Crypto Web 3 Marketing Interview with Anthem Blanchard Ep. 592

howdy welcome to the unknown secrets of internet marketing my name is matt bertram uh we are doing our speaker series and i have a i would call it illustrious guest uh adam blanchard he's one of the most interesting people i've met i met him at a web3 meetup for a blockchain um years ago and uh he's just somebody that's been uh part of my network uh somebody we have like random conversations in the middle of the night and we talk about theory i think he's more of a theologian than anything else but he's done some really amazing things with some companies he's uh done vc kind of stuff he's done private equity he's built companies uh he's done stuff he was doing blockchain before there was bitcoin okay like that is super impressive i'm gonna let anthem kind of introduce himself and we're gonna talk about web3 marketing strategies this podcast so stick around anthem welcome thank you so much matt i'm really really uh grateful to be on your show thank you so much awesome so you were telling me kind of you know in the pre-interview and we've talked previously you were doing like digitizing gold you were you've done all kinds of stuff can you can you go into that a little bit more to just kind of give people a flavor of your background yeah yeah totally uh 21 years ago i graduated out of a college emery atlanta and uh ended up working at a startup that my dad who was deceased at the time sadly had helped to be a seed funder angel in and called goldmoney.com which is basically a uh was a digital uh payments platform for gold specifically and then broadened out and ended up having an exit about a decade ago and really just grateful for the time over there i was six years over there uh morphed into head of marketing director of business i wore several hats over the the six year time span that i was uh i was operational at goldmoney

and uh yeah just uh thanks for uh having me on appreciate it oh awesome so you know one of the things i found out after we met there's a lot of people um there's a there's a different conferences that i've been to i'm actually wearing one of the shirts here for unconfiscatable out of vegas um you know uh who had started that conference you were his first podcast interview he told me that and and i looked that up and watched that interview and that was pretty pretty cool so you you are a og of the bitcoin which bitcoin is its own community and be clear bitcoin people don't like crypto people for anybody that's listening uh please understand that um crypto people uh are pretty cool like for the most part i think they're pretty cool and um you know there there's a lot of artists uh there's a lot of creatives it's very uh welcoming there's a great conference out of denver that i i enjoy every year i i like the bitcoin people and the bitcoin people are more focused on ideology um and and certainly uh around the bitcoin people you don't want to talk about crypto um but there's always people in the corners um that are talking about crypto at some of these things so it's it's super interesting but tell me anthem kind of you've been through every cycle you were there at the beginning you know some of the people that have written a paper like you are the og of ogs and um when we talk you you you share firsthand knowledge of me of stuff that's going on tell me kind of where the crypto space is now or kind of give me kind of a you know maybe a history or just anything you want to share as far as you know crypto as a whole so people can understand it because i think marketing in the crypto space in the metaverse i mean it's all coming and marketers need to prepare yeah well again

humble that i you know kind of really been an observer more than a doer for a lot of my time in the space we started developing about nine years ago in the space uh specifically quote unquote blockchain public protocol crypto and just to kind of take a step back really we're talking about a scaling of the internet when we're talking about bitcoin and crypto in terms of my perspective and and that's really how i look at it and that's how where i think we're going and it's important for marketers i think to look at the origins of bitcoin there were a lot of people for example that were unhappy in the affiliate marketing or click-through marketing for example where there's uh and so to this day a lot of uh you know lack of transparency in a lot of cases in terms of click-through rates for example or any kind of throughput rates and i think it was a lot of these really big marketers actually early on that had a lot of issues with their payment processing and you know lack of transparency with how much they were getting paid so um you know that's i think really relevant um you know i think game also is kind of really interesting to generally um i i think it's still really early for enterprise and business um you know there there's some speculative tools that are that are pretty neat that you know have gotten a little bit of traction and a lot of speculation that that are kind of interesting so uh yeah um definitely a lot of cool things to look at the cycle well i'll tell you anthem uh in 2015 i was i had to figure out how to buy bitcoin to pay a contractor in venezuela okay like that was literally and and you know i i you know i was learning how to i mean everybody's kind of offshore and now or whatever we we were trying to find very technical people and and they're not all in a

