Increase Awareness of Polkadot On-Brand Messages via Twitter Ads (5/1/24-12/31/24)
Colorful Notion proposes to run $720K in On-Brand Twitter ads to Increase awareness of On-brand Polkadot messages from the Twitter accounts of Polkadot, Polkadot Parachains + Projects ecosystem-wide.
This is a follow-on to OpenGov Ref #324 and increases spend from $50K/mo (see Polkadot OpenGov Ref #324 Transparency Report (March 31, 2024)) to $90K/mo, promoting messages Polkadot-ecosystem wide in a larger range of countries. The ongoing #324 campaign has been boosting tweets from the following accounts:
This 577 Campaign is proposed to continue to be run as follows:
- Ad Spend: $720,000 [85% of Requested Amount]
- Strategy: Optimizing for High Reach and High Engagement (eCPE)
- Time Period: May 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024 ( 8 months )
- General Campaign Target: English-Speaking, High GDP Countries
(US, GB, AU, NZ, CA, IE, JP, KR, DE, FR, IT, ES, NL, BE, NO, FI, DK, CH, AT, LU, SE, PT, AE, SG) - Specific Campaign Targeting: Based on campaign message, with advisements from DF-funded Distractive + the OpenGov community, using "Follower Lookalike Targeting" from both Campaign Management Systems
- Campaign Management Systems: Twitter Ads Direct (66%) for High Reach campaigns and Addressable.io (33%) for Highly Targeted (KPI-optimized, usually for lower eCPE) campaigns (discretionary allocation based on Campaign needs)
At this level of spend, throughout the 8-month campaign run, we anticipate:
- 1 BILLION Twitter impressions (at average of $0.792 CPM)
- Reach: 10MM+ crypto twitter users in the General Campaign Target
- Frequency: 100 impressions/user on average
As of March 31, 85% of the $144K allocated from #324 has been spent ($120.7K of $144K) with the remaining 15% expected to be exhausted by the end of April.
Key Benefits to DOT Tokenholders:
- Robustly increase awareness of On-brand Polkadot Messages for mass crypto retail users (to both Polkadot AND parachains/projects) and builders (on both 1.0 parachains + 2.0 new technology [JAM, CoreTime, and so on])
- Demonstrate Decentralized Marketing at scale, funded by OpenGov
Polkadot OpenGov Ref #324 Transparency Report (March 31, 2024)
Do you want to see the Polkadot ecosystem marketed via Twitter Ads?
If you do, please comment on OpenGov Ref #577 indicating your support .. and vote! 5 Decentralized Voices in #577 with 30MM+ NAYs [and a DOT Activist not voting] ensure that this will not be renewed.
Objections raised by DVs and the broader community .. and our proposal adjustments!
Overall spend of $200K/month is too much!
We adjusted the proposal. Instead of increasing $50K/mo spend to $200K/mo, we increased to $90K/mo spend. Its an 80% increase.
That is still too much money!
No, $90K/mo is not. Polkadot is a $10B market cap company. Crypto Twitter has not yet taken over by Farcaster, Subsocial, Mastodon in sufficient numbers. The reach of 10MM+ Twitter users is there. Most of those people can be targeted with Addressable and Twitter direct at scale.
How dare you promote DED!
It was definitely reasonable at the time to promote a 100% community generated token in Dec/Jan: *Because I am not an omniscient God, I could not predict what would happen in March back in Dec/Jan. However, it is no longer reasonable as of mid-March.
As to memecoins, I hate them too. Unfortunately, they are a part of what happens in Web3. BTC, DOGE, SHIB are all memecoin. They attract users. We have to relax and bring real people into the ecosystem to have fun. Polkadot is capable of everything.
Do not promote giotto tweets. He is a _______
Done! Promoting giotto content was useful in December in January but there is no need anymore as he is a DED activist rather than a DOT activist. Lets keep our blood pressure low and stay healthy and breathe the fresh air!
Lack of transparency
This report should cover it! All the raw data is in a table. You can query it. If you have an idea on how to weight the future marketing, please share!
This is all very random! You should have a meticulous plan in Month 1 of what should happen in Month 4.
False! Invention happens in the Polkadot ecosystem at extremely high rates. Ecosystem wide marketing of Polkadot cannot be a single campaign promoting one thing. You cannot know in December what will happen in April. One day its CoreJam, another day its JAM. That's part of the reason why we love Polkadot.
That said, you can have very focussed campaigns promoting ONE thing each month, e.g Polkadot+AI in April, Polkadot+Gaming in May, Polkadot+SocialNetworking in June, etc. But then the AI people not getting any voice in the other 11 months makes little sense. There is nothing wrong with a focussed based approach being combined
You are not a marketing professional!
