Jenaro Diaz on How Marketing Agencies are Approaching Web3

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Marketing Meets Web 3, a podcast that helps marketers navigate the news trends, opportunities and insights surrounding Web 3. Today's conversation is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal or investment advice.

Speaker 2: 0:24

Welcome back everybody to another episode of Marketing Meets Web 3. Today we are joined by Hinato Diaz. He is the Chief Innovation Officer at Minero. Hinato, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 3: 0:35

Thank you very much for having me in the podcast. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Just to kick us off and learn a little bit more about you. Hinato, can you tell us about your background and how you got into this crazy world of Web 3?

Speaker 3: 0:51

My background goes all the way back, probably to 1999. I started my professional career in the web design, web development industry and I transitioned very fast into working mostly with ad agencies. I've been in the web marketing space digital marketing since back then. The last 15 years it's been mostly based here in Austin, working with ad agencies across the country, being involved in different organizations like the American Advertising Federation, south by Southwest organizations that award or recognize talent in that space, technology space, marketing space. Our adventuring, web 3, started with that in mind. I figured that it's hard to keep track of all the achievements you go in any career in these days and sometimes these organizations don't keep track of all the records back in time. That's where I figured that combining the blockchain technology with augmented reality and 3D and digital twins was the perfect combination for supporting these type of organizations to certify personal and professional achievements. And that's how it all started. When it comes to our starts in Web 3, pretty much.

Speaker 2: 2:36

Something that I'll dig in for one second. I think everybody who's in the Web 3 space probably has their own story about how they went down the rabbit hole or how they learned about Web 3. Something about this technology resonated with them. Because it is kind of early and it can be complicated. I think you have to be kind of a motivated learner to want to dive in and get underneath this technology. Did you have a particular moment or an inflection point along this journey that you had in a moment and said, oh, that's the thing, or this is going to be transformative?

Speaker 3: 3:10

Yeah, In my experience in the course of my career, we've always been that team that brings any cutting-edge technology to advertising, whether it's been apps, games, sweepstakes, anything that has to be online, and we've always been asked for the latest team. When I realized that the blockchain could be used in this matter, I also was thinking that, from the marketing perspective, it's going to be very useful when it comes to loyalty programs, ownership, sweepstakes, but at the end of the day, what we've always have to do in the advertisement world is to make it extremely easy for users to get on board. That's when I got involved in what's the tech behind blockchain. I saw a lot of technical barriers that we had to solve and they were still trying to solve because it was very exclusive of a community for example, that was very into it.

Speaker 3: 4:18

I've never been very into it from the beginning, but I knew that the tech behind could be very can be leveraged for other use cases.

Speaker 3: 4:29

In this case, marketing, awards, certifications, stuff like that. I think that the aha moment was how do we make it easy for people that are not tech savvy, because right now, everybody that is in the Web3 world knows how to do everything because they learn about it and they're passionate about it. When you go out there to the masses and to the common users, they know how to use a phone, but they probably don't know. We've seen that technology barrier where I need something else apart from an email and this and that and connect different open accounts left and right. We always approach technology from a user experience perspective. How do we make it easy for anybody to join and not necessarily be somebody that's tech savvy or passionate about the industry? For me, that was my aha moment where I was like we have a big problem to solve and it's been. I think we've been very successful in at it and at the same time, we're still evolving to make it easier every time.

Speaker 4: 5:42

I wanted to ask you about how you describe Web3 to colleagues and clients, but to make it more specific, because I'm sure that you've had this conversation before. To make it more specific, let's say that I am which I think I am a person who is more or less tech savvy, has been doing stuff with the Internet, knows about the older developments, but may not be very proficient at some of these very technical stuff. How do you go about explaining this kind of person what Web3 is?

Speaker 3: 6:13

Well, I mean, it's the new version of the web. To start with. I've been involved in web since it was Web0, web1, web2, and now it's Web3. It's a natural next step. Technology is getting there where now everything is very immersive, everything's hands-on. You don't want to be opening accounts left and right, you want to have control of what you're putting out there and stuff like that.

Speaker 3: 6:41

I will explain like is the next version of the web, whether you want to include certain technologies on it or not. But at the end of the day, it's something natural that at the beginning and I've been explaining this the same way the Web3 industry community right now knows almost everything about the technology behind. But it will be like explaining 20 years ago how do you run a website? You don't know how to website runs. You just have a website there and everything is taking care of behind scenes and with email.

