How Web3, NFTs, & DAOs Upend Modern Marketing
I might either be incredibly accurate or hilariously way off the mark in this post. I might even want to retract this blog post one day. We’ll see. But here goes.
In the next 10 years, marketing will be less about SEO, backlinks, and growth tactics, and more about storytelling than ever before. To be specific, a marketer’s ability to weave a narrative — fiction or otherwise — that brings people together will matter more than their ability to rank on Google.
This might seem obvious on the surface — I’ve written before that marketing is about helping people make a positive change in their lives — but the emergence of decentralized communities brings this idea to the fore.
For example, the value of NFTs appreciate or depreciate, based on its origin story story and the excitement of the people who buy them. We’ve seen this happen in collectible art with Cyperpunks, in play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, and even in random blockchain projects like Loot.
With Cyberpunks, coming into possession of a piece of digital art that only 9,999 other people in the world have, boosts the buyer’s social status and signals that they’re an early adopter in the web3 game. Participating in the now billion-dollar game Axie Infinity means that the player believes in the possibility of the metaverse and the gamer economy. Finally, with NFT projects like Loot, becoming one of the 8,000 people who have a Loot bag is an investment in a future where Loot items are the LEGO blocks of role-playing games.
Speaking of communities, we should probably talk about the poster child of web3 narratives: DAOs.
DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations are communities built around ideas or a shared purpose for the future. The difference between a DAO and a traditional corporation is that it uses the blockchain as a technological backbone to regulate and govern the community.
In practice, DAOs are like an exclusive club and a public corporation rolled into one. Krause House is a DAO that wants to buy an NBA team. MakerDAO maintains DAI — a cryptocurrency that tracks the price of the US dollar. CabinDAO wants to build and support a decentralized city with physical locations all over the globe.
Technologically, DAOs are built on a blockchain that keeps track of access, governance, contribution, and social clout within the community. DAOs on the Ethereum blockchain, for example, have defacto “free trade” agreements with other Ethereum-based DAOs since they can all use ETH as a common currency, outside of their community tokens.
Just like shares in a company, a DAO’s social token can be traded on crypto exchanges like Uniswap and SushiSwap. And like how Cristiano Ronaldo rejecting a bottle of Coke singlehandedly tanked Coca-Cola’s share prices, the narratives around the crypto industry, web3, and its own story affect a DAO token’s valuation and market cap.
$FWB, Friends with Benefits’ social token, for example, initially cost $20. By virtue of being early in the DAO ecosystem and onboarding a number of outspoken cryptoTwitter influencers, however, $FWB now trades for upwards of $20,000. While FwB’s manifesto isn’t clear about the kinds of projects it has in the pipeline, a shared belief in the future of “token-permissioned access” and the chance to rub Discord elbows with DAO celebrities are more than enough for prospective members to airdrop thousands of dollars’ worth of ETH into FwB’s treasury to buy access to the DAO.
Moving into web3, the key marketing skill will be one’s ability to convey a movement’s story and inspires belief in the narrative. As historians like Joseph Campbell and Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari would say, social tokens, smart contracts, and DAOs are all just newfangled, hifalutin’ ways human beings show trust, communicate myths, build entire companies and civilizations.
Thanks for reading! If you’re into web3, NFTs and DAOs, you’ll probably enjoy my weekly newsletter. Subscribe below to get more posts on web3, creativity, and the creator economy, or check out previous editions to “try before you buy”.