False. I've done advertising startups my whole career. I've done $150MM of TAC in my life, $144K is nothing. I bought from Twitter's Mopub had Twitter as a advertiser in previous startups I've founded. But in this context, I understand what Twitter+Addressable is doing very well, and because the colorful notion team is doing ecosystem wide Dune integration, we follow most activity in the ecosystem closer than non-Polkadot people could.
Lack of closed-loop optimization
It is true that almost of the activity is for pure awareness, and is optimized for eCPE. But Web3 people do not like being tracked!
Everything should be in bounties. Or a collective.
No. While I agree that having more people look at something and advise on how to improve something is definitely useful, adding a bunch of curators or having N other people in a collective would not help. If I screwed up in executing in 324, someone can say what I did wrong. At the end of the day, 1 person has to push a button and N people can complain about it after the fact but NOT marketing at all makes little sense.
Distractive should do it instead.
Probably! Distractive is extremely capable and has wonderful positive people. I have met with them and should this pass or fail, we are super happy to work with them collaboratively. This data has been provided to Distractive's Katie Butler and the entire universe.
How dare you use your own account to run ads and promote yourself!
This is not a serious objection. Whereas the TheKus #298 ran ads that was "Follow the Kus!" and showcased The Kus in dozens of video content (which I love and see nothing wrong with), I did not. Our ads were like these:
In addition, we see no problem promoting @colorfulnotion's Dune dashboards. After all, Colorful Notion has been active in Polkadot analytics for the last 2 years and will continue to be a Polkadot ecosystem agent for the next 2 years with #366. If you think these are ads are somehow problematic, that's just too bad.
Thank you Addressable!
Tomer, Lev and Andres at Addressable were extremely valuable to make this campaign work and have a great platform. They have special skills with Twitter Ad Ops that very few Web3 teams will be able to replicate. Everyone in Web3 marketing should do campaigns with Addressable. Great platform, awesome people.
Thank you OpenGov + DOT Token holders!
Polkadot OpenGov is completely decentralized. Lead proposer Sourabh Niyogi would like to thank Polkadot OpenGov for the opportunity to get back and do some good old advertising work and get to know some fabulous Polkadot people better.
Requested Amount
97,747.61 DOT
TRANSPARENCY REPORT ON DUNE
Polkadot OpenGov Ref #324 Transparency Report (March 31, 2024)
Comments (11)
Requested
Proposal Failed
Summary
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Aye
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Aye (55)0.0 DOT
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Nay (85)0.0 DOT
the more awareness the better... lets go out strong
Unfortunately, due to the fact that you are proudly amplifying / have amplified the X accounts "@giottodf" and your own "@colorfulnotion" and you have also proposed to keep amplifying these accounts for the next batch, we have made the decision to vote against it without a recourse for flipping to AYE. Let us explain why:
On the full proposal for referendum 324
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U99BS6NK18bYmmizOkThAVabb4pzKecEbF24GovxF_Y/edit
You guys proposed to amplify Narratives and Native Ads (including but not limited to: HydraDX, KodaDot, Apillon, Lastik, PolkaVM, CoreJam, Polkadot Staking APRs, Mythical, Frequency, EnergyWebX, Parachains, Decentralized Futures Program), Polkadot True Believers (including but not limited to: alice_und_bob, stakenode_dev).
According to your report, Instead we got these other accounts and topics like the DED memecoin. Which looks different from the original intention of 324.
Moreover, 324's proposal also states that "If you are a True Believer (not “shilling”, never trolling anyone, following Polkadot Code of Conduct,[...]) so amplified accounts should follow such rules. Misinformation is included. Such point is missing now on your new proposal (577) by the way.
So, the most pressing topic is here the inclusion of the account "@giottodf" who has been engaging in underhanded tactics such as the spread of misinformation against us and
other members of the ecosystem as evidenced here:
Misinformation spread
https://twitter.com/saxemberg/status/1767552078681882866
https://twitter.com/saxemberg/status/1768422595664154761
Motivation for DV attacks on X
https://twitter.com/giottodf/status/1767131133454532823
Also against many other accounts in the ecosystem.
If you guys ran a sentiment analysis on the content or if you made a qualitative analysis of said account you can easily see that this is far away from the content you will like to amplify. Moreover, if you guys had followed the content you will have seen already the misinformation that the account is actively spreading. The inclusion of such account is concerning as you were already aware of how controversial (to say the least and in a polite manner) that account is. For that reason we would like to see that account grow organically without ads paid by the treasury. Moreover, we see problematic that the biggest voter for the previous proposal got his own X account amplified and who also broke the code of conduct according to 324's rules and this proposal (577) aims to amplify such account once again.
