The CMO is coming to web3 faster than the CFO
And marketing is going to flip on its head
Hello my frens,
It’s another glorious day in the world of web3.
After 12 years of living the enterprise agency life and consumed by web2, it’s incredibly obvious that web3 is here to stay.
One thing that has surprised me is just how fast the CMO of the future will be a web3 guru. And, this is going to happen much faster than anyone realizes.
To help give ourselves a point of reference, let’s first compare what’s happening in marketing and culture today, to moments in time within the financial side of web3.
In 2012, Bitcoin reached mainstream awareness among business professionals. This is when mainstream media such as CNBC began to talk about this new digital currency.
It then took eight years for a publicly traded company to buy BTC. The first being MicroStrategy in June of 2020, followed by Square and Tesla.
Shifting gears to the CMO and NFTs, it’s safe to say NFTs reached mainstream awareness in February 2021, with SNL’s skit “WTF is an NFT”.
From there is took just six months for Visa to buy and CryptoPunk, Budweiser to purchase beer.eth, and Arizona Iced Tea to purchased a Bored Ape in August 2021.
Eight years for the CFO vs. six months for the CMO.
What’s the lesson?
Culture moves faster than money. This is true in the old world, and its true in web3 as well. Why is this true? It’s simple, humans make more cultural transactions on a daily basis than exchanging currencies.
There’s far less regulation around culture than with currencies. We’re fortunate this is true, because for most of human history culture was highly regulated relative today.
What’s different about the web3 movement is that culture is now an asset. New technologies unlock value in new ways. We’re seeing this with NFTs.
Brands are enterprise creators, and everything that applies to the creator economy applies to brands. The only difference between the solo creator and Fortune 1,000 brands, is that these large brands spend over $1 trillion a year on marketing.
Marketing is treated as an expense. It will soon be treated as an asset.
The CMO of Fortune 1,000 brands, startups, large private firms, and even DAOs, are about to bring trillions of dollars in the form of marketing expenses, and put those dollars to work fueling cultural assets.
Get your popcorn ready, marketing is changing in a big way!