Incent, the Australian company that pioneered crypto-powered view-to-earn (V2E) marketing, has partnered with market-leading blockchain technology company ConsenSys to build the Decentralized Engagement Protocol (DEP). By using Web3 technologies to attribute and reward consumers’ actions to prompts embedded in digital content, DEP takes aim at the $220 billion digital advertising industry. Additionally, Incent has partnered with Run the Chain to promote their go-to-market strategy.
Online marketing: A failure of Web 2.0
In the digital landscape, the exponential growth of online content competes with increasing desperation for consumer attention. The sector is dominated by the huge content publishing networks, which monetize consumers by spamming them with algorithmically targeted ads. In an environment where the statistical probability of a consumer clicking on a display ad is as likely as that consumer being struck by lightning, volume is king and the user experience is correspondingly poor.
Marketers have long known that influencer marketing is a more effective means of stimulating consumer engagement than this one-size-fits-all approach, as influencers (especially those with smaller audiences) tend to have loyal followings who value their authenticity and trust their recommendations. However, Web 2.0 marketing technology has failed to organize and aggregate this talent in a way that commerce can access and leverage efficiently, at scale.
“Decentralized marketing is a game-changing example of how Web3 can transform inefficient and ineffective Web 2.0 solutions,” said Claudio Lisco, Director of Strategic Initiatives at ConsenSys. “Online advertising is clearly no longer fit for purpose and the opportunity is to build a technology that enables commerce to access grassroots influencers, at scale, across all media and rewards all parties fairly and automatically for their contribution to the value creation process.”
Successful proof-of-concept
Incent piloted its V2E technology in early 2020 with a Web 2.0 application that provided digital content streamers with a Plug’n’Play means of rewarding viewership through incentivized calls to action (CTA) within their content. When a consumer engages with this CTA, their attention is moved off-content to a digital property, where a commercial sponsor can secure their permissioned engagement. Each time this occurs, the commercial beneficiary automatically funds a micropayment (of crypto tokens) to both consumer and creator.
This pilot product grew to 330,000 users in its first nine months, as viewers enjoyed being rewarded for their attention and streamers watched their viewing statistics and wallet balances soar on the back of the commercial engagements that V2E triggered. Throughout the pilot, V2E secured click-through rates 10x superior to that of Facebook.
The DEP expands on this concept with a fully decentralized Web3 protocol that rewards not only content creators and their viewers but every party involved in the digital marketing process.
“The attention economy is broken and Web2.0 doesn’t have the tools to fix it,” said Rob Wilson, Incent founder and CEO. “Advertisers are looking for more effective solutions and there’s a growing army of content creators looking for better ways to grow their audience and monetize their work. Working with ConsenSys will secure the technology mix to deliver an in-content marketing solution that works for everyone, including their huge MetaMask community of over 21 million monthly users. The DEP will be qualitatively better, fairer and more effective at incentivizing and rewarding marketing outcomes, with zero fraud, data or privacy risk for users.”
About DEP
Built around ConsenSys’ Metamask wallet, the DEP will automatically track, attribute, reward and participate in content-triggered engagements from click-through to purchase. The impact will be to bring decentralized finance (DeFi) to decentralized marketing — or DeMa.
“We are excited to collaborate with Incent on the implementation of their innovative decentralized engagement protocol to the Ethereum ecosystem. Leveraging our products and services, we will enable Incent to natively interoperate with a wide range of DeFi protocols and efficient layer two scalability solutions," said Charles d’Haussy, Managing Director of Asia Pacific at ConsenSys.
When a marketing trigger, such as a MetaMask connection or purchase is detected, the DEP protocol distributes units of commercial sponsors’ staked budget to all of the stakeholders contributing to this marketing outcome: sponsors, themselves, content creators, content consumers, publishers, liquidity providers (including the protocol treasury) and the DEP staking community.
Simply put, DeMa will make it possible for anyone, anywhere, to monetize any digital content, regardless of media type or distribution platform; commerce to engage consumers way more effectively, with fuller attribution than is possible through Web 2.0 and zero fraud risk; publishers to open a turn-key, in-content revenue stream, where none exists at present; financiers to generate a yield from staking value in the attention economy and for humans, generally, to monetize their attention — with zero data or privacy risk.