Some marketers say that when people talk about the future of Web3, they spend too much time talking about terms and not enough time talking about real-world use cases.
“We talk too much about is it Web3, is it Web2, is it the metaverse,” said Sandy Carter, senior vice president and channel chief for Unstoppable Domains, a company that provides non-fungible token domain names and other digital identity tools. “We should focus on what the customer wants.”
Carter is well-versed in marketing emerging technologies. Before entering Unstoppable Domains, she was an executive at Amazon and IBM, where she assisted businesses in utilizing various cloud software-related solutions.
She said that companies shouldn’t spend as much time making a Web3 strategy as they do figuring out what they want to change for customers. “In an ideal world, we don’t say Web3, we don’t say metaverse, we don’t say those buzzwords, but we’re solving a true need that the customer has,” Carter said.
Last week, Carter was in Lisbon for the Web Summit tech conference. There, he was one of many tech executives talking about the pros and cons of using new technology.
Since the beginning of last year, marketers have put money into a growing number of Web3 projects. Some brands have released NFT collections that are either small or big. Others have built virtual worlds, tried using NFTs for things like loyalty programs and “token-gated commerce,” or even opened real-world stores. Even with all the hype, the ongoing bear market for crypto and NFT prices has led to new doubts.
Getting rid of terms and taking longer
Some Web3 fans, both in and out of marketing, often talk about how important it is to get people to use something like NFTs, blockchains, and different kinds of metaverses. But some people who work for blockchain-based companies say it can take longer than people think to put projects into place.
“I used to know every project that was being built on Ethereum, every single one,” said Amanda Cassatt, co-founder and CEO of Serotonin, a marketing agency for Web3 companies. “Now it’s hard to track everything that’s going on with Web3 because it’s going in so many directions. At the end of the day, it’s a substrate and a set of tools to work with rather than a set of foregone outcomes so it’s only natural that it’s going in so many different directions.”
Jeremiah Owyang, the chief marketing officer of RLY Network Association, says that consumers don’t need to know all the technical terms right away if they understand what the technology is used for. He said that marketers often have the wrong idea that NFT projects are a way to make money quickly. Instead, he said, brands that offer digital tokens and other assets should keep in mind that some people might keep them for a long time.
“They’re thinking in terms of short flights and campaigns,” Owyang said of marketers. “They’re not thinking multi-year; they don’t know how to support it.”
Owyang and Cassatt said that some brands are realizing that they wasted a lot of time building audiences on Facebook and Twitter because they can’t take those audiences to other platforms. They also think that Web3 companies and people working with Web3 technologies shouldn’t keep marketing the same way they do with Web2 platforms like Facebook and other social networks.
“We should not be at the whim of billionaires owning our data in social networks,” Owyang said. “That should be in the hands of people.”
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