Speaker 3: 7:25

To this day, I guarantee you, nobody knows how does email work technically speaking. So we're leveraging the powerful technology that now we have on our hands on a mobile phone that can render 3D, ar VR, certify things on the fly and process stuff that your computer 20 years ago couldn't handle. So we're just leveraging new powerful technology and hardware and software at the same time. So it's more like slowly, partially, everybody will adapt to it, as long as the mainstream adapts it, whether it's marketing or gaming or entertainment industry. But at the end of the day, I think that the main issue with Web3 is that people are expecting that you know everything behind the tech aspect where you actually don't have to.

Speaker 2: 8:23

So let me drill into that for a second, because I agree with you.

Speaker 2: 8:26

I think that at the end of the day, as consumers, we want the benefit of the new technology.

Speaker 2: 8:32

It's not that I want the iPhone 20 because it's going to be a faster chip or whatever it's, because it's going to let me do something new or different, faster, better, and so when you think about the benefits of Web3, or maybe going back to even Web1, gave us kind of mass access to information so we could go online. It was the first time that we could access things like the Library of Congress and get mass access to all kinds of information, research resources etc. And then Web2 came along and it was the first time that we could actually, at scale, as society, contribute to this thing called the Internet. So we got social media and we were able to start kind of writing or sharing our ideas back to the world. So we've got Internet1, the Internet of Reading, Internet2, the Internet of Writing, and then we get to Web3, which is often, I think, called the Internet of Ownership or the Internet of Value. But there are some underlying benefits behind that. So I'm curious what's your take on the superpowers that Web3 brings to the table?

Speaker 3: 9:33

Well, for starters, we're going to be faced with new generations of how they consume the web or how they use the web. It's always going to be the web, and now we have new generations that are like, extremely digital in terms of gaming and how they interact with society. Like you can see kids right now, teenagers that their whole social interaction is through gaming and that's where they hang out with their friends. That's how they have deep conversations. It's no longer trolling on social media about your likes and dislikes is where you hang out with them and it's no longer the face-to-face. It's more like in an environment that is immersive as a 3D world. And now they're not going to be excited about a piece of paper. They're going to be excited about a 3D model that represents whatever they achieve, play for, gain or anything like that, and it's going to be more like being more immersive in the web world rather than going there to write and share. It's going to be their environment. We're going to start looking at kids showcasing their collections, showcasing their achievements in a digital world that is 3D that you can, whether it gives you more visual, immersive space of these. So you're right 20 years ago nobody needed a website and now everybody needs a website. Where you're a small business or whatever type of thing, it became the norm that every business has to have a website. And then every business has to have social media and now every business is going to have this immersive world and also community and fandom and collecting all of these items.

Speaker 3: 11:32

Like we grew up in a society where you will wear shirts with a big logo on it because you wanted to share that you are part of that group, or cool kids or whatever you want to mention it. But we're now seeing that transition into your digital self and it's no longer your Facebook or your Instagram or Twitter. It's more like here's my men cape, for example, or my art gallery. Whatever makes you passionate about it.

Speaker 4: 12:02

Yeah, that's great and I mean I couldn't agree more with that and we've seen that development in other conversations that we've had with other guests and, as you said, everything that's going to be built on top of Web 3 is still mostly to be built. However, with Minero, you made a decision of going in a specific direction. So why did you choose that direction and maybe give some background as to what Minero does and what services you provide?

Speaker 3: 12:33

Great Well, in essence, for more than 20 years, my career has been building custom solutions on digital experiences for businesses, organizations, you name it. The aha moment was like everybody's going to need this technology pretty soon, whether you're already in the market in the community or not. That's what drove me into creating this new web pre-creative agency, which we see them becoming very popular, but at the same time and this is something my CTO mentioned it's if you're going to go and award cakes, you have to know how to do cakes to start with. That's the main reason we started with a product of our own where we created our own minting platform to be able to customize that minting platform in any direction, whether it's for a sponsorship or a partnership or a marketing or just certification skills. I knew that that was a problem.

Speaker 3: 13:49

We live in a city which is Austin, texas, that we have 130 person moving to the city every day. Most of them will come with fake credentials. We've been victims of those fake credentials in a digital agency where people may say they've done stuff and they actually don't. We wanted to solve that problem where you have your credentials on your crypto wallet or on your phone and you don't have to go to your office and say, although my awards and certifications are in the back of my office, people don't have offices anymore. We're living the digital nomad lives and you have to carry those credentials with you and we have to have these organizations that validate that you are who you say you are like. Where is a membership or recognition or a level of skill sets?

