Inverting the ad monopolies by Cameron Hejazi

thank you cool so yeah inverting the ad monopolies um well let's talk about what that means first off your attention and data and businesses so as you use social media you're giving all these interactions likes comments Etc it's pulling together a huge amount of data that Zuck and other people love to say is theirs right uh there's this whole iceberg that you don't barely have access to you can download your data from Facebook but it's really hard to interpret uh and certainly no one else has access to unless it's through a state-sanctioned data sale that would happen in the form of buying ads right and so you have a lot of businesses that come to Facebook they say I want to have access to someone who's into Coke products and caps right and then Facebook is like okay we have that intersection of the audience we can give you those 200 000 people to reach and now pay us right and so this is kind of the basis of the ad Monopoly uh monopolies and how they operate a little bit of context on me before we get into it too much so I used to work uh adjacent to these ad monopolies I worked in ad Tech uh the devil and AD Tech is really a bad industry because a the internet is totally dependent on it to run it's how a lot of creatives monetize Publishers monetize and B it's really a race to the bottom so when I was an engineer in ad Tech what I would focus on is milliseconds of uh shaving off milliseconds of time for performance so that advertisers could get billable Impressions and it's like what the hell is the value right this is like what I'm spending my career trying to optimize for and so I started sent back in 2017 to help solve this creative monetization problem initially with a social network that used micro transactions so instead of giving for instance a penny you are a like you would give a penny uh and all sorts of other monetization mechanisms and then sent also added nfts once nfts became a thing after crypto kitties and so we tokenized tweets we were the one that did jack's first tweet and then we're also thinking about other platforms that we can go do having Collectibles be a native part of other experiences out on the web so just generally in web3 an observation is that collect is replacing the like right so and before before web3 we had this sort of vacuous interaction that was very drive-by you click like and then you kind of forget about something for the rest of time Facebook or whoever would capture that data and monetize it but now we're actually taking control of that data and going Beyond just that initial value a lot of people I have the wojak on the right because you're collecting things because you find them valuable and that they could appreciate and value in the future and you have that personal attachment that you're holding to it right so this is happening all over web3 obviously you guys all know being at this conference um but in general we really see this as the successor to the web 2 version of the like and you start to see it take place in products right so on the left we have context app uh which is basically like a wallet watching tool and so you have the Friends with Benefits uh nft holders and you're able to see what they collect in the middle you have lens which is also heavily based on nfts and actions that people take collecting posting Etc and on the right you have mint.fun so a bunch of really cool products and services that are being built around this data that exists natively on chain starting to give social context to the interactions that are happening but the question that everyone loves to ask is when Mass adoption and the truth is that Network effects are kind of by definition like harmful they make it tough to leave these products like Facebook Twitter Youtube Etc even if better Alternatives exist and so where web3 we're crypto native we need to use the crypto native way to kind of outclass them and since Bitcoin and everything that's come after it really the way that we've achieved that is literally with money right we need money somehow as a factor in the equation so who has money any of you we got to figure out who has money to help Drive adoption well it turns out advertisers have money right advertisers have a lot of money they're businesses that are cash flow positive and they have a lot of money to spend and so I have sad Pepe over on the bottom right asking like what like does that mean that nothing is going to change like how are we actually going to evolve this system to get past uh these ad monopolies and so this is kind of more at leaning into more like hypothetical what I think uh from here on out and I think that we need to basically bring ad budgets on chain so globally there was over half a trillion dollars spent on digital ads just last year right the crypto market cap is somewhere between like one and three trillion right depending on what season of the market you're in so there's a huge amount of money that's being spent on digital ads that if we could start to bring that money on chain somehow in a useful way we could actually really Drive adoption but how do we do it again my hypothesis is that we have to give value to your audience directly right and I see free Collectibles as a path where a brand or a business can offer things like coupons or rewards that aren't just like poapps right they're not just like a snapshot of a moment in time there are things that actually have incentives tied to them and that can actually really Drive value for someone who doesn't know anything about web3 they can just be like oh I can get five dollars off my next purchase of course I'm going to sign up and go through this process however