Web3: A Mesh Network For The Future of Entertainment
By Adam Chorley, Alkimi Exchange Co-Founder & COO
The rise of video gaming has been covered a million times over. But recently it’s collided with high fashion, NFTs and Web3. To become a sleeping auto bot about to change the industry forever.
The rise of web3 has opened up the creative taps and allowed eCommerce to finally create ecosystems built on a backbone of various tokens and protocols.
By merging the data produced by general marketing, sales and supply chain onto one interoperable standard gives brands a completely different god view over their business. Compounding this with gaming culture and economics to produce something completely new. A hashed version of many different web2 experiences has made web3. It’s something that came from before but has virtually nothing in common with it.
Online communities are nothing new. Facebook built a hugely successful ad network using them as a tool to create more ad impressions. They soon realised by letting heated and some-times illegal speech go unchallenged they could generate more revenue.
Godwin’s law dictates “that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.”
Yet, brands have paid good money to appear next to this exact kind of content. Based solely on an algorithm that can entice a click from a user. It seems like a sale at all cost approach which only serves a P&L sheet, not the longer term vision of dynasty brands.
A new hope lies in more open platforms such as Discord. Where brands can cultivate and curate their interactions with users. Rather than ‘the vibe’ being driven solely by the profits of one company who own the platform. Discord is the social platform they’ve been looking for, allowing brands a sandbox type environment with many different channels and formats to interact with users in.
The ability for brands to curate community experience akin to “company culture” building that happens in most office environments means brands can do new and interesting stuff driven by a semi autonomous group.
This is the best market research any company could hope for. In return, that data goes into the feedback loop. Allowing supply chains to be more efficient by reducing wastage on unwanted consumer items. It’s a way for companies to understand what their clients do and don’t want, but with more linguistic subtlety than a tweet or Instagram post can ever hope to achieve.
The ‘like’ was a vanity metric. Designed to sell more ads; not to provide meaningful audience insight for clients. This leads to ad spamming and therefore a loss of consumer warmth toward your brand. If brands can turn users into participating consumers online and offline we can bring new creative and entertaining ways for them to consume products.
The products in question may today be physical items such as clothes and shoes. However, we are already seeing major fashion brands create NFT’s with online Clout backed up with exclusive merch drops. I’m sure we’re not too far away from online experiential utility to be added. Yuga Labs (Bored Ape Yacht Club) has already partnered with Adidas Originals and are in the process of building out the Otherside, an immersive NFT game. It stands to reason that more complex brand experiences linked to NFTs are not far off.
The holy grail of brand attribution has never been reached in web2. The cookie could not support the complexity of messaging and providing rewards to customers required for user uptake, that’s needed to make online to offline attribution possible. When Satoshi Nakamoto solved the Byzantine generals problem using encryption and rewards, he didn’t just invent a trustless means of payment, he paved the way for a whole new internet economy.
From tiny seeds grow mighty oaks: The combination of the trillion dollar eCommerce, gaming and crypto markets, promises to be a sight to behold. All three industries are massive in their own right. But together they promise to be more powerful than Neptune’s trident.
Once the smartest people from these industries start collaborating in an additive rather than extracative way, the whole system will become interoperable by design. Giving rise to a new user experience based on them being at the centre. Not just more meat for the chopping block.
Brands have been appealing to our better nature for as long as advertising has existed. Now is their chance to show us their better nature. Brands can become a more collaborative member of society by building communities that can interact and understand other communities rather than the free for all, race to the bottom culture provided by social media platforms today.
Brands stand to gain a lot more too. A strong brand identity and brand loyalty are hard to come by, but to get it you have to treat your customers with respect.
Via the myriad of technology converging under the guise of NFTs, crypto and Web3, brands can have their cake and eat it. They can offer clients complete anonymity and still understand every single interaction with them. They just need to give the user the sovereignty they need over their data in order for them to be comfortable Sharing it. Encryption is the key (pun intended) to unlock this consumer utopia. And it’s so close you can almost touch it…or maybe not if you’re in the metaverse. 😂
About Alkimi
A decentralised replacement to the inefficient legacy programmatic ad exchanges with the mission to restore the value exchange between advertisers, publishers and users.
We built Alkimi Exchange to reestablish the intended value exchange between users, publishers and advertisers. We believe in a different world that can be born from a cataclysmic event, when IDs disappear and it appears we have nothing, we can create something. Where users see fewer and better ads, Advertisers reach an engaged audience and Publishers regain control of the means for their success and continue to produce innovative and creative content.
Alkimi Exchange helps you create ad products, proven successful by walled gardens across the open web.
