Blockchain Technology & Web 3.0 Will Render Current Internet Marketing Obsolete

There’s an unstoppable force looming over the current digital landscape and it’s inevitable result — Web 3.0 — will disrupt the driving force behind the applications we use every single day. The applications that have become so widely adopted across the world such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like have become so integrated into our daily lives and routines that many seem to have forgotten how/why they’ve achieved such adoption. In short, the answer is because their services are “free.” But recent coverage of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress has brought to light a seemingly forgotten detail — the realization that those services are not FREE. Each and every one of us pays for these services we enjoy so much, not with our money, but with our personal data — which is then sold off to marketers, advertisers and research groups for the purpose of extremely accurate audience mapping and targeting to sell more products or services.

Although this same tactic has been used for a century in other forms of media from direct mail, to billboards, radio and television. The sheer magnitude coupled with the intimate personalized nature of online data, seems to produce a much different reaction among people regarding its use. A 2017 IBM study outlined our average DAILY data output exceeds 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. Much of that gets analyzed, segmented and utilized by advertisers for it’s ability to drive a plethora of valuable results and information. I’ve been one of those people for nearly 5 years now operating in the digital marketing, branding and Ecommerce space. I and many thousands of people like me have been able to make careers out of effectively collecting, analyzing and deploying this data to achieve beneficial results for our clients or our businesses. Because I’ve been exposed to the adverse side of this system, I for one am not as outraged as so many others seem to be about the trade-off we make with advertisers for our data. Many people don’t seem to understand that there would be no Super Bowl, no Facebook, no Instagram and no Google to allow you instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge with the click of a mouse, without these advertisers that are so universally despised. The products/services I’m shown are extremely correlated to my tastes and interests, which was absolutely not the case just a few years ago where an obese 40 year old neckbeard would be shown organic Bed Bath & Beyond banner ads. In fact, the effectiveness of these marketers has reached a point of such precision and efficiency that the amount of wasted ad space online i.e. ads being shown to people not in their target market has pretty much been eliminated entirely. But like many similar instances where efficiency reaches a maximum, something totally disruptive comes along and turns it entirely on its head.

Enter Blockchain technology and decentralized applications — or “dApps” — which are in the process of giving the Internet a much needed upgrade. This upgrade will come in the form of a totally trust-less, decentralized and individually owned system that will blanket what we currently know as the Internet, or Web 2.0. While I have benefitted from the Google Adwords and Facebook Ads Managers of the Web 2.0 world, I’ve always seen myself as a sort of adversity alchemist, or as Tom Bileyu would say, an Adaptation Machine. Shoutout to Tom. So I spent an ungodly amount of time and sleepless nights learning the ins and outs of this space to effectively prepare myself for what’s to come with Web 3.0. My prediction is that the entire framework from which we’ve operated thus far as advertisers and Internet marketers is about to be rendered obsolete. As browsers such as BRAVE operating on a decentralized blockchain system block ads and essentially eliminate an advertiser’s ability to collect and aggregate your data — not to mention drop a cookie for tracking/retargeting purposes — and social media dApps like STEEMIT picking up steam (pun intended) which have eliminated the need for pimp its users’ data to marketers through their ingenious cryptocurrency system of user-backed upvoting and participation, making them a social media powerhouse with well over 4 million daily active users already.
This led me to a lot of thinking and modeling of new, more organic and native advertising approach, which coincidentally, I predict will have an even higher rate of conversions and engagement. Without giving away the whole playbook, some of these new Web 3.0 strategies might include entirely new departments within a marketing firm titled “community development” where brands engage, joke, and interact with their audience rather than predicting how certain demographics will respond to a red call to action button over a blue one. Marketers are going to be forced through the very nature of these Blockchain-driven, privacy-focused, decentralized systems, to adapt and develop new, more community-focused methods of promoting their product/service to a targeted audience or niche. This will inevitably force them to adjust the product/service itself, increasing the value proposition, thus benefitting all parties. Additionally, PR I predict PR will play a much more decisive role in how brands reach their audience in a post Web 2.0 world. Public Relations, or the art of becoming the news and injecting your brand into the public discourse and becoming omnipresent within your industry. Again, requiring the business to improve and maximize its value proposition to justify such coverage. The best case of this is of course Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign and his ability to bait the media into BILLIONS worth of ad spend at little to no cost to him financially.

My team and I have already begun restructuring our consulting firm to be fully equipped to deal with whatever Web 3.0 throws at us, but I cannot say the same for a large percentage of marketers out there whose livelihood is about to undergo a monumental mind f**k as Web 3.0 becomes more pervasive. For all you small businesses out there, I would highly recommend getting in touch with someone familiar with what’s coming before your entire marketing plan is rendered obsolete.

Written by: Tyler Leleux