geographically located area right and so we had found a really good person um we were paying in bitcoin and um um in 2017 so fast forward um i called up circle okay i literally and i talked to their techs and i was like hey does this connect in with like a payment processor does this connect in with like a quickbooks or something like that because this is the biggest player and they're like yeah probably like we could probably do that like maybe maybe yeah like they were not even interested at that point of what they were doing i think they were looking at the speculators the traders the trading volume um it it was shocking to me that like this kind of last four-year cycle like just now like just now like recently have i even started to see any kind of enterprise solutions i mean people were not even messing with it let's go back to kind of the scaling of the internet and internet money and um to you know give us a little bit more theory about behind um why this is such a transformative technology yeah and i think the the best uh answer to that is that it the bitcoin and and other um quote-unquote crypto or blockchain software or public protocol whatever you call them they give an incentive to make uh their record keeping harder basically to delete or edit in any way and making the data that saved more and more reliable to those referencing the data and um that the incentive is in the software keys and these quote-unquote crypto um that are really software keys that give uh typically uh unilateral access to the software's utility or utilities whatever whatever that is so cryptography right like basically um public ledger basically if something happens you can document it and you can't change it and there's a lot of different people that have to verify it i think you know with with what's going on with like news and i'm even seeing like with the pedia

you know things are getting deleted things are getting changed so people think that if it's on the internet and it's it's documented um like it is out there but people have been scrubbing the internet for a long time um there's different even kind of pixels and images and you can track all kinds of stuff like right so there's also a double-edged sword with all this tracking but you know even you know you get into politics and stuff like that like but but just truth right like i think that um this distributed letters truth there there's things that you can do internally in enterprise there's things that you can do externally there's things that kind of you can have both it's really like connecting everything together um you know there's a lot of different um you know angles at this thing like even the payments processing and stuff like that but but overall um i think that the internet is maturing right the internet's pretty young um like it's a teenager like you know what i mean um it's it's not it's not as mature there's a lot of uh people like myself that were born before the internet and and saw that that that changeover right and and so um i think that a lot of people are unfamiliar with it a lot of people are focused on kind of i i remember like qr codes you remember like qr codes were like a thing or not a thing but they were like a technology that people were using but but it never took off until touchless and covet and then oh my gosh every restaurant every place you go credit like it just was like it was there kind of waiting to be utilized and the right situation came along and boom it's now like literally every business card you need to have a qr code on today right yeah yeah yeah and and it's kind of a history of unfortunately destruction or violence that has necessitated technology innovation and you know i think

this has kind of been indicative of of human history and i think what's kind of neat potentially it's a hypothesis because we're not there yet i think that with bitcoin and other public protocols once we see what i call commercialization and meaning that you know bitcoin is used like you know linux quote unquote or other types of open source software where you see um layers of a public protocol um you know quote unquote crypto software being layered in to uh commercial software being indispensable uh 24 7 and and we're just not there yet we're kind of linux pre the lamp stack i think still and it's really surprised me how long it's taken and then i kind of take a step or two back realizing how close i've been to the space for so long and then i realized well maybe it hasn't actually been that long yet maybe it'll still be another five ten years before we really start seeing some semblance of commercialization of bitcoin and other public protocols we'll say we'll say well you know my my mom was uh one of the first employees in microsoft and um i in college wanted to uh buy red before red box became a thing right but i started seeing these pop up um i i took a job kind of backwoods of uh north florida okay and they they didn't have these uh dvd boxes and you know blockbuster was kind of going the way and and streaming and netflix were really on the rise and i said mom i want to buy okay these and they weren't called red box but these stands and and these relationships because i was doing pharma stuff so i was in uh you know the the the the pharmacies and the the grocery stores and all that and she goes no don't do that everything's going to be streaming right she told me everything's going to be streaming this is like 20 years later and there's still red boxes at the pharmacies around the corner you

