing, they have been a big success”, well, that’s true, good businesses must have good marketing to succeed.
Web3.0 is here and the internet is transforming, we understand that we can’t build on top of Web2.0 applications, they have too much-centralized power aimed at the cause of making a profit for themselves. We need to build it in a way that brings the power back to the users, allowing them to control their data. That’s the idea of Web3.0, which raises the question, do we even need marketing in the decade of decentralization ahead of us? That’s an easy one, of course! Marketing is always a necessity; how else would you find out about new stuff? Just think about how you found this article to begin with. Marketing is also a serious revenue stream that many companies rely on in their business model. Offering free stuff in exchange for showing ads was the main source of income for most of the tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Marketing was how every innovation got adopted, it’s here since the print age, and will continue to make our lives better always!
It’s definitely going to look different on Web3.0, As the media evolves, the marketing industry must tailor itself to it. They go hand in hand together, and although it’s early for all of the Web3.0 apps to know what will go mainstream, we can accurately speculate a few of the things that will characterize the marketing industry in the Web3.0:
- Transparency for the users and the brands is a key feature in the process of giving the users back their power. Everyone will know exactly how the data is being used and what data has been shared. By making this process transparent companies will be able to advertise this advantage for the user to choose what platform they want to use. The users will be more aware of giving away their data and could control what data they will decide to share with the apps. Imagine every bid, impression, click, or sale, all being exchanged for money on the blockchain. There are millions of Reddit posts on “Facebook Ads Problem”, and what all of those people have in common, is that they don’t know why is this problem happening, some of them think they got ripped off by Facebook, some of them don’t know why the ad did not get approved or why it stopped working. There is no support, no customer service, you can spend millions of dollars on advertising into their machines and hope that everything will work out for the best. On Web3.0 everything will be backed on the blockchain, so it’s not an option to keep you in the dark, you will always have the ability to investigate exactly what happened with every cent you paid in detail.
- Community driven, as the power of tech monopolies breaks into pieces, a new era is coming, where the community can decide how they want the organization to evolve. The abstract concept is that Web3.0 Companies will bring value to their community by developing new things, and the community will stay loyal and invest in the company to influence decisions that represent the community interest. So the company valuation is determined by how much the community is willing to pay per stock/share, that stock/share is represented as a governance token that can be bought on public markets. That’s why this ecosystem is so powerful. It’s driven by the people who use it, if they are acting towards a change, something will change or they will invest in another company that will deliver. It’s a fair and open race that pushes the boundaries of supply vs demand in the tech industry in general, and in a dynamic growth environment, as we see in the marketing industry, it’s essential to hear your community and develop accordingly.
