Have you ever felt like Facebook or Instagram was listening to you and sending ads for products you were just talking about… or even thinking about?
It’s not as magical or mysterious as you might imagine, says Antonio Garcia-Martinez. In a mundane reality, a user browses a given topic somewhere and a few minutes later a relevant advertisement appears, thanks to the data stored in the browser.
“You shopped on the website and you came back to Instagram and that’s why you saw the ad on Instagram,” he says, “because two seconds before you were on this website and indeed , they have uploaded your email to Facebook and said, “show this ad to everyone who came but didn’t buy,” and that’s what you see.
Garcia-Martinez explains that another “very valuable” way that ads target a specific audience is through the use of “lookalike” mechanisms, where a “measure of similarity between users” can be used to target new potential consumers. .
User data that determines who looks similar, combined with a connection to “the outside world,” allows targeted ads to be effective, he says. “That’s how this whole thing started working on Web2.”
On the Lightspeed podcast (Spotify/Apple), Spindl CEO explains how he now applies the same principles to Web3where he says that most marketers are “flying blind.”
Garcia-Martinez spent “over 10 years” in ad tech with companies like Facebook And Twitter before being “crypto-looted”. Regarding Web3, he said he didn’t understand how billion-dollar companies didn’t understand their “core user value” or “where the users were coming from.”
“Basically, they didn’t understand anything,” he says, “and it was so strange to me because, again, a lot of this data is now on-chain.”
Blockchain is “an astonishing miracle in many ways,” says Garcia-Martinez, but as a marketing database, “it’s not particularly good.” Spindl exists for this reason, he says, using blockchains to present a “worldview that marketers are interested in.”
The average marketer doesn’t care about on-chain details like blocks, transactions and smart contracts, says Garcia-Martinez. But information revealing that a user spent $6,000 on a microsite after discovering it through Twitter, for example, would be very valuable. “That’s what they want.”
THE The “nerdy name” for this process is “attribution,” says Garcia-Martinez. “Tying it all together is like the foundation. Without it, you have no idea what’s going on as a business.
Garcia-Martinez acknowledges that many Web3 marketers have been resourceful, using the limited tools available to them. NFT drops, for example, behave like simple advertisements, he says. “It’s not good advertising, but it shows up in your wallet and you kind of commit to it as soon as you see it” he says, adding that the tokens can also serve as referral reward programs.
“They used the tools they had,” he says, “but they were measured very poorly.”
Garcia-Martinez says Spindl aims to explain “the entire user journey” to marketers, connecting all relevant user data. The other aspect of the product, he says, “is to really stand out” with a payment model that doesn’t exist in Web2.
Illustrating the payment advantages of Web3 over the Web2 marketing model, Garcia-Martinez describes a typical advertising client scenario. “I’m running an event on Facebook saying, yes, we converted it. Facebook says, “Great, pay me $30. »
Learn more: Here’s a crazy idea: what if we used Web3 tools to interact with Web3 products?
“Hopefully that user pays and earns more than the $30 you pay Facebook. It’s less risky than just paying for ads and hoping the user comes and buys, but it’s a bit risky, isn’t it?
“Wouldn’t it be cool if I could say, ‘Look, I only pay for the user if they come in, if they spend money, and by the way, I pay you a fraction of their income? ‘”, did he declare. request.
“Web3 will have a more intelligent, more interesting, fairer approach, a more transparent marketing stack that Web2 never had,” he said. With native on-chain payments that transparently track and reward any resulting revenue-generating activity, Garcia-Martinez explains that “everyone can take a small piece of it.”
“But the advertiser loves it,” he says, “because if the user didn’t come, guess what? I don’t pay anything.
“I only pay if I get paid,” he says. “It’s much better than the way things worked before.”
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