AD-VERSE. #102. Marketing 101.
Sending clueless advertising apes back to school.
Layoffs in La-la-Land
As we discussed previously, Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are starting to look more like plain-old Organisations (luckily really, as D.A.O. is a mouthful no one needs to eat on the regular). To wit, recent announcements of layoffs at one of the earliest and most prominent of them - MakerDAO.
Anyone who has found “360 degree” reviews by their peers difficult in their own work-place would be horrified to suffer the indignities afforded the MakerDAO Content Team recently. In an open-to-the-world proposal, the short-comings of the team were described in excruciating detail. Culminating in the pithy summary below, before a vote was taken on their fate,
After over a year of what many consider a lukewarm attempt, we need to remove this team to allow for space so that other teams can grow into it. This team representing Maker is enough to discourage new talent from joining the DAO. The quality bar needs to be several feet higher.
And just like that, technologically-mediated-democracy in action, they were voted out. To anyone stepping into their shoes we wish you good luck. To anyone thinking a role in a DAO will have none of the downsides of the modern workplace, think again.
Sadly, what the members of MakerDAO probably don’t realise, is that “content marketing” is a bullshit trend that the marketing profession is slowly expunging from its playbook. It was born of a time, a decade ago, when “organic social media” was a thing and people chose to follow brands. And when posts those brands made would be seen by most of those followers, before algorithms ate engagement with everything but fake news and your ex’s holiday snaps.
A wondrous time when you could spend the money you might normally spend on paid media on making content. Oh and this was also back before TikTok wrecked everyone’s attention span and people consumed content that was longer than 15 seconds.
But today only single-digit percents of a brand’s followers see their posts, at which point you need to buy paid media to reach them, which means you may as well spend that money to reach everyone not just your “followers”. With… good advertising.
So what MakerDAO really need is an advertising and media team, not an incompetent-or-even-competent content team. This is not financial advice, but it is marketing advice.