[OGP-11] Proposing a marketing budget for attracting KOLs

[bebis]

Proposal Chain: Global

Type (Choose one): Funding Proposal

Proposal Author: Justin Bebis

Date: 11/2/2023

Executive Summary

I propose a budget of OATH and USDC to be used in hiring educators and key opinion leaders (influencers) to help promote some of the upcoming changes to the OATH ecosystem. This will help increase the reach and impact of the proposed changes and incentivize thought leaders to further investