I see an opportunity to deliver sales in an entirely new way.
Today, marketers and sales organizations pay for advertising. Given that everything is online, advertising is also digital, and Facebook and Google, and their cousins dominate the online advertising markets. Their bread-and-butter is the CPC model, the so-called Cost-Per-Click.
Not only do these paid-for clicks cost way too much money that has to be paid upfront without any guarantee of success, but what's worse, they also convert into sales at a less than 1% rate. If there was any other industry that operated in this incredibly inefficient way, they'd long have gone out of business. But here, in the online advertising universe, TINA is the name of the game. TINA is There Is No Alternative.
The Internet has become dominated by "big tech" platform companies. As far as reaching potential customers for their products or services, businesses have to play the online advertising game, the CPM game (number of views bought by the thousand), the CPC game (as described above), and the CPA game (cost per action such as an app download or submitting a lead-generation form), the sponsored content game (paying for infomercials and content that looks more legitimate than it might be), the influencer marketing game (paying people with large numbers of followers on social media to endorse brands), and so on and on.
All these approaches cost money upfront and convert at a 1% efficiency rate (usually lower), and the other 99% of purchased activity goes wasted. This assumes that the activity reported by the platforms is accurate (there's no way to verify and no two analytics services match) and that those clicks are not fraudulent, powered by click farms or AI-bots.
If Awake could provide businesses a way to market and drive sales without paying upfront money and with perfect tracking across various digital platforms, we'd really have something. In particular, the digital advertising industry suffers from what is known as The Attribution Problem, and if we solved it, we'd be able to change the fundamental business model of the Internet.
The short version of the problem statement is that because the Internet is fragmented into various clouds that belong to different platform companies, it is impossible to tell how a sale actually happens. Instead, businesses using the various platforms for advertising can only get information about the final click before the purchase, which only confirms the particular platform or website the buyer came from. This happens because of the walled garden nature of the platforms, and a solution would allow businesses to see what is actually going on out there on the Internet as far as their own brand was concerned.
If we could solve the attribution problem it would enable many new things that the original Internet had promised but not delivered. First, businesses would be able to see precisely how sales happen as buyers traverse the various digital properties and platforms of the Internet, and in fact, businesses could pay each platform or even people (users of those platforms) directly for helping drive sales in a 100% transparent and open manner, and most importantly do it after the actual sale transpired, removing the need for the expensive and inefficient prepaid ad model.
Second, content creators and users of various Internet platforms and properties around the world would suddenly be able to monetize their activity, and directly get paid for any sales they participated in. The Internet would move from last-click attribution to full-funnel attribution, allowing multiple creators to share in any given sale. This would unlock influencers from being just users with a lot of followers today to everyone on the Internet. We all have influence, and we should be able to use our networks to provide value directly to people we're connected with and we should be able to directly co-create value with anyone else on the Internet.
Third, a very meaningful change would be effected on the Internet. Today, the model of sales is fundamentally broken. Most people don't enjoy selling to others much less to friends and family, and most people certainly do not enjoy being sold to. The truth is that sales do not happen, instead only purchases occur. This means, to the question of who came first, the buyer or the seller, the answer is not that one must have something to sell first, but that when a buyer appears, so do sellers. With the ability to unlock multi-touch attribution across the Internet, people would no longer need to actively sell or promote products and services, but instead, they could focus on all the previous clicks that happen before a potential buyer decides to become a buyer and effects the last click.
Fourth, an even more meaningful change would be enabled. The platforms companies that today have gone from being gateways to gatekeepers to the Internet economy could finally be disintermediated by their own users and indeed any user on the Internet. The original vision of an open transparent Internet would finally be delivered, and if we do our jobs right, it would be a far simpler solution than the complex blockchain technologies being touted today. We're talking about the Consumer-to-Consumer economy (also known as the peer-to-peer economy), and this reboot of the Internet would spawn not a just handful of new platform companies, but millions of micro-networks and micro platforms around the world.
My mom would be able to use these new platforms without having to understand the technology behind them, she'd just be able to participate in any shared economy she likes with just one click, all powered by Awake in the cloud. I know she'd be proud of what we'd accomplish for the world, for all the people less fortunate than us.
We wouldn't even need to invite more regulations or the government to meddle in the affairs of private enterprise and private society. Technology would once again come to the rescue. We would unlock the real entrepreneurship economy, not just the creator economy, and we'd make a serious impact on the global problems of poverty and hunger, and provide employment and empowerment and dignity for hundreds of millions if not billions of human beings we share this planet with. Awake would enable the largest sales force on the planet, empowering them through a direct and regenerative economy, all powered by the Internet Market Protocol, aka Shoptype.
PS - Read the whole book at Beyond All Clouds.
