This proposal in the shape above should in my opinion not be approved at all! And this cannot be fixed by minor adjustments.
Most of the text are just generic commonplaces from Marketing 101 which could be said about marketing soap or shoes to the general public, but do they even make any sense for “marketing” a blockchain?
Does it make sense if a “commodity” or “currency”, a “decentralised ecosystem” does centralised marketing efforts? Do gold, the USD or the CHF have a marketing department paying for Google Ads? What is the product, who is the vendor?
What shall the message be? “Buy more ADA, bro!“?!?
Where should the “Digital Marketing” and “SEO Marketing” efforts send people? Where do you want to publish the “Content Marketing” products? cardano.org? Have you talked with the CF about it? intersectmbo.org?
Does a group of marketers/PR people focused on advertising something™ have the legitimation and expertise to promote and negotiate “Partnerships” for the whole of “Cardano”?
Can “Cardano” be treated as a brand like any other? Who should be considered the entity behind it? CF? Intersect? With what legitimation? (Currently, the CF holds the trademark “Cardano” and as far as I can tell tries to be very cautious in using it to represent “Cardano” as a whole.)
When people get scammed and want to talk to the manager or a government wants a registration for the company behind the security “ADA” so that there is someone who can get sued if things go sideways, we have spent years trying to make clear that there is no entity “Cardano”, that it is a permissionless network with many independent actors on it.
In my opinion, marketing should be done by the particular projects and companies building on this ecosystem, not by “the ecosystem” as a whole. After all, those – the DEXes, NFT projects, games, real-world asset providers, … – are the ones that provide the reasons for people to consider becoming active in this ecosystem.
Should those marketing efforts be financed by the treasury, by all of us? Could a service provider – an Intersect “committee” or someone else – provide support for that? Difficult!
What is funded from the treasury should not benefit a single competitor and omit all the other competitors in the same area. What could maybe work quite well is providing neutral resources – educational material, documentation, how-tos, … – so that not every project has to reinvent the wheel when starting to market their thing as the new hot stuff on Cardano.
And we probably wouldn’t want to associate “Cardano” as a whole too closely with specific projects: We cannot guarantee that they won’t fail or rug at some point. We have seen more than enough of those cases, also among the ones that previously were in high regard in the community. It would be a catastrophe if the impression would be that “Cardano” has “officially” endorsed one of them when that happens again.
Anyway, this is a case of “back to the drawing board”. In this state, I will surely not approve this budget.
EDIT: To preemptively answer the “Why didn’t you come up with that earlier?” question: This is what I wrote in the #wg-marketing channel in the Intersect Discord on 25th November 2024 and they said that they saved it to their collection, so that it doesn’t get lost:
Discord Feedback 2024-11-25
Reading all this, I as a dRep (albeit a very small 0.01% one, so you don’t have to be disturbed) feel less and less inclined to give any treasury money to marketing.
Going to break that down a bit:
First, I am very conservative in what I want to fund from the treasury, basically just things that have to be funded from it because there is not really a viable business case to fund it from another source: node implementations, open source libraries, maybe wallet apps, …
So, first question is if marketing should be funded from the treasury at all. Cardano is an ecosystem, a basic infrastructure where diverse businesses can build on. Does gold in and of itself have a centralised marketing initiative? Does Bitcoin? Does the USD? Does the Internet?
Second, if we decide to do marketing for Cardano as a whole, question is: “To whom?”
To the general public? Do we want to convince people to gamble with their life savings here? To do what? Just wait for numbers going up … maybe? Or to use services on Cardano? Which ones do we feature there? Why should their competition be content with funding that from a treasury that is also theirs? What do we do if one of the featured services rugs or collapses? What is the contingency plan for “But ‘Cardano’ said they are a-okay!!!”?
Maybe, the services building on Cardano, directly searching for customers should be the ones doing the marketing, not the network as a whole?
So, it could make sense to market not to the general public, but “just” to businesses potentially building on Cardano. But should that be done by a centralised “Cardano Marketing Initiative” or rather by individual development and service vendors that can actually offer them the necessities for realising that?
In both cases, an entity doing marketing leads to expectations that there is also an entity responsible for the thing being marketed.
A much more worthwhile thing that could potentially be financed from the treasury would be support for Cardano users now done mostly by some more or less volunteers. Up to now, it was not easy, but at least consistent to explain to people that “Cardano” is a permissionless network, not an entity, and they have to watch out with whom they are really dealing when acting on that network. If “Cardano” can order ads at Google, it becomes much harder to explain to people why it cannot also provide support, guarantees, protection, redemption when they are scammed …
Third is the approach how this is requested. I’m already very angry at the budget committee for planning to do this large overall budget that the on-chain vote then can only say Yes or No to. That is incredibly disrepectful to the dReps. We have built this complex system of on-chain votes not to just get all or nothing votes, where the nuclear “nothing” option will most likely never be taken out of fear. Such votes mean hardly anything, they are just meaningless acclamations.
If “we” do marketing at all, I don’t want to have to decide to throw money at Google and at clueless YouTube shillers (“influencers”), just because I think that the content marketing part sounds okay and some geniuses thought that I have to take the whole package.
Fourth, I don’t want to establich a centralised “Cardano Marketing Department” at Intersect that leads to expectations that it continues to be funded – the one whose fur you are currently selling before the bear is even shot.
And this prematurely selling the fur gives very bad vibes. Y’all make the impression that you think that the dReps simply have to approve your ingenious plan because there is no other and because surely Intersect is Cardano. No, they do not and it is not.
Fifth, the budget as it is now is incredibly rough. It just lists all possible marketing streams without much detail and for some reason assigns the same importance, the same 5% min to 30% max range to all of them. It doesn’t give any reason why this might make sense or not. Why are 5% min, 30% max accidentally the right span for Digital MArketing as well as PR and Media and Research and Analysis?
There would have been a chance to address this. It is a choice not to do that leading to a choice by me as a dRep to oppose this budget.