Now that we have a basic understanding of blockchain technology, we can envision by industry and function how everybody can be a winner with the use of this technology. In this lesson, we will look how marketing for blockchain technology can teach us better community engagement. I will show you different use cases by industry and current challenges, and how we can use blockchain technology to improve client and customer engagement. Marketing with blockchain technology, it will be different. Re-think marketing and advertisement to include deeper customer engagement, rewards from customers for valuable content, loyalty and awareness programs, creation of marketplaces. Like the internet before, blockchain will impact marketers and marketing dramatically. Just like the radio, TV, the internet, social, and mobile before, blockchain technology presents an opportunity as well as a threat, and will dramatically affect the practice of marketing. It will also give rise to a new set of competitors with different business models. For marketers, many questions arise. How are key customer engagement functions transformed? How does blockchain as a trust machine offers market as an opportunity to differentiate and gain a competitive advantage? What are some of the opportunities and initial use cases for marketing in a blockchain world to drive greater return on investment? And last but not least, what might be the long term impact of blockchain adoption on how marketers understand ideas such as customer experience and branding overall? Remember, the last time we can empower people to directly connect with each other, things change fundamentally. Who of us is still using exclusively a landline? Or mostly the fax and the postal service to communicate? Are you still doing all your banking with a teller in a branch? Probably, not. Are you still focusing on what ways commercials and print ads is the only marketing function? Or have you embrace the internet, banner ads, communication, and engagement? Probably, yes. Blockchain will be to marketing what the web was to communication. You can think of Amazon, Netflix, Uber, AirBnB created new business models unimaginable in the early 1990s. Now, this is where we are with the blockchain technology. Traditional truth like half of advertisement is wasted. But we don't know which half. Or attention of our audiences is free. And that data is plenty and cheap and managed by a few central organizations like Facebook or Google might not be true going forward anymore. Marketing with blockchain technology dramatically different experiences than what we have today. We will see new payment transactions modes. We will see customer that have a cryptographic proof of her identity and the credentials. Customers can provide eligibility to shop on your site as a citizen of a certain country, or part of a certain group without telling any personal information whatsoever, through the blockchain technology. On the other hand, it allows no tracking that is imposed on customers today and provides them more privacy themselves. Marketing for blockchain technology is like good community marketing. What we're seeing now is the true power of community to build brands, in an era of hyper connected individuals with emotion and passion. Enthusiasm for the protocol attracts new believers. The growing of ecosystem increases the value of the coin itself and stimulates its innovation. We've seen this with theory and with blockchain and a lot of Bitcoin and a lot of other projects out there. You will see more and more brands that are born based on a clear mission usually for disrupting an incumbent. A strong white paper and a vision document of what they're trying to achieve, and creating a community of believers who benefit across multiple access: emotional, psychological, and financial. Bitcoin has achieved this position with no marketing in the traditional sense. Ethereum raised over 17 million in its crowd sale and it does not really spent much on marketing either or either. The Ethereum Foundation or Switzerland Defcon and it's safe to say that the sponsors more than cover the costs. The list goes on and on and on. Social media can enable people to manage their identity in the privacy of their data instead of having to rely on centralized entities such as Google and Facebook and Twitter when we combine them with blockchain technology. And that will move us from a centralized to decentralized social media, where tracking of customer behavior across websites becomes really hard. The move to blockchain-based social networks that preserve anonymity like Mastodon Systemic, decentralized versions basically of Twitter and Reddit, really change and show what's possible in a world of disintermediation of Twitter and Facebook if they don't disseminate themself first. The data ownership is going to change. Customers' data will belong to organizations locked away in corporate databases today. Not anymore. The data belongs to the individual, represent as a token or coins in an identity blockchain. I think we will see data providers. Then like with the new or the old banks, offering trust and storage of that personal data. Blockchain offers a new opportunity to chain our customers to our brands and marketing. Loyalty programs have been a huge challenge to establish, a lot of people are dissatisfied. But blockchain technology creates the possibility of microtransaction very, very cost efficient, and therefore, creates new opportunities, collect loyalty points, bringing different companies, different brands together, and really solving a lot of the problems loyalty programs see today and makes them possible even on a local or even on a regional level. In the near term, transaction cost will get lower. You will start to see discounts for manuals of payments that's made digitally. The increasing number of companies that accept cryptocurrency as payment as well as opportunity to use them at a lower cost is happening more and more. Japan is one of the good examples in 2017. They have yet estimating that 300,000 stores already accept bitcoin by the end of the year 2017. There are more than 46,000 merchants worldwide that already accept bitcoin via Coinbase. The American most popular on-ramp for the cryptocurrencies. And even the CEO of AirBnB branches, he said it was the most demanded feature from their community that Bitcoin is one of the payment should be accepted. Even more than loyalty stubs. I think it's clear, blockchain technology is here today and it's growing strongly, and it's going to change marketing dramatically.
