Web3 is here. Is Marketing ready?

Summary:

The world of business has seen more change in the last 3 decades than it did in the last three centuries fueled by leaps in technology. Marketers have always played a pivotal role to play in helping future-proof their brands and businesses they manage, to help ride the industry trends, to help business pivot in line with customer behaviour change. Afterall, Marketing is about winning in the marketplace.

Web3 brings the largest leap in the industry through decentralisation of business models. But the world of marketing is far from ready.

Yesterday: Web1.0 – Newspaper in a new garb

The world did change with the advent of internet in the 90s when computers got connected at scale. New companies like AOL, msn, and Yahoo spawned, and many old ones morphed with new business-models. New vernacular and capital followed.

Marketers tried to catch up by converting brochures to digital content, creating websites as new storefronts, new advertising formats like banner ads, and eventually caught up to using the internet as a distribution channel/ vehicle to reach audiences in the new world.

For the consumer, most of this static internet was read-only. It was newspaper on the screen.

Today: Web2.0 –Mobile and Social Web

Myspace was perhaps one of the early Web2.0 businesses. It allowed the user to create content for other fellow users. Facebook, Twitter and others followed. But it was the advent of the smartphone, Apps, improved data management tools and content technology that created the tsunami of User Generated Content. Armed with high internet speeds, mobile phones, and cats, consumers created content on platforms like youtube, Instagram and facebook like never before. Many managed to become influencers and celebrities, and even monitize it and become millionaires.

While Web2 created new value, it also created centralisation of power with organisations who owned these platforms. They had access to the data that came through the frantic content creation and consumption. ?By the time Marketing executives got to understand Web2.0, the power in the value chain had moved from advertisers to platform-owners, who owned customer-eyeballs and customer-data.

There is even a strong argument that creators did not necessarily get a fair share of the value they produced. ?As regulation caught up, organisations realised, oftentimes the hard way, that there were multitude of risks like customer privacy, lack of water-tight consent, transparency of the marketing value-chain, and data integrity.

Tomorrow: Web 3- Semantic Web

While this is something that Berners-Lee predicted, the basics of Web3 are being devised and determined as we speak. Its genesis is from Blockchain technology, and therefore has imbibed the philosophy of decentralised ownership.

It is not one platform, or one programme or one set of services. The scope of Web3 is practically the entirety of the internet- from basic services to finance to domain names to social media.

Web3 will be designed to ensure that the participants in the ecosystem will not just be able to read, or create, they also get to own the system, opine on the development roadmaps, vote for the direction of travel. In many ways, it is web for the community, of the community and by the community. All participants will be rewarded for their contribution. Content creators, developers, moderators, administrators, and even consumers for their time and their interest.

Data protection will be paramount and wallets like Metamask will hold the key to unlocking platform services. This would mean platforms don’t hold customer data, and hence targeting or marketing to segments like in the web2 world will be impossible.

Many tools of the marketing trade in Web2 will no longer be available for marketers. No cookies, no platform partnerships, no data partnerships, no first party data in many cases. While the situation may not be that dire immediately, this is the direction of travel.

Web3 will also provide new customer opportunities- truly co-create content with customers, create new forms of loyalty through preferential access for token owners, bring gamified brand experiences (dare I say, in the Metaverse), that are differentiated.

Marketers will need to arm themselves with the vernacular, insights, technology and tools of the new web order to help the brands and businesses they support become successful.

[w3ma]

Web3 Marketing Association’s reason for existence is just that. To help Marketers navigate the imminent arrival of Web3. To create conversations, content, communities that can help marketers learn together to go further. It will be a not-for-profit that will help bring all of this to play.

[w3ma] is at an incubation stage. We are in the process of gathering volunteers, like-minded-marketing leaders, industry experts and others to join the conversation.

The principles of Web3 will be at the heart of everything the association does- decentralised and transparent.

The next steps are to create a robust roadmap and clearly defined milestones.

Join the discussion here.