Ten impacts of Web3 on marketing

September 12, 2022 – 06:00

Do you know the internet we know? Forget it.

See the diagram below:

Web3 no longer has a center, as originally intended. But with a revolutionary novelty: the blockchain layer.

Blockchain: Blockchain, you probably already know what it is by now. For those who don’t know yet, I’ll make it easy: it’s an immutable and eternal cash book, shareable and digitally trackable. Among other things, it revolutionizes the entire process of recording transactions and tracking assets in the business network. Contracts, projects, documents, digital and even physical goods can be embedded in the blockchain. And that changes everything.

I can know, for example, where the McDonald’s fries I’m now eating deliciously were produced, because they will be traceable from their origin on the farm to the chain store around the corner. All contracts will be transparent and traceable. All commercial transactions will be terminated. All thanks to blockchain.

Semantic Web: Today’s decentralized Web3 also differs from the original in something called the Semantic Web: the Semantic Web. It will enable computers and humans to speak the same language, as it uses metadata to describe and share content of all kinds, allowing machines to “translate” human physical reality into their machine language and learn ever faster and more fully our world. Natural language processing (NLP – a computer language that mimics ours) will be the language of the web. Our and machines. Machine learning will be anabolic thanks to algorithms that will evolve endlessly.

And it will be embedded in our lives as if we were ourselves and all the reality around us. We will no longer surf the Internet, we will be the Internet.

Metaverse: This brings us to Metaverse, Web3’s preferred environment, which you’ve already heard about and brands are starting to discover as well. Metaverse is a combination and extension of many existing and new technologies such as AR, VR, blockchain, cryptography and social commerce. A commonly used definition is that the Metaverse is an ever-expanding world of real-time 3D virtual spaces that are not just additional sales channels, but are becoming their own economy.

DeFi: When we talk about the economy, the impact on it will be equally devastating. Imagine a decentralized financial environment without traditional banks and using a universal currency, cryptocurrencies.

The term that best sums up this new environment is DeFi, decentralized finance, or decentralized finance. It’s a financial world that works all the time on smart contracts, on the blockchain. One of the by-products of this is DeX, Decentralized Exchanges. Stop and think about what it will be. Global international exchange.

I’m not going to go into this financial thing here, but I could write a dozen articles like this just on that.

Tokens: You also need to understand that Web3 is fully tokenizable. A token is a digital voucher of reality. A crypto-asset that is activated and circulated on the blockchain, like a translator of reality into a virtual asset, a cryptocurrency that we do not take, but which is reconfigured in value in the environment of a radically decentralized web.

DAOs: Companies can be DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations. Founders create governance tokens that are distributed to the organization’s stakeholders. Each token corresponds to a defined amount of voting power within the DAO and can be bought or sold at will.

Immersiveness: Web3 will be as impressive as another reality, fully integrated with the one we know. That is, we will not connect with him, he will always be there and completely around us.

Data: And, finally, what is perhaps most important for our lives and has a great impact on marketing: the power that the citizen/consumer assumes in such an environment. Citizens and consumers will be able to control all their data like never before, so that privacy will no longer be a law that regulates law, but an intrinsic condition of the entire new Web3 platform. Like the air we breathe.

Do you see now why it is a revolution and not an evolution?

But let’s move on to the impact of all this on marketing

1. Infinite media – everything and everyone will be media. Due to the ubiquity and intimate integration between reality and virtuality, with touchpoints preserved as one, unique, marketing will be able to address – as long as it is allowed – equally ubiquitous and decentralized messages, exactly like Web3. If it was complex for the media, it will be much more.

2. Consumers float in the Metaverse – brands will have to be fluid entities that will move with their consumer in the Metaverse, a conceptually boundless and endless environment. The consumer will be immersed in your brand. Imagine the possibilities of that.

3. Metaverso is the new shopping center – If Web3 is immersive in concept and technological structure, Metaverso is its interactive existential skin, just as immersive. For trade and products and brands, a digital shopping center that is always available. When it comes to marketing, it’s about building equally immersive and unique experiences for communication and sales.

4. Shopping will be a video game – As mentioned above and the impressive features of Web3, buying anything will be like participating in a commercial virtual game.

5. All power to influencers – I don’t even need to explain, influencers get absolute autonomy and your brand will have to “be” together with them.

6. Social Networks Become the Ultimate Network for Brands – It’s also easy to imagine that social networks are no longer a channel, becoming the priority digital channel par excellence.

7. NFTs go mainstream – irreplaceable assets will be the default. What is the exception today will be the rule. Once again, brands will increasingly have the use of NFTs as increasingly usable and repeatable assets.

8. DTC becomes the standard – your brand will be distributed directly to the consumer in a digitally pervasive and always-on environment.

9. Redefining e-commerce – multi-channel and permanently interchangeable integration between online and offline reality will radically transform e-commerce. What we call e-commerce today will disappear, because everything will be “e”, for electronic. That’s why I called this sector trade and no longer e-commerce. Therefore, the image below is already outdated, but it helps you understand the evolution of the buying channel.

10. Re-dimensioned advertising creativity – It goes without saying that agencies and creatives will have to re-adapt to a new and multi-dimensional universe of possibilities, which has immersion as an increasingly definitive backdrop for everything in advertising.

We face the challenge of building a new marketing for a new and comprehensive reality. Something of which we were not fully aware until today, but which we will have to decipher yes or yes. Hands and machines at work.