Nigel Lee on Web3 Marketing

Where users usually ‘opt-in’ with wallets instead of email, how do you envisage comms evolving in a web3 world?

Personalization will be king. Let me explain.

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In a world where we use web3 wallets instead of email, we should theoretically have more control over our personal data. Rather than private information being stored in an app’s database, it should be protected by your wallet’s access. At the same time, you can bring along your data from whatever transaction or interaction which could all be recorded on the blockchain. Giving access from your wallet should therefore provide richer information across multiple apps. This wouldn’t have been possible in the world of emails unless apps created a network of integrations. Even then, data sharing would have been limited since the format would be all different!

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With more universal data, communication and marketing experts will likely use it to deliver more personalized and tailored content. They’d want to cut through the noise and get your attention after all. This actually creates a second-order effect—too much data! It would be an automation nightmare to create individually personalized content. But still, you’d want to since the data is there. Enter AI and machine learning.

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That’s an idea for a different day. But I predict a web3 world will eventually need the help of machine learning algorithms to take advantage of all the data a ‘wallet’ has to offer.

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Much of web3 is centred around content ownership. How does that change the approach to marketing?

It changes who you need to market to and how you market. You need to go straight to the individual. Take the below example:

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Web 1: The age of big aggregators like Yahoo, Google, and Amazon — ads

Web 2: Age of user-generated content like YouTube, Meta, Tiktok — influencer marketing

Web 3: Age of individual ownership — ?

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Fill in the blank. What do you think is next? They say it’s community.

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The proof point of this is very clear if you spend even just a little bit of time looking through Crypto Twitter. Founders of multi-billion dollar protocols and projects talk directly to their community and token hodlers. The founder of FTX, one of the largest web3 projects today, was answering support tickets in Telegram in the middle of the bull run in 2021.

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If the point isn’t clear yet, here’s a different take. As a marketer, you need to reach and influence the people that hold power. With web3, every token holder owns a part of your project. Hard to get more powerful than that.

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The marketer that is able to influence at a personal level at scale will win.

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Which verticals or industries have you recently noticed entering the web3 space?

Which industry hasn’t dabbled into web3? I’ve seen everyone from lawyers, to mining, to coffee farmers dip their toes into this trend. 

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Most interesting, in my opinion, is the combination of social media and machine learning algorithms. The key question is as follows: can you reinvent social media such that individuals own and control their data, and then let them choose the social algorithm they’d like to subscribe to, rather than having a single tech conglomerate dictate what you get on your feed? 

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As a creator myself, I’m also deeply interested to see web3 for music and artists mature. Giving creators more control over royalties and funding just makes so much more sense than the boomer model of publishers and labels.

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