know what i mean so so i know that it it takes quite a bit longer than we think and certainly i think you've been really really close to it i think there's a user interface issue um is probably like one of the biggest things that i've seen of you have to it's not intuitive like when it becomes intuitive like apple right or something like that there's going to be a huge uptake in it but but it's still very programmy it's still very codey still very you got to do different steps you could lose your you know internet money and you can't get it back like i i think that there's probably a um you know a lot more education that should be pushed out there and probably like user user interface but i want to kind of change the gear a little because i think everybody listening to this podcast is a technologist of some sort like if you're in digital marketing like you like technology right um and and web three and of course ai ai is our biggest topic everybody wants to know about that you know even the emergence of uh ai and crypto i think or i web three let's call it web three let's call it blockchain technologies crypto is like short for cryptocurrency we're we're using um slang here i guess but that's how people are searching on the internet um talk a little bit about you know you have a marketing background um you have a technology background a web three you know you're doing we haven't even talked about it but you're doing data security iot um you know cyber security you're doing blockchain stuff you're you're you're doing all kinds of awesome stuff i mean what what are you seeing the opportunities being as the space matures for maybe marketers to move into the space or what what are some ways that if you're wanting to get involved in web three and um you have like a traditional advertising or marketing background how are we getting

those people across the the river if you will yeah i great question and i i think the reality is is that you have to see what's hot and and see you know what is catching people's interest and you know if if you want to try to survive when prices aren't skyrocketing and maybe skyrocketing down for a little while maybe even you know a year or two maybe even in a row potentially who knows then maybe you choose a swath of uh of different clients and and and maybe you try to just start especially by going in a little bit lightly and and really figure out what you like because it's an intense space it's it's it's extraordinarily speculative because of the lack of commercialization by definition it's speculative and this is the reality so you have to be prepared for um a lot of risk you know there you don't get a lot of reward with a lot of risk and um it's a lot of it's a lot of stress it's a lot of trauma ultimately and and it it's it's it's it's not for the faint of heart so you have to remember what you're getting into so uh at the same time it can be very rewarding and and it can be very liberating and and a lot of fun but um it can also be very painful uh as well um so i think you just have to be prepared and and and be as realistic as you can with yourself about you know your your own pain reward tolerance basically so well anthem we can we can we can do a counseling session later it sounds like there's a lot of uh internal trauma there um no i i i i i agree you know and and there's only a few agencies that have jumped in wholeheartedly in this space um i've seen a lot of pr be kind of the main thing like getting bylines people want to get bylines they want to build their uh authority i've written

books about how to build your brand online i think that that's a lot of what it is right is building a community and and becoming that expert google even says expertise authoritativeness trust experience showcasing that online so building that brand i've seen a lot of people get in something called dow's which maybe you can explain for for the audience but essentially um there's a lot of freelancers there's a lot of groups there's a lot of encrypted chats um so community management i think is like a a big part of that i mean like it's really right now i think right getting the word out about your project and and maybe you can even speak to this a little bit because we talked about affiliate marketing there was a lot of people this last cycle that got in trouble for promoting like fdx and some other things where they took money for promoting something affiliate and and then you know it really blew back on them right like in a negative light maybe maybe you could speak to some of that sort of thing yeah yeah it's unfortunate and and you see this really with every single speculative industry really pre-industry but budding industry it just a ton of rampant fraud and and issues and because everything is speculation and and then you know you really have to just kind of decipher well who are the ones that are really being curious and who are the ones that are really just trying to take advantage of the situation and so you know obviously ftx i think we could pretty firmly say was in the latter of the case of um really just trying to figure out how many different which ways they could take advantage at the same time it's kind of um insane honestly but you know unfortunately there have been several of these cases you know the decade or so that i've been i guess you could say involved in the space you know really you know at least being leadership in organizations that

were building solutions with bitcoin software layer two three bitcoin software and other public protocol software like ethereum and ipfs and others so um yeah it's uh it's been humbling for myself it's it's it's uh taken a lot longer to get to assemblants of commercialization so i think your your suggestions and observations are are very spot on for people you know pr seems to be a pretty obvious choice and and and i would just say stay curious right stay curious and and where we see adoption is typically going to be user experience i think and more than anything right now i think that's where marketers more traditional successful marketers and web 2 can help web 3 bridge into web 2 and ultimately commercialize and that that this user experience issue really plagues i think the vast majority of experiences in in web 3 bitcoin public protocols in general so that's that that's i think a really good place to to be able to really add a lot of value and guidance well you know one of the things that that i'm thinking about now as as we're talking about this is um i remember like in this this industry there's there's the true believers right on one end um and then i think that there's the i don't know what the right word for it is but the people that are just looking to make money as quickly as you can and because it's unregulated industry and you have to be super careful i can i i remember there was a scam where uh somebody was doing press releases okay and they were promoting this big thing or whatever and they were like send you a sure bitcoin and then they were gone right and and and everything was gone but it was through a press release right which is typically needs to be verifiable that something's there and so if you're trusting the news source right that this is fact and you haven't done your due diligence um like you can get caught up so

