How Web3 Is Going to Unfuck AdTech | Thomas Salas - Relayer

okay awesome so uh happy Thursday everybody hopefully we can wrap this up with a fun one but uh today we're going to be having a interesting conversation about how web 3 can unfuck adte so just to kind of kick things off here I'd love to get a show of hands who here hates ads awesome okay great well for everyone who raised their hand fair enough you guys have good reason um ads kind of stuck from opaque targeting practice to some of the more intrusive ad experiences the current state of affairs leaves a lot to be desired um advertising infrastructure is not in the best place um for me personally it's the spam in my email inbox or um some of these popups that I just can't seem to run away if I'm on an ad um or on a web page um so the question has to be asked how do we fix this uh and we think web 3 can help but I think it's first important to have a little bit of background so so just a little bit about me uh my name is Thomas I'm one of the co-founders at relay a web three native company building advertising infrastructure for the new internet a better way to connect people to Brands they love directly in the apps they use um but long before I was ever in adte I was a crypto native that bought the top in 2018 and never left so like you I very much loved my crypto bubble and also very much hated ads uh at least I did did until I took my first Venture back startup role at Card Financial so card offered rewards as a service in the form of these wallet linked offers the debit card and Credit Card cashback experiences that you might get in some of your favorite cards on the market today uh while I was there I worked with some really amazing Brands powering a lot of awesome reward experiences from varo and Green Dot through to players like Robin Hood and coinbase that you might know a little bit better in crypto um but at the end of the day uh we were essentially focused on building amazing rewarding experiences in fact it was an extremely important part almost table Stakes of every card product on the market today U something that consumers expected and um led to this sort of an unique conversation that we're having today um you see cards are card rewards are table Stakes uh if I went out and I told a business uh do you want or turn told a user as a card do you want to earn rewards from Brands um most definitely you would probably say yes and the market sort of shows it businesses like AMX and Chase Bank are the most successful card programs on the market at the moment they focus entirely on building a rewarding experience that's native and personalized but if they had gone out and asked do you want to see ads uh I expect that most people would probably answer the way that you all answered today saying no um so why is that because whenever you pull back the curtain of the C catchy uh buzzword and phrases they really are just advertisements they're funded by brands that want to meet users in a unique way get them to convert on behaviors and even use Rich personalized insights to help make the experience a little bit better um what it comes down to is that uh our brains like to think in a really funny way you see whenever we give a name to something it really hurts our ability to think about it um you see the stated preference the stated preference that you all gave me here today is that you hate ads but the revealed preference that we see the market with some of the more successful Financial applications is that whenever they're rewarding you actually really like them in fact they're a primary decision maker for the way you go out and choose the debit card or credit card program that you might be interacting with you see we have this interesting dichotomy where some of the most well-used Chrome extensions today are ad blockers but we also see that loyalty and reward programs are the biggest influential points for the average consumer on where they take their business um and it doesn't make it doesn't it's not too surprising whenever you see a word as uh heated and controversial as the word ads um our brains really would rather just think than or believe than just think we'd rather believe that we like rewards than think we'd ever like an ad but whether you still feel like you might like ads or not it doesn't really matter uh ads are the dominant marketing form and dominant monetization form of the internet you see these banking applications aren't in ating ads at the end of the day to make a more interesting consumer experience for you they're mon they're integrating it is a way to monetize and drive more meaningful and sustainable Revenue into their business it's ultimately the endgame for every modern consumer application everything is becoming an ad Network whether it's your social media app your banking app or your grocery store app the implementation of these ad networks can lead to huge Revenue we're talking more growth more engagement and ultimately a still a better experience for everyone the classic example that we like to use is instacart they launched their debut ad Network in 2022 and overnight in one year generated $740 million in ad Revenue a 30% increase in their total ARR in one year alone so it's no surprise that applications might be interested in implementing this type of decision and although it is happening in web 2 and we're seeing it everywhere uh web 2 isn't alone unfortunately web 3 isn't a special snowflake ads run the internet and they're coming to web 3 as well with the consumer landscape finally beginning to take shape it's leading to some really big questions how do Brands meet customers