complicated it may be to claim it and we've seen this pattern work in the past so on the left we have uTorrent which is a BitTorrent client we saw millions of people downloading torrent clients which are very like confusing like what is a magnet link what are it was a lot of new technology but the value was there people wanted to watch movies right there was a clear pot of gold same thing with Chrome extensions this is the the honey Chrome extension which automatically applies discounts at checkouts uh wherever you're shopping online you could even argue the same thing about metamask but it got people to install Chrome extensions which most people have never done before so I think there's a shift that needs to happen in how businesses are thinking about nfts we talk with a lot of businesses at scent and we've talked with a lot of peers in the space as well and a lot of them think of it as a new Revenue stream that they can make money selling nfts to Their audience right and I put this Porsche collection on here because this is probably the most egregious example in the last month of a cash crab where it was so poorly executed that I think they refunded all of the purchases and they basically kind of canceled the project after it had launched and so again in the hypothetical land I think we really need to start thinking about shifting from revenue uh as businesses think about nfts to marketing which would lead to revenue and so we've started to see some early directional success in this so Starbucks launched the Odyssey program which is part of their Loyalty Rewards program it's about bringing added value incentives to people who are already engaging with your brand and I'm really hopeful that a lot of other brands are going to start to think about it in the same way in the future that it's not just the money making opportunity but it's actually a way of deepening engagement with your audience but then going back to the start where we were talking about getting rid of the ad monopolies so if we can have enough businesses doing this then we can start to actually build like a useful social graph that transcends crypto art that transcends games that transcends the early things that we've seen in the nft space if you get a Coca-Cola that brings on 20 million people onto a blockchain and then 10 other brands do that you now start to get more and more precise intersectional data on these people that can actually be an alternative to having to go to Facebook or someone else to get that type of information and reach certain users right and so over time the value of this data compounds as more people opt into the system and you can start to opt out of the ad monopolies and I think that this approaches uh Superior over traditional ad platforms for a number of reasons I think first of all the data is like public and free to use you don't actually have to like pay a third party like Facebook to get access to it and there are increasingly tools that allow Brands to connect directly and own those relationships directly with their audience so xmtp is a messaging protocol that works directly with wallets and I think over time we're going to see more services like this more services like lens that allow people to connect directly without having to go broker it through a third party so hopeful takeaways I believe that we can bankrupt ad monopolies by bringing data on chain I think to date we've seen a lot of social motivators with these apps like Leinster and and value driven sort of privacy-centric tools that um are really great but I don't think it's going to be enough for us to actually get there and to sort of supersede the web 2 ad monopolies and ultimately I think it's about incentives and really having Brands incentivize their audiences to come into these new systems get the data on chain and they could actually very much foot the bill given how large their ad budgets are given how much resources they are already devoting to just trying to reach Their audience why not just give that money directly to your audience uh and then also build a longer more enduring relationship without a third-party middleman in the future so and stop paying Zuck so yeah do we have any questions hey uh thank you a really great presentation I I think the problem I see with a big Brands burning people along is ultimately the value of the user is the data is the value like if I'm Starbucks I wouldn't want to put my customers information on the Chain because then someone else could come in and send every job start air dropping them so I think that's a bit of an incentive misalign alignment would you see that well I think uh choice is a big part of it so sure you can airdrop and I think we've seen a lot of spammy airdrops already happen in our industry especially for notable wallets I think choice is critical so it's more about someone choosing to collect something and establishing that relationship from an audience member to a brand first so a brand might offer something uh but then thereafter it's up to the potential recipient to really opt into that relationship so tell us about scent are you is is that a project that addresses the issues you just talked about uh pipe dream um no we really want more and more people creators Brands Etc to start to use nfts in a really scalable way I think there's a lot of companies in the space that are here at this conference that are doing that very same thing and so uh you know I think it's something that we're definitely focused on with some of the tools that we've built to make collecting something that can happen on any website but I would also think I also believe that it's like really an ecosystem wide movement yeah cool thank you