Crypto Web 3 Marketing Interview with Anthem Blanchard Ep. 592

Howdy, welcome to the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. We are doing our speaker series and I have a, I would call it illustrious guest, Adam Blanchard. He's one of the most interesting people I've met. I met him at a Web3 meetup for blockchain years ago. And he's just somebody that's been part of my network. 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 done VC kind of stuff. He's done private equity. He's built companies. He's done stuff. He was doing blockchain before there was Bitcoin. OK, like that is super impressive. I'm going to let Anthem kind of introduce himself and we're going to talk about Web3 marketing strategies. This podcast. So stick around. Anthem. Welcome. Thank you so much, Matt. I'm really, really 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. Twenty one years ago, I graduated out of a college, Emory, Atlanta, and 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 was a digital payments platform for gold specifically and then broadened out and ended up having an exit about a decade ago. And I'm really just grateful for the time of that. I was six years over there, morphed into head of marketing, director of business. I wore several hats over the six year time span that I was I was operational at GoldMoney. And yeah, just thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. No, awesome. So,

you know, one of the things I found out after we met, there's a lot of people. There's a there's a different conferences that I've been to. I'm actually wearing one of the shirts here for Unconfiscated out of Vegas, you know, who had started that conference. You were his first podcast interview. You told me that 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, please understand that crypto people are pretty cool. Like for the most part, I think they're pretty cool. And, you know, there's a lot of artists, there's a lot of creatives. It's very welcoming. There's a great conference out of Denver that I enjoy every year. I like the Bitcoin people and the Bitcoin people are more focused on ideology. And and certainly around the Bitcoin people, you don't want to talk about crypto. But there's always people in the corners that are talking about crypto at some of these things. So 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 when we talk, you share firsthand knowledge of stuff that's going on. Tell me kind of where the crypto space is now or kind of give me kind of, 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, 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 that's really how I look at it. And that's 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 and the affiliate marketing or click through marketing, for example, where there's and still to this day, a lot of 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 lack of transparency with how much they were getting paid. So, you know, that's, I think, really relevant. You know, I think gaming also is kind of really interesting, too, generally. I think it's still really early for enterprise and business. You know, there's some speculative tools that are pretty neat that, you know, have gotten a little bit of traction and a lot of speculation that are kind of interesting. So, yeah, definitely a lot of cool things to look at the cycle. Well, I'll tell you, Anthem, in 2015, I was I had to figure out how to buy Bitcoin to pay a contractor in Venezuela. OK, like that was literally and, you know, I was learning how to I mean, everybody's kind of offshore and now or whatever we were trying to find very technical people and they're not all in a geographically located area. Right. And so we had found a really good person. We were paying in Bitcoin and in 2017. So fast forward, I called up Circle, OK, I literally and I talked to their tax and I was like, hey, does this connect in with like a payment process or 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. 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 the kind of the scaling of the Internet and Internet money. And, you know, give us a little bit more theory about behind why this is such a transformative technology. Yeah. And I think the best answer to that is that it the Bitcoin and other, quote unquote, crypto or blockchain software or public protocol, whatever you call them, they give an incentive to make their record keeping harder, basically, to delete or edit in any way and making the data that's saved more and more reliable to those referencing the data. And the incentive is in the software keys and these, quote unquote, crypto that are really software keys that give typically unilateral access to the software's utility or utilities, whatever, whatever that is. So cryptography, right, like basically 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 Wikipedia, 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 like it is out there, but people have been scrubbing the Internet for a long time. 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 this distributed letter is truth. There's things that you can do internally and 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. You know, there's a lot of different, you know, angles at this thing, like even the payments processing and stuff like that. But but overall, I think that the Internet is maturing. Right. The Internet's pretty young. Like it's a teenager, you know what I mean? It's it's not it's not as mature. There's a lot of people like myself that were born before the Internet and saw that that that changeover. Right. And and so I think that a lot of people are unfamiliar with it. A lot of people are focused on kind of 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 covid. 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 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 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 layers of public protocol, you know, quote unquote, crypto software being layered in to commercial software being indispensable 24 seven. 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, 10 years before we really start seeing some semblance of commercialization of Bitcoin and other public protocols. We'll see. We'll see. Well, you know, my mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft and I in college wanted to buy Redbox before Redbox became a thing. Right. But I started seeing these pop up. I took a job kind of backwoods of North Florida. OK. And they didn't have these DVD boxes. And, you know, Blockbuster was kind of going the way and streaming and Netflix were really on the rise. And I said, mom, I want to buy, OK, these. And they weren't called Redbox, but these stands and these relationships because I was doing pharma stuff. So I was in, you know, the the the pharmacies and 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 Redboxes at the pharmacies around the corner, you know what I mean? So so I know that 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 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 programming, still very Cody, 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 think that there's probably, you know, a lot more education that should

be pushed out there and probably like 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. And in Web3 and of course, AI is our biggest topic. Everybody wants to know about that, you know, even the emergence of AI and crypto, I think, or Web3, let's call it Web3, let's call it blockchain technologies. Crypto is like short for cryptocurrency. We're we're using slang here, I guess, but that's how people are searching on the Internet. Talk a little bit about, you know, you have a marketing background, you have a technology background, a Web3, you know, you're doing we haven't even talked about it, but you're doing data security, IoT, you know, cybersecurity, 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 Web3 and you have like a traditional advertising or marketing background, how are we getting those people across the river, if you will? Yeah, great question. And I think the reality is, is that you have to see what's hot 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 of different clients. And maybe you try to start, especially by going in a little bit lightly 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 a lot of risk. You know,