i would just tell everybody you have to go into everything from from a really skeptical mindset and if you're going to be putting your name as an influencer or if you're going to be um doing marketing for a company i think you know you need you need to really understand and and get involved and i think that um the the people that are the true builders are very very protective very kind of closed network because they don't want the the story to get spun in in the wrong way um you know i i think i just think that this industry um everybody has to to like the thing is okay like not to talk about different kind of chains or anything like that but there is a chain out there that uh basically uh to put any kind of project on the chain there was this full vetting process right polka dot basically like there's there's a there was a full process of who are all the founders right so like guys like thought process if if people don't want to put their names out there there's at all so the whole board is like internet people um why do they want to do that well one is they could be uh revolutionaries right and they're they're they're changing kind of the money system but but another thing is they don't want to be tracked so that's concerning right like you you gotta you gotta figure out um the way to navigate this thing but i but i i am coming firmly from the side of the the industry the commercialization side of of seeing how can um companies start to bridge that gap and start to lever this technology and also how can um you reach different people so i'm going to take this conversation just a little bit and we're going to see how anthem responds to this so um there's a there's a company that i've been following uh and i and they're a publicly traded company on the canadian stock exchange

and essentially what they have done is they've gone on into the decentralized land and some of these uh v v v v r experiences like virtual reality experiences because i personally believe that brands today in web 2 you need to mirror what you're doing in the real world with your website today okay so like since covet everybody's online if you used to bring people into your showroom and to show them product you need to have that digital the showroom online right your your brand need to match okay well you know gaming as you talked about is like far and away like on the rise right and gaming and sims and virtual reality and all that is is merging together so if you're a brand how do you connect with different consumers right in a different way and yeah no i think you're spot on and and i think one of the answers i mean yeah i think if you gamify something studies show consistently like 20 to 40 times faster learning than if you don't make it fun basically and then you know think about a cookie right and you know from a marketing standpoint you know bitcoin and other public protocol leave a database like a blockchain quote unquote that makes the state provable so you know you know you know there's a lot of talk about websites being experiential uniquely right to the user and so when we go on you know it's like when we log in right but we don't even have to log in it just it we already have this right with banner you know ads and you're getting served video ads or whatever we're getting served all the time right the phone's always listening right all of our devices are always listening and all of these you know various cloud services right are always listening so you know we're we're just we're just going from centralized commercial clouds to uh distributed commercial clouds so anyway that that's that's going to be for your for your children's uh enjoyment

you know they're going to be able to have like exponentially you know times many many many times right in the next decade plus right better and better experiences because you know it's it's a network basically that that are voluntary it eliminates human administrators right so there's only like polka dot that you mentioned you know the reason that a lot of these quote unquote dows suffer is that they still have human administration many of them and you know really one of the ad events of bitcoin software was it eliminated the need for human administration to administer the software so you know if if there's a if there's a human or group of people that are required to basically administer system administrate the software then you know that that's really a vulnerability um so you know these are just you know kind of checkpoints to look out for right kind of common sense oakum's razor you know this is why i love fresh eyes in in the space because again oakum's razor is people like me that have been in this space a while we're kind of stale looking at the space and we need fresh eyes to kind of maybe figure out where is this bridge to commercialization right that that's that's really you know the thing that we're all speculating on no i am i'm so glad that that you added that in there i think that uh zero proof kind of technology where you you take humans out of it certainly you hear a lot of stuff about ai taking over but like if you have uh basically like rules that everybody knows um that that was like one of the most interesting things to me like like the zero trust proof so basically like hey if we say we're going to do something we can lock it into a smart contract and guess what like those rules are those rules and everybody knows what those rules is and everybody can play fairly based on those rules and i think that that is extremely

