Yeah - I think if anything that is more a comment on how little the vast resources are being utilized to directly promote Stargate (as voiced by almost every reply to the budget proposal you mention) than it is on how outsize the proposal above is, frankly. Even so, significantly more (many millions of dollars) have been spent on incentives and other activities which are arguably “marketing” too, so if you look at it from an apples-to-apples comparison pov, this proposal in its entirety is only a fraction of what has been “spent” in that sense on other endeavors. To be clear, marketing is distinct from advertising, by the way: “If marketing communicates the ‘bigger picture’ of the brand’s identity and message, advertising is the tool to actually get it in front of customers.”
User acquisition (advertising) is what my partner and I are experts at though - we have both built $100m+ businesses that focus on digital advertising, won awards like Forbes 30 Under 30 for the marketing&advertising category, and won awards for most effective funnel creation, among many others. In fact, Snapshot (my partner) has a business that still exists today in the advertising technology world which has tens of millions of dollars a year of profitable revenue and has had for over a decade (he doesn’t actively run it anymore really as he’s full-time Glue, but this should be illustrative). I myself have owned a couple of advertising agencies that represented and worked with some of the biggest names in the world, all very profitably. While I don’t want to “dox” us each as individuals, you can verify these claims with executives of LayerZero whom I have known for many years and am fully undoxed to.
So if there’s one place where I am very confident we can make something happen, it’s on getting users to check out the app. And when we implement proper tracking metrics, we’ll be able to see what is working on a ROI basis, where we’re wasting our money, etc. This unfortunately does take some money to find out - that’s how performance advertising works usually, you “buy knowledge” via various different approaches at once - and then when we find something that is ROI+, we can scale up on it. At that point my hope is it creates a flywheel such that we know that spending $1 begets $2-3 or $10, and we can use the earnings to spend more and get more returns, ad infinitum. This is as compared to how money is typically spent on marketing in crypto, where money is mostly simply thrown at events and one hopes it brings new users, but there’s essentially no proof it does. This is called “brand advertising,” and while there’s a place for it in the world for sure, it is very hard to track whether it is actually a good use of budget. With the approach we take, you can see dollar for dollar whether there is a positive return on investment, down to the campaign level. It’s the best possible way to make sure the pencil is, in fact, sharp.