Speaker 3: 14:43

That's why, from the very beginning, we've been so agile on building custom solutions. For us, it was pretty easy and natural to say, okay, we need to get here. What things do we need to get there? From day one, the goal was to have 3D models in order to bring them to your metaverse or your argument to reality worlds and, at the same time, what technology we need to get there. We tested a lot of different things and whatnot. Before we even look into blockchain, we were trying to figure out how do we validate that people are who they say they are and realize that the blockchain certification aspect of it was the perfect solution, because you cannot change that anymore. Once it's sealed, it's there forever. So I think that, from that perspective, is when we realized that we knew that we can pivot our services for business purposes, but also for certification purposes.

Speaker 4: 15:47

The certification part is one that we haven't discussed much in the past. I wonder how is the demand for this kind of service in your region and for what specific reasons are you required these services?

Speaker 3: 16:05

Well, same. We want people to be able to share their success in their resume portfolio, however you want to call it. The success is we're empowering different organizations to have this technology and no longer use your website database or your PDF that you just published. But a more official way to say this is the organization and we're not certifying anything as a company. We provide the tools and technology to different organizations to certify those achievements and obviously, the communities that are very accepting that.

Speaker 3: 16:48

It's obviously in the advertisement community, in the technology community, in the entrepreneurship community and obviously in the web-tree community. So now we're kind of like working with other web-tree communities to create what's called social tokens or reputation tokens, which, at the end of the day, become your achievement. So it's always been in a city like Austin that it's cutting-edge technology and building. That's where we wanted to focus at first. It's been very successful in different arenas and now we're kind of like trying to expand nationally for that and we're actually getting ready to start a second year activation of our platform for all the communities with help in the this year and last year.

Speaker 4: 17:39

We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.

Speaker 1: 17:43

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Speaker 2: 18:18

So I want to dig into something that you're talking about here, which is this idea of certification and looking to some sort of on-chain reference for the validation that we have done something and that's connected to an organization that says, yep, nick earned that credential or Nick achieved that certification. I see a parallel here in what you're doing with Monero and this vision of on-chain certifications and credentials. I see the same thing kind of happening with social media platforms. So social media platforms today they're kind of the captors of our information. So we put all of this time and effort and all of our social connections live on a platform, and it can be kind of arbitrary.

Speaker 2: 18:58

We've seen instances where people do get de-platformed. Sometimes there's a valid reason, sometimes it's kind of a mystery and they don't even know why they've been de-platformed and it's like suddenly, overnight, all of your social connections, all of your social validation can go away. And when we look at things like on-chain credentials, sure we could say, well, why do we need that? We have services like LinkedIn or we have places that we can go to see what somebody's achieved if it's a professional organization. But in a lot of ways, what you're solving for is kind of the same issue of how do we become the owners of our own credentials and take out that middle layer that could go away overnight or could change motivations and suddenly everything that we've built credibility on is gone.

Speaker 2: 19:45

So with that in mind, I guess what I want to dig into is this idea of looking on-chain for credentials. I think it's very new for people and I think it's a little bit foreign for a lot of people, but oftentimes the behaviors that new technology enables, they become kind of second nature. So the smartphone as soon as you have the smartphone plus the internet, and you introduced apps on top of that, like the idea of going to the app store and getting an app to do something it became very natural and for a lot of people it became second nature and nobody thinks about it anymore. So is there some aspect of Web 3 and what you're doing with Monero that you think down the road will look back and say, yeah, that's pretty obvious, we should have known we were going to be doing that. I mean, is it this idea of looking on-chain or what are your thoughts there?

Speaker 3: 20:30

I think it's leveraging the technology behind blockchain. The blockchain makes it permanent whether the organization is gone or not, because some organizations just I'm not even starting with social media yet, but some organizations cease to exist for different reasons, right.

Speaker 3: 20:53

Whatever it is they're gone and there's no way to say, hey, how can I bring my certificate again? Or how can I request another trophy that I did for this organization, and that's one aspect of it. Once it's out there, it's there forever. I mean, you can go as far as like maybe even some countries disappear, and then you're off with passport and unanimates, all sorts of documents that you need. So the decentralization of these organizations they're not letting go of their data, they're not letting go of their authority, for example, they're just utilizing a new way to certify online, digitally, what you achieve.

