Introducing the Ethereum Marketing DAO

Ethereum is the largest open-source platform for building decentralized applications and running smart contracts. Its growth has been spectacular, an achievement that has been primarily fueled by a fast-expanding, self-motivated global community of developers and supporters.

Remarkably, this growth has been accomplished without a concerted effort to market Ethereum by the Ethereum Foundation, which is instead focused on the most essential goals, from building out the Ethereum infrastructure to onboarding developers.

However, the market has evolved. Ethereum has grown to the point where there is a need to formalize and professionalize a set of marketing and communications activities to benefit its long-term position. Indeed, the blockchain marketplace is maturing, with a multiplicity of players competing for attention. As the leading blockchain by most relevant metrics, Ethereum is in an enviable position: it gets admired for its success. But Ethereum also gets attacked by detractors, some spreading misinformation — and it lacks an organized entity to respond to these misinformation campaigns.

A unified marketing organization should ensure that the strengths, value propositions, and vision of Ethereum are well communicated and understood, despite its complexity. As marketers, communications professionals, and designers, we want to step up and take on that responsibility, working closely with aligned groups across the space.

Accompanying rapid increases in user preference, adoption, and loyalty, it’s time to launch a concerted and organized effort to coordinate the presentation and growth of the Ethereum brand. To this end, a group of like-minded individuals has launched the Ethereum Marketing DAO to surface, fund, and execute the right marketing efforts to benefit Ethereum and its thriving ecosystem.

Through clear communication, we believe Ethereum can become widely understood for what it is: a powerful blockchain platform that can help businesses, economies, governments, and communities transform for the better.

Why a DAO?

We believe the best way to help advance the Ethereum mission is to do it the Ethereum way — through a DAO. For those who are new to the concept of DAOs, or “decentralized autonomous organizations”, Marketing DAO will release a primer this week explaining how DAOs work in a way that is accessible to everyone.

The Ethereum ecosystem is decentralized and diverse. To properly support this platform and its stakeholders, we need a coordination mechanism to empower funding and decision-making in an efficient, fair, and representative manner.

That’s where the DAO process comes in, making our two big objectives easy:

1. Enabling funders to pledge any amount toward a pooled budget, which is deployed toward what stakeholders decide by vote are the highest impact marketing initiatives
2. Enabling DAO members to propose, become selected and incentivized to work on projects

With marketing professionals ideating and executing, and funders determining prioritization by voting on project proposals, we achieve logical governance, while at the same time showcasing a sliver of Ethereum’s powerful and far-ranging capabilities.

We will fork the Moloch DAO as the DAO baseline for implementing our marketing activities, hence the name Marketing DAO, and customize our UI. Here’s a diagram of the Marketing DAO process we will adopt:

Marketing DAO Team

The Marketing DAO was born in September 2019 as an initiative by a group of aligned community members that were interested in helping communicate Ethereum to the world. The Marketing DAO contract was deployed on October 18th.

Specifically, the initial working group is comprised of individuals with deep experience as marketers, communications professionals, technologists, designers, writers, brand experts, and long-time Ethereum supporters. Some of these people include ConsenSys advisor and former CMO Amanda Cassatt, former Ethereum Foundation advisor and blockchain author William Mougayar, Darren Mills, MetaCartel DAO’s Alexandre Masmejean, EtherWorld Founder and Ethereum Cat Herder Pooja Ranjan, former Reuters Americas General Manager Saul Hudson, former ShapeShift CMO and current director at Wachsman Emily Coleman, Brendan Forster, Dave Craige, Ven Gist, James Ross Treacher, Manuel Gonzalez Alzuru, and Kris Jones — among over 50 others.

This group has been working for the past month via regular online and in-person meetings (in Osaka during DevCon V) and planning sessions to lay the foundational elements necessary for the operation of this DAO, including Agile project management tools, discussion forums, voting, and document sharing. Using this variety of tools and practices, we can hold our members accountable while tracking our activities and progress. Funders will get full visibility into our work progress continuously.

Initial Projects

Every big mission needs to start somewhere. We met as a group, brainstormed ideas for what our first marketing initiatives should be, and voted to make these our initial projects:

1. Develop strong Ethereum positioning. We will manage a process to surface, select, and communicate a strong Ethereum brand positioning statement with supporting elements (similar to Bitcoin having a de-facto “digital gold” moniker), so more people can easily understand Ethereum.
2. Deeply know our audience. The foundation for great marketing campaigns is understanding our audience, the key messages that resonate with them, and the channels where they can be reached. We will lay a solid foundation for all future Marketing DAO campaigns by creating detailed audience profiles and a multi-segment strategy.
3. Establish a strong ground presence. It is increasingly important for Ethereum to be present at key conferences and events around the world. We will open-source a list of global events, prioritize them, and efficiently deploy knowledgeable and articulate ambassadors, booths, swag, and branding artifacts to ensure proper representation.

How To Get Involved

Anyone can get involved with Marketing DAO in a way that matches their interests and capabilities. So far, we have identified three paths for involvement:

1. As a Funder — If you are interested in funding Ethereum marketing activities, please submit a pledge via this link (minimum of 10 ETH). To get more information about our plans or meet with us to discuss your potential participation, don’t hesitate to email us here.
2. As a Member — If you have specific marketing, communications, or design expertise and would like to join the Marketing DAO working group as an active member-contributor, please send us a short email summarizing your background and motivation for helping, and we will respond promptly.
3. As a Supporter — If you are interested in being a supporter, we invite you to follow Marketing DAO on Twitter and Medium where we will share updates. Visit our website MarketingDao.org to sign up for the email newsletter and to see more information about upcoming projects.

We look forward to collaborating with you!