Rethinking Online-Marketing for Web3.0

Advertising has been around for many thousands of years and has evolved steadily over the past centuries from letterpress to advertising pillars, newspapers, radio, commercials to product placement & in-game advertising.

With the latest evolution of the Internet to Web3.0 and decentralization, the question is: What's next for advertising?

The global advertising industry is a billion-dollar market. The digital marketing market alone has a total global volume of a whopping USD 350 billion with an expected growth rate (CAGR) of 15% until 2026.

Challenges facing the advertising industry

In addition, the advertising industry is currently facing four major challenges:

1. Abolition of 3rd party cookies Abolition of 3rd party cookies - no cross-domain tracking and no personalized targeting possible anymore

2. Ad Fraud Fake accounts, bots, manipulated click and download numbers costs the advertisers millions of money annually

3. Competition for attention Increasing dilution of ad effectiveness due to overload of advertisements online in humans daily environment

4. Increasing sensitivity for privacy Growing spread of privacy focused browser settings (e.g. Brave, Safari) through public debate on data privacy topics

What opportunities does Web3.0 create to meet these challenges?

If we assume that the future of online consumption will take place (at least in part) on the blockchain, and thus all transactions will be traceable and publicly accessible, then blockchain data offers enormous potential for advertisers.

The number of active blockchain wallets has been constantly increasing over the past years. Digital wallets are moving from a niche product to mass adoption. Established brands like Rakuten, Twitch or AT&T are starting to accept cryptocurrencies in their online stores via payment providers like Moonpay.

Luxury and sports brands like Gucci. RayBan, Prada, Louis Vuitton or Adidas & Nike launch their own NFT collections.

These collections and the associated wallets and other blockchain data can be used to form completely new target groups for advertisers, and therefore provide a new way to target consumers without the traditional barriers & challenges known from the Web2.0 world.

A new form of advertising?

As already in other publication mentioned, there is a paradigm shift going on. Not (only) the marketing platform or website operator gets rewarded for playing out the advertisement, but also the user for watching it. The way of rewarding can be different. Whether own advertising token like BAT from Brave, established cryptocurrency like ETH or a completely different form is up to the advertiser.

In-game advertisement has already been adopted by giving game producers the opportunity to install ads space within a Web3.0 game and distribute rewards to players for watching it (e.g., AdShares).

Another form of advertising is currently under radar. Web3.0 makes it possible to play out in-wallet advertisement. This is currently partly covered by community management & analytics tools. Prevailing or conditioned promo codes can be dropped as NFTs in the defined target group wallets, which makes it a perfect tool to aggressively target competitors customers.

In the future, the development regarding consensus collection as well as spam protection mechanisms of digital wallets must be closely monitored.