I will vote in favor of restarting the whole process from scratch, including removing curators and set new standards about Marketing spendings. Defining a plan, KPIs and the targeted audience.

A/ The selection of KOLs is terrible.

The majority are shillers, that only know about charts.
We don't need people to buy DOT, we need users, we need activity. Staking is not an activity, DOT are locked and generate 0 activity (except for LSTs).

Depending on the audience and the goal we have, we need a total shift in the selected KOLs.

B/ The targeted audience is not the good one.

Polkadot is about infra, do you think retail users are interested by AWS ads on the street ?
No, as a retail you are interested in apps on top of the infra.

Same worths for L0.
Marketing the L0 (Polkadot) should not be the end goal.
If you want Polkadot to succeed, you need to market the appchains, that the ones that bring users to the ecosystem.
And end users don't even have to know they are on Polkadot.

C/ 99% of the people don't care about the tech details

Don't speak about Polkadot 2.0 or JAM, the basic user doesn't care about it.
A basic user doesn't care about decentralization and Coretime and Elastic Scaling.
A basic user wants to trade A for B, transfer from B to C. That's it.

If you want to speak about tech details, target the good person, not the retail.

D/ Following C, the important is that the basic actions from any newbie in the ecosystem are simple.

So far we have not reach that goal even if we improved a lot. We have great wallets now.
But there are still barriers for a basic user to enter the ecosystem (CEX transfers, ED, mix of addresses...), hopefully some of the main issues should be tackled through ref 819 and the UX bounty, + the work of Velocity Labs.

So marketing to Retail again, it's not the good audience.

E/ Following point B, the goal ?

As the main goal of Polkadot is to have an unstoppable, scalable & decentralized infra, the audience should be the builders, the developers, web2 companies or institutionals that want to build on top of Polkadot.
Breing the devs and the teams, you will have users.

If appchains succeed, then Polkadot succeeds.
But so far, Polkadot has never been designed to be a blockchain hub for Retail like Solana for instance.

We all know that Polkadot is not the home of Defi (lack of liquidity), even if we have some flagships to market (Bifrost, Hydration, Acala before).
So far, we won't have the hords of nerds for Defi on Polkadot, notably due to the complexity discussed in the previous point.

Mewe users don't even know they are on Polkadot, Mythical users don't even know they are on Polkadot, it should be the way, "Polkadot" by design will be abstracted more and more.

**F/ Proposals to fund some private companies **
(like Virtune for the Nordic ETP campaign If the only benefit is for the private company in the end, it should also be denied.
Public funding means public benefits (users, devs, teams). Not private ones.

**Marketing is not here so that DOT get 1 spot ETF. **We are not here to fund TradFi.
If one day we have 1 spot ETF, it will come direclty from the TradFi institutions, not us.

Conclusion

So i ask the question:

• What is our real audience ?
  (if our audience is more on the dev side, then we are talking about hackathons and PBA, not taxis in the street. If our audience is more on the company isde, then we need BD, not football jerseys).

• **What do we have to market in the ecosystem ? **
  (appchains ? relay-chain ? Both and if so in what proportion)

• What is the final goal for the marketing bounty ?
  (just brand awareness ?)

- What are the expected KPIs ?
(we see that conversion are very poor so i really doubt we are targeting the good people).

Finally, i know the community really enjoys the Indy car race, or having a Polkadot logo on a football jersey, or even the taxis and airport biilboards.
I liked the outcome of the Indy race and i think Conor was a great ambassador, but in the end, what did we receive ? (besides temporary exposition).

We do not have to mix what is "fun" (sports partnership), and reality.
The reality is that these partnerships are costly and bring a near 0 ROI to the ecosystem.

I really hope the community will start to ask more questions about any future marketing proposals.

• What is the audience ?
• What is the goal ?
• What are the KPIs ?
  Fun is not a decision factor.

Easy Aye. I am not against marketing. I think it needs to be more transparent and it needs to be revamped with common sense marketing. Right now, that doesn't seem to be the case.