Over the last two decades, our society’s information environment has been shattered and rebuilt.
As communicators and marketers, we watched social media overwrite the broadcast era, changing how we communicate, socialise, even how our political processes function. In the new era’s unprecedented promise we have also witnessed the emergence of a dark side, in privacy, mental health, social cohesion. We work in an increasingly fragmented social field, facing new challenges of targeting, attribution, personalisation and attention.
Now, the tide is turning again. Once again, a technological evolution has enabled fundamentally different possibilities in information, participation and community. Once again the future blooms before us in multifarious potentials.
The myriad applications of blockchain technology could enable solutions to some of the challenges we face.
New modes of participatory community with more intimate relationships. New ways of sharing data while protecting privacy. New types of meaningful experience online, not just in two dimensions but in three, exploring rich interconnected worlds together. New ways of bringing people together and elevating the human experience.
All of this is within reach - and countless more new possibilities, as yet unimagined. What happens today will shape the standard of engagement for the future.
But much of this great potential is obscured, only glimpsed briefly behind a howling storm of hype and deception, built on information asymmetry, exploited by unscrupulous actors.
Whether we want it or not, the marketing and communications industry is in centre stage as this drama unfolds. We’re deeply integrated with online platforms, an inescapable part of how people experience worlds online.
We are facing the storm.
But have we learned our lessons from the chaotic expansion of web 2.0?
Can we realise this potential?
We believe that together, we can.
We believe that we can work together, with intelligence and humanity, to deliver the best possible information environment for the future.
That is why we are here.
We are the Web 3 Marketing Alliance.
And we call on all who believe as we do, to stand with us.
Let’s build the future together.