S3 E8: How Blockchain Puts the Brand at the Center – With Shelly Palmer

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Shelly Palmer, co-founder of Metacademy and professor of Advanced Media in Residence at the Newhouse School of Communications, joins the pod to talk with Jake about the potential impacts of Blockchain, NFTs and Smart Contracts in the field of Marketing.

Generally, consumers may not like advertising, but they tend to like brands who care about the things they care about. Those experiences that engage, enrich and provide value, for sure. But also things like trust, privacy and community.

What if consumers valued ad experiences like they do the content? Sought out certain brand experiences like they seek out certain content?

That value exchange would look different. But that’s okay. This whole arrangement is implied anyway, it’s not like the terms are set in stone.

The marketing vision of Blockchain (and its sibling technologies) is to establish deeper relationships between brands and consumers by enabling a different kind of value exchange – A value exchange that can make ad experiences and brand touchpoints incrementally more rewarding for the customer and help brands build deeper customer relationships that are based on trust and transparency.

Shelly Palmer is one of the industry’s most influential thought leaders. And Shelly wears a lot of hats… business advisor, speaker, commentator, author of numerous books – his most recent book is all about blockchain, NFTs and smart contracts. So, I’ve asked Shelly to talk with me about blockchain and marketing innovation.

Jake’s FIVE List:

What is blockchain?
How do blockchain, NFTs and smart contracts work… and work together?
What are the tactical applications and benefits in marketing?
When will we see practical, scalable, general adoption?
For innovative marketers and early adopters, How do we get started early?

“This is a completely new technology that allows us to exchange value differently. Allows us to keep score differently.”

Host Jake Moskowitz and guest Shelly Palmer discuss Blockchain and its sibling technologies in a marketing context. Along the way, Shelly makes some fascinating observations and shares some compelling thoughts about a marketing future in which brands can build direct relationships with customers by applying these “Web3” technologies.

Some other interesting things Shelly says about Blockchain during the conversation:

“All of a sudden I know that someone’s visited a website, I know that someone has visited a physical place, I know someone has bought a digital collectible, I know someone has attended an event. I know, meaning my database knows, my good old fashioned web 2 database with APIs and endpoints knows what’s happened on the blockchain.”

“There is no clearinghouse required, I simply need to write my smart contracts in a smart way. That’s the whole point. There is no Facebook, there is no ad agency. There is no middleman, there is no central authority required; you are the central authority for your community as a marketer.”

“This is not a one size fits all technology platform. I would argue that half the brands that are on Twitter shouldn’t have a Twitter account except for their customer service desk. Very few brands do websites well. Many brands should not be touching social media. I don’t think blockchain marketing is going to be for everybody. For the people it is for, it will be a hybrid additional tool, not a replacement tool. It’s not an awareness tool. It is a retention tool. It is a community building tool.”

“So we’ve got different ways of accounting, different ways of value exchange, and different ways to store value. Which actually, oddly, is the definition of a currency. We have a lot of currencies in the internet, right? We have attention, we have intention, right?”

“So, what’s going to happen when we democratize finance and value exchange the same way we democratized information? Call it 1980 with the Apple 2 Plus and 2000 with the world wide web? Here we are on the cusp of democratizing value exchange and finance. Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s really fun to be in it.”