We are also aware that even if such posts were not amplified and paid for specifically, Twitter/X still boosts amplified accounts in order to get more revenue in the future. So even if the argument is that other most positive tweets/posts were amplified, the result of account amplification is still the same regardless due to the increased activity in previous non-controversial topics.
Another point of friction here is the inclusion of your own X posts, something that was not expected in 324 as we thought that such campaign would have focused MORE on other accounts and not be part of a self-promotion.
As a final lingering point, we can also argue that accounts like @astar and @watanabesota probably don't include Polkadot as much anymore so having them included and not including the work of other, more active Polakcentric parachains, dapps and projects sounds like a mismatch of strategy. So we are unsure Colorful Notion's knowledge of the current state of the Polkadot ecosystem and its needs. But that is open to debate.
@saxemberg
Its unfortunate that OpenGov disputes are turning personal and affecting rational vote behavior on large levels of ad spend. We will remove giottodf from promotion in both #324 and #577. We collected enough data concerning boosting OpenGov participation (from DED to the Indy 500) and what matters is boosting product and news, not opinions.
A number of substantive questions were raised concerning message distribution:
For @colorfulnotion posts, I used this for promoting tweet content that I did not have direct access to. Promoting "reposts" and "quoted tweets" is not possible via Twitter ads -- promoted tweets have be directly posted by the account (see screenshot for @polkadot and compare to x.com/polkadot to see what I mean). For example, Gav gave a powerful keynote about JAM Chain from sub0 this week that was from @paritytech (permission not solicited) -- this is/was the kind of message we used @colorfulnotion to boost. The message is about JAM Chain, a massive new product direction for Polkadot. Its best if it comes from @polkadot but if it comes from @colorfulnotion because it can't come from polkadot, we think this kind of boost is easily justified. The #298 approach of "Follow the Kus!" was never attempted in #324. However, because of colorfulnotion work on Dune integration in #366, we may promote colorfulnotion's data analyses e.g. on Decentralized Voices, any number of Polkadot dashboards or parachain ddashboards. Tweets like this were not more than 7% of the total spend and were dominated by the presence of @gavofyork and “Polkadot 2.0” messaging. Going forward, we think its foolish to disallow the flexibility to have colorfulnotion generate tweets and its the first and primary Twitter Ads promotion technique.
I agree that it makes little sense to have OpenGov fund promotion of messages that are clearly outside the Polkadot ecosystem (e.g. Astar zkEVM). However, I don't think its a very mature viewpoint to wholesale reject chains (or their key leadership) that work in multiple ecosystems (Astar, Manta, Centrifuge, Interlay, Pendulum, Composable, Mythical etc.) and put them on some kind of "enemy" list. This should not be a debate: web3 activity is multiecosystem, and OpenGov funded advertising should just promote messages that are good for Polkadot. Turning this into an algorithmic rule like must mention "secured by Polkadot" is unnecessarily draconian. Going forward, 577 aims to use common sense on this front.
Re memecoin messages, I promoted a few DED messages to collect performance data on the cost to acquire a new Telegram user of dotisded, compare it to influencer marketing (cf 385). It turned out Twitter ad ops did not allow direct links to t.me/dotisded, which made eCPAs higher. I understand that memecoins is a polarizing topic for many, but to NOT collect eCPA data would be foolish given the massive level of interest the topic has received from so much of the Polkadot ecosystem in Q1 2024 from wallets to DEX parachains and beyond. I understand memecoins themselves are debatable, but not collecting eCPA data is poor judgement. The total amount of spend on this was less than 4% of the total. Going forward, many parachains/projects may involved some parts of their product with memecoins and it is not sensible to disallow this in 577.
@giottodf himself is a major OpenGov figure, polarizing and passionate. The data collected concerned stimulating OpenGov participation, which seemed reasonable at the time and still does. The total amount of spend on this was less than 2% of the total, mostly in January while I was awaiting W3F/Polkadot legal permissions to clear and getting a few leading parachains onboard. The reality is that most people, including @giottodf, doesn't want a "Ad" next to his opinion. Going forward, it's unnecessary to have giottodf related content.
For message weighting / budget assignment across dozens of Polkadot parachains and projects, we believe a sensible cooperative procedure could be developed. Prior to DV creation, a “Narratives” TG group served as a rough guide about what parachains/projects should be promoted, which factored into 324 significantly. With the new DV program, it shouldn’t be that hard for 7 DVs to pull out a Google Sheet as a ephemeral committee and develop a weighting scheme, which can modulate budgets and CPM bids. It is far more reasonable to coordinate 8-10 parties than dozens to hundreds in a chat room. Going forward, happy to attempt to lead this but it does require a cooperative mindset.