Speaker 3: 21:44

Now, this is nothing new, in a way, because all the different like LinkedIn and other organizations that certify online, they give you a digital certificate. They're leveraging the blockchain as well, but there's still a flat piece of paper or a flat piece of art. We're taking it one step ahead. We're also going towards the immersive digital life that we're going into next. So it's technology that we need to leverage as people, because it it gives you the tool to say it doesn't matter if my home goes up in flames, I have every certificate on my wallet. It doesn't matter if I go to a different country. Those certificates will be valid in any other country. Different that if you wanna go from one university to another one it's centralized in a way. We're kinda like decentralized in that that even WebTree communities we're talking about with different communities in across the world where?

Speaker 3: 22:50

how do we collaborate with each other? How do we leverage your own social and reputation tokens across this platform, across these communities? And it's naturally already there. We don't have to go and say you need to format this in a different chain or a different thing. It's already there. It's we're setting up a new standard that it's relying on PDF for too long, for example.

Speaker 2: 23:17

Yeah, yeah, no. In a lot of ways, this transition, I think, is similar to brick and mortar, to e-commerce.

Speaker 3: 23:23

And then sorry to interrupt, but to add to that, we're about to break the like. It used to be very easy to falsify an achievement with Photoshop. Now it's gonna be even worse and it's gonna be even easier to do that with AI, and that will be the battle between I'm pretty sure in a few months we're gonna see AI powered or human powered and that's gonna be certified on the blockchain. Interesting, yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:52

Yeah, definitely agree.

Speaker 4: 23:53

Yeah, at this moment I would like to shift gears a little bit. And what you commented on your intro that you've been working with web since web zero all the way to web three and working, and you've worked extensively with agencies, marketing agencies so I wonder, why should creative agencies be concerned with web three? Well, concerned meaning in the sense of being interested in what web three could bring to that table.

Speaker 3: 24:23

I think, to be 100% honest here, the biggest challenge, the biggest concern with ad agencies this day, whether they're very digital or not, is the user experience. That's what's become the first barrier between the massive adoption in marketing. That's pretty much number one concern, Like how do we make it easy for users to be onboarded into this new platform and the web three community? It's kind of like pushing it to be very technical and the marketing has to make it very easy for people to onboard, because you have different targets to go to and not just the web three savvy people. So until it's very easy for any person that can just use a phone and scan a QR code and boom, you're in.

Speaker 3: 25:23

That's the biggest concern. I don't think it's anything else, but that, Like, their concern is. The second concern is they don't know how to do it, how to do a successful campaign on web three, and it's very right now we're looking at web three in a very on off zero one successful, unsuccessful rather than saying we're like 70% successful or anything Like this didn't work at all, it was a complete fail and this was a great success and 100%. I mean the big ad agencies are concerned about that. Like what if we do something and it's a complete failure and we get a lot of bad press because of that. So, until we get to a very more established user experience, that's what's gonna make the difference and that's their biggest concerns that I share with many different agencies.

Speaker 2: 26:24

So let me dig into that for a little bit. So, and there's kind of two follow-ups that I wanna ask. The first is about the user experience, and so you said you know web three adoption. I think and I agree with you it hinges on us finding a place where onboarding is just seamless right. It has to be as easy as web two is today.

Speaker 2: 26:41

There is this tension, though, with web three, because in web three owning things is a pillar right.

Speaker 2: 26:49

It's one of the principles behind web three is that I can own my own things, and that's usually enabled, or it is enabled because I have a non custodial wallet, meaning that I control my assets.

Speaker 2: 27:00

It's my, I have the private keys to that wallet and I can choose to do what I want with those things. But a lot of the easy onboarding experiences that we're seeing now with web three experiments let's call them include something called a custodial wallet, which is where I don't completely control that wallet. It's the third party. It could be a business, it could be some other type of third party, and they control that wallet, because it makes the onboarding process really, really smooth and kind of seamless to me. I don't have to think about that as a user, and so I'm just wondering what your thoughts are in terms of finding that balance between a decentralized, non custodial experience where I fully own my things, versus a very easy onboarding custodial experience that gets me into web three quickly but then maybe is harder for me to realize the benefits of those that ownership. So where do we find that middle ground?