helpful in business that you know people do what they say they're going to do actually like code forces people to do what they say they're going to do and there's a lot more you to to web3 and people need to prepare for it but i think the biggest burning question people have is okay bitcoin or something you know something like that how does it have value but again all the gamers already know it does right because they they they buy stuff in games that are just code like they're buying a like i said before a sword or a shield or a skin or something like that right like that has value to them um people are virtue signaling like if i had like a which i don't wear watches but like a rolex watch or something like that virtue signaling in real life what people are even doing is they're buying stuff they're taking instagram pictures or whatever and then they're going and returning it like we live in this like crazy world but but the reality is how is there value in something that is backed by nothing there you go well i think it's a great question and you know we're used to this concept i mean look at most of what we call quote unquote money or currency today it's just digits in some accounts somewhere right it's very little of what we consider our money is really in our hands or nearby could be in our hands right so we've been digital with the vast majority of our currency for a long time right so you know i think of money or cash as slang in bitcoin and it's really a software key and you know it's basically what people perceive to be the most trustworthy currency is really what they perceive to be the most trustworthy marketplace or future marketplace in the case of bitcoin ethereum other public protocols and their software keys so i think it's really valuable to have metaphors like cash and money and and other things

that we use to kind of try to draw analogies at the same time i think it's equally critical to remember that these are software keys and and they're unique to concepts like money and and cash and and you know maybe we can even supersede some of these concepts and and you know maybe we can have voluntary types of marketplaces that's that's my hope for the space that that we can eclipse the need for violence to force marketplaces and what we typically call money quote unquote that that typically empowers these these uh forced marketplaces so um yeah the hope is bitcoin you know maybe ethereum you know maybe maybe a lot of other public protocols will end up becoming commercialized and therefore be voluntary marketplaces so for the futures you know for all of us right we're all part of the future today so awesome i think that that's a a great answer to to end on as um anybody watching my five-year-old who will inherit the earth um and doesn't understand commercials like interruption marketing no way all right like i want to watch on demand what i want to watch when i want to watch he already wants like a watch that's connected to his friends i mean i remember that from like star wars or dick tracy okay like the future is here right and anthem and and and a shout out to bartlesville um and and everything going on out there for people that don't know that was the highest concentration of phds uh in the country before silicon valley um it's a lot of where it all started there's a lot of brain power there there's a lot of awesome things going on there's a lot of startups um i would say do your research uh learn the technology get involved don't let the future pass you by um thank you for watching this episode anthem thank you so much for being on we'll have to have you on again i think a lot of people um how can they check

you out like how can people find you um you know you're using your real name uh you know you're you're a real person so i think that that's a a win out of the gate um you've been around a long time uh you know a lot of people i would encourage people to follow anthem anthem how do people follow you or get in touch with what you're doing yeah i would say you know these days on social media probably x or you know formerly known as twitter i'm anthem hayek my first and middle name and that's probably the best these days you can also text me which is maybe equally good uh i'm crazy i give out my cell phone publicly so it's out there 702-569-3431 um you can find me on facebook anthem hayek blanchard um instagram anthem hayek um those are probably the best ways honestly um i've got emails but uh they're so spam these days honestly it's it's it's it's a bit of a sift through so um i'm sure many people can sympathize with that statement so um but those are probably the best ways to uh to reach out um you know i'd love to hear from you and uh hopefully we can create value together well guys anthem my brother he is awesome um uh he's a real dude he's awesome to connect with if you're working on a project that you want to touch base with him on uh i encourage you to reach out to him uh he's doing some really amazing stuff uh i can't even go into all the projects if you send me links anthem i'll put it in the show notes uh but uh thank you so much for your time uh having you on it's been an honor thank you so much matt the honor is mine privilege have a wonderful merry christmas and holidays so uh much love to you and family yeah thank you and to all of you the same uh merry christmas um you know happy new

year uh we we love you all uh have a great one with the family friends enjoy yourself uh and uh until the next time bye-bye for now