you don't get a lot of reward with a lot of risk. And it's a lot of it's a lot of stress. It's a lot of trauma, ultimately. And 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 at the same time, it can be very rewarding and it can be very liberating and a lot of fun. But it can also be very painful as well. So I think you just have to be prepared and be as realistic as you can with yourself about, you know, your your own pain reward tolerance, basically. So, well, we can we can we can do a counseling session later. It sounds like there's a lot of internal trauma there. No, I agree, you know, and there's only a few agencies that have jumped in wholeheartedly in this space. I've seen a lot of PR be kind of the main thing, like getting buy lines. People want to get buy lines. They want to build their 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 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 DAOs, which maybe you can explain for for the audience. But essentially, there's a lot of freelancers. There's a lot of groups. There's a lot of encrypted chats. So community management, I think, is like 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 FTX 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 you see this really with every single speculative industry, really pre industry, but budding industry, just a ton of rampant fraud 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 really just trying to figure out how many are from which ways they could take advantage at the same time. It's kind of 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 and really, you know, at least being leadership in organizations that were building solutions with Bitcoin software layer to three Bitcoin software and other public protocol software like Ethereum and IPFS and others. So, yeah, it's it's been humbling for myself. And it's it's it's taken a lot longer to get to a semblance of commercialization. So I think your suggestions and observations are very spot on for people. You know, PR seems to be a pretty obvious choice. And I would just say, stay curious, right? Stay curious. 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 Web2 can help Web3 bridge into Web2 and ultimately commercialize. And that this user experience issue really plagues, I think, the vast majority of experiences in Web3, Bitcoin, public protocols in general. So that's 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 I remember like in this this industry, there's there's the true believers right on one end. 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 they can because it's an unregulated industry and you have to be super careful. I can I remember there was a scam where somebody was doing press releases, OK, and they were promoting this big thing or whatever. And they were like, send us your Bitcoin. And then they were gone. Right. 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, 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 doing marketing for a company, I think, you know, you need you need to really understand and get involved. And I think that the the people that are the true builders are very, very protective, very kind of closed network because they don't want the story to get spun in the wrong way. You know, I think I just think that this industry, everybody has to to like the thing is, OK, like not to talk about different kind of chains or anything like that, but there is a chain out there that basically to put any kind of project on the chain, there was this full vetting process, right? Polkadot, 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. Why do they want to do that? Well, one is

they could be revolutionaries. Right. And 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 got to you got to figure out the way to navigate this thing. But I but I am coming firmly from the side of the industry, the commercialization side of seeing how can companies start to bridge that gap and start to lever this technology? And also, how can 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 there's a there's a company that I've been following 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 VR experiences, like virtual reality experiences, because I personally believe that brands today in Web2, you need to mirror what you're doing in the real world with your website today. OK, so like since COVID, everybody's online. If you used to bring people into your showroom and to show them product, you need to have that digital showroom online, right? Your brands need to match. OK, 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, I think you're spot on 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, 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 and just we already have this right with banner ads and 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 various cloud services, right, are always listening. So, you know, we're just going from centralized commercial clouds to distributed commercial clouds. So anyway, that's going to be for your children's enjoyment. You know, they're going to be able to have like exponentially, you know, times many, many, times right in the next decade plus, right, better and better experiences because, you know, it's a network basically that are voluntary. It eliminates human administrators. Right. So something like Polkadot that you mentioned, you know, the reason that a lot of these, quote unquote, DAOs 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 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's really a vulnerability. So, you know, these are just, you know, kind of checkpoints to look out for. Right. Kind of common sense. Occam's razor. You know, this is why I love fresh eyes in the space, because, again, Occam'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'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 zero proof kind of technology where you take humans out of it. Certainly you hear a lot of stuff about

AI taking over. But like if you have basically like rules that everybody knows 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 are 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, OK, 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 buy stuff in games that are just code. Like they're buying, like I said before, a sword or a shield or a skin or something like that. Right. Like that has value to them. People are virtue signaling, 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 their 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 account 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 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 they're unique to concepts like money and cash. And, you know, maybe we can even supersede some of these concepts and maybe we can have voluntary types of marketplaces. That's my hope for the space, that we can eclipse the need for violence to force marketplaces and what we typically call money, quote unquote, that typically empowers these forced marketplaces. So, you know, the hope is Bitcoin, you know, maybe Ethereum, you know, 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 great answer to end on as anybody watching my five year old who will inherit the earth 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. OK, like the future is here. Right. And Anthem and a shout out to Bartlesville and everything going on out there for people that don't know that was the highest concentration of PhDs in the country before Silicon Valley. It's a lot of where it all started. There's a lot of brainpower there. There's a lot of awesome things

going on. There's a lot of startups. I would say do your research, learn the technology, get involved. Don't let the future pass you by. 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, how can they check you out? Like, how can people find you? You know, you're using your real name. You know, you're a real person. So I think that that's a win out of the gate. You've been around a long time. 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 these days on social media, probably X or formerly known as Twitter. I am 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. I'm crazy. I give out my cell phone publicly. So it's out there. 702-569-3431. You can find me on Facebook, Anthem Hayek, Blanchard, Instagram, Anthem Hayek. Those are probably the best ways, honestly. I've got emails, but they're so spam these days. Honestly, it's a bit of a sift through. So I'm sure many people can sympathize with that statement. So but those are probably the best ways to reach out. You know, I'd love to hear from you and hopefully we can create value together. Well, guys, Anthem, my brother, he is awesome. 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, I encourage you to reach out to him. He's doing some really amazing stuff. I can't even go into all the projects. If you send me links, Anthem, I'll put it in the show notes. But thank you so much for your time. 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 much

love to you and family. Yeah. Thank you. And to all of you the same. Merry Christmas. You know, Happy New Year. We love you all. Have a great one with the family, friends. Enjoy yourself. And until the next time, bye bye for now.