Speaker 3: 27:50

I think that it's an a base to base case and it depends on the end product of the project or the campaign or whatever. But I think that for the most part, we're gonna have to continue to adapt that custodial for the so people understand the value of web three. It's kind of like the way in, like here you know what, we're gonna save this for you. In the meantime, once things evolve and are easier to manage by the users, or once your iPhone is your own wallet like you don't have to get a wallet, then it's kind of like only natural, you know what? Can I have my tokens? Sure, just give us your new wallet. Here you go. Now you own it. But in the meantime we're like it's like a bicycle with training wheels, like it's pretty much it used to be where before you couldn't have email unless you work for a company, and then you have free email. And now you're like should I keep my hotmail or not? And we still have people using hotmail these days. So it's kind of like a. It's part of the onboarding and the adaptation, the mass adaptation to it, and I think that we're gonna be able to say we made it, we're done, it's been successful.

Speaker 3: 29:05

Once, people don't even see it as web tree. It's just part of how it's built. Like to this day, nobody knows how a database works or how does your website is. Where's your website hosted. Then we just say the cloud, and people think that there are clouds holding databases. But it's just like because at the end of the day, it will be more like making it easier for the users to get involved with this. Again, I think that the custodial wallet is going to be very successful because it helps user understand the value of this technology. At some point they're going to be like okay, now it's very easy for me to get a wallet and transfer everything there.

Speaker 2: 29:54

Yeah, that makes sense. The other thing that I wanted to follow up on here is the agency side. You talked about how agencies prioritize and rightly so prioritize a really smooth onboarding experience, a great UX when you're speaking with a client or a perspective client. That's coming from the agency side of things. What are the first maybe two or three things that you put out there for consideration? What are the top of mind things they need to be thinking about when it comes to creating a great web three campaign?

Speaker 3: 30:26

For starters, again, the UX experience.

Speaker 3: 30:27

But we see things differently, in a way where, when we talk to a potential client agency, it's always about what's the end goal of the campaign, the product, the project, and then from there we try and analyze what's the best technology to achieve that goal, whether it's blockchain or not, whether it's 3D or not, but obviously trying to push into the web three aspect of things and when I say web three, we're talking about not just blockchain, but AI, ar, vr, immersive, and it's always.

Speaker 3: 31:11

We always try to figure out first, what's the end goal, what do you want to try to achieve, and then from there we see what's the end goal, we see where and how we can adapt the technology for that end project Because, for example, like web three requires a ton of web two, every project needs a website, for example, and who's going to build that website and is it going to be built on WordPress or Webflow or custom, and that's a whole project in itself. But you have to make sure that whatever you're choosing is the best for the end result that you want to achieve. Now, it always starts with the user experience at the end of the day.

Speaker 4: 31:55

When you were talking before about how you expect the end result to be one in which, well, users don't know what web three is. It's funny because when you were talking about that, and that's precisely Nick's perspective on how this is going to go, so I think you agree on that one. Well, Renato, it's been great having this discussion with you before we leave. Could you maybe share here how, some ways in which people can connect with you and also to keep tabs on what Minero is doing?

Speaker 3: 32:31

Yes. So again, in a nutshell, our elevator pitch. It's from the perspective of the platform that we're building. We're certifying personal achievements on the blockchain. That's why our tagline is we meant success. The other thing that we're doing is we're helping any type of organization to get there, to get into the tokenization era, as we want to call it, and where you may need not the whole process of from design to turnkey solution. We can always come in in a portion of the whole project or we can do it all, and we've done that several times very successfully with different organizations. Where you can find us, it's mineroio, our website. Our Twitter is at minero and on LinkedIn also, as mineroit should be mineroink. But again, I think that, to wrap it up, we want to position ourselves as the Web Tree Creative Team, whether it's design, technology or strategy, on how to utilize this very powerful technology that we're coming upon, like AI, tokenization, blockchain and all these good things that we can figure out how to do.

Speaker 4: 34:03

It's really cool that you got the admin arrow on Twitter.

Speaker 3: 34:11

It was thanks to a friend, but, yeah, it was a big success that we were able to get.

Speaker 4: 34:18

Nice one. Well, thank you, Hanaro, for the conversation.

Speaker 2: 34:22

Thank you, hanaro, it's been great.

Speaker 3: 34:24

Thank you very much. I'm very grateful to be here and be able to share what we're working on. We're always open to have brainstorm sessions. That's something we really like, and thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 34:39

Thanks for listening to Marketing Needs, web 3. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe in your favorite podcast app and I'll see you guys next time.