Over the past couple of years, I've heard countless influencer marketing projects touting the benefits of blockchain. But I’m not convinced. I'm a big fan of crypto/blockchain-based projects, and I think the future is going to be very exciting, but I want to dig into why we likely won’t see any momentous shifts in the way we do influencer marketing anytime soon.
The main arguments for influencer/content marketing companies implementing blockchain solutions seem to revolve around these three points:
Utility tokens provide users with access to a product or service. When contractors (creators) are posting content for review, a network of people could verify that the content meets brand specifications. They could fix spelling errors or even make sure the content doesn't mention a competitor. In return, they would receive a token reward for their work, and the content would be posted to social media.
At Dovetale, we work with a wide range of enterprise clients from a variety of industries, and every single one of them wants to see the content before it's posted. They absolutely do not want a network of people to approve content and have payments processed automatically. In my opinion, it all breaks down around the approval process because it requires a team of brand marketers to approve and give feedback on all content.
Storing media content on the blockchain also seems to be a popular topic. The schemas built around storage, validating uniqueness and copyright are complicated, and there isn’t an immediate upside. If there isn’t an inherent advantage, then why wouldn’t you use something like Amazon Web Services? Even companies like CryptoKitties store images on S3 (a cloud computing web service offered by Amazon Web Services) and use the crypto kitty ID to locate the appropriate image. Technically, you could store the image on IPFS and store the metadata on the blockchain to decentralize it, but again, I’m wondering why. The technical hurdles and are not really worth it given that there isn’t much upside.
Payments is the last point, and it's where crypto influencer marketing companies focus most of their attention. The general themes are trust, transparency and speed as they relate to processing transactions. I, however, think cryptocurrency complicates the process and is unnecessary. To many people (influencers included), cryptocurrency is still foreign, and the concept of digital money is still very nascent, not to mention you have to ask them to set up a wallet, MetaMask or even an exchange account.
So, when I see influencer marketing solutions that convert FIAT to digital currency to pay creators for their hard work, I see complication and tons of required support.
Finally, I want to touch on borderless payments and microtransactions. Cryptocurrency is great for this, but again, there are better solutions with incredible risk departments and documentation for implementation. Stripeis the standard in online payments, supporting over 25 countries, but there is a wide range of payments solutions, including FastSpring and Braintree. Microtransactions, on the other hand, are still really expensive to process until new solutions are adopted to reduce transaction costs on the respective networks.
The key thing to understand is that there can be successful implementation of blockchain technology in the influencer marketing world, but it doesn’t seem to have an apparent upside. With the influx of ICOs, you never really know if companies are genuinely trying to adopt blockchain solutions or are doing it because they simply need capital.