how do platforms monetize and ultimately how do people discover things that are getting built and implemented we've seen a lot of interesting implementations from copycat web 2 banner ads to the attention tokens to Quest sites to even life-changing airdrops people in web 3 are in the arena and they're trying things the question isn't really will ads persist the question is honestly how but the stated and revealed preference have given us some excellent insights on how to build these better building blocks for ads um you see what we've determined is that ads need to be built as net positive consumer experiences transitioning them from Bugs and into features we know that human tension needs to be rewarded not exploited that they need to be built for people not for Impressions and that ultimately personalized experiences will lead to better experiences and that's really good news for web 3 web 3 offers some really great ways to enhance all of these initiatives ownership distribution that's so native to the web 3 environment will develop core alignment mechanisms between advertisers Publishers and users and this shared ownership and control will create a lot of trust and engagement ultimately resulting in new layers of opt-in data Frameworks and blockchain transparency will enable advertisers and Publishers to engage users in hyper customized and interactive ways ultimately making it a much better experience for you but on top of all that it's a lot bigger it's a fresh start to build a system for everybody you see when hotwire.com slapped the very first ad Banner on their website in 1994 they weren't implementing it as a feature they were implementing it as a bug a way to compensate a gaping hole in their ability to pay money to their writers for doing content work web 3 is a fresh start a chance to go down A New Path a path to coordinate for a more human Centric experience a valuable experience not a embarrassing experience for a bad web 2 ad that you don't want to see and that ultimately comes down to the best way that web 3 can fix ads web 3 makes a better coordination model uh a quote that we really like is that when societies want to build schools and hospitals and infrastructure but instead they build guns and bombs and planes it's because they can't effectively coordinate together and disarm this quote from Amin sulamani at mikow uh is highly aligned and although it may be a little bit violent uh it's applicable you see advertising has still been a exploitative and um unfortunate model that has caught a crossfire for people in the middle a web 3 forward approach will allow for us to shift from these more top- down coordination structures and closer to a more frictionless Market in decentralized network one that will allow us to springboard towards a better path path for everybody not the best path for the web 2 Data oligarchs of Google and Facebook so we've talked about what ads need to be and the direction we want to go and web 3 can help but what does that actually look like what do better web 3 ADS mean well one model that we really love is a term that's recently coined by Olaf Carlson we uh from poly chain Capital Olaf talks about this idea about the incentives Vortex a new layer of consumer infrastructure that's embedding pre-existing application feedback loops with a new Financial incentive backbone if you add the word brand funded in there it sounds an awful lot like ads but if you're like us or most people on the market you don't want to use the the word ads so uh we'll go with incentives this solution specifically is the thing that our team at relair has been building towards for over a year and we'd like to share a little bit about how we're thinking about it and the approach we're taking is that of the Wayne Gretzky game for those of you that don't know Wayne is a famous hockey player who's most notably known for his quote you miss 100% of the shots you don't take and we definitely think web 3 needs to take a shot at building a better ad system but more importantly we like the quote that a good hockey player go goes where the puck is and a great one goes where the puck will be and we've been lucky enough to identify this incentives Vortex this better solution to ads that could happen and could create a better internet for everybody and we've looked out 30 years and we've said how do we get there thankfully web 3 has been identified as this favorable exponential that will help us accelerate and get there much quicker so what's the earliest form of this thing that is the app link offers experience that relayer has been so focused on building natively for web 3 to begin embedding as consumer infrastructure continues to grow an inflection point that will allow for us to accelerate and go to the next level not only building better ads in web 3 but proliferating them externally into the broader Market that inflection point is extremely exciting where we're no longer focused in the adtech sector on the irrelevant ups and downs of optimizing for clicks or Impressions or customer acquisition costs ultimately ads that are bugs in moving towards an era where ADS become optimized features that improve your product not only allowing for you to be more viable and sustainable but also allowing for consumers to consume in a more personal and rewarding way that relevant thing is something that we're excited to continue building at relayer um and we'd love to connect further to share our vision and how we're continuing to develop that we'd also like to shamelessly plug at this time that we are hiring so if you'd like to come build with us please come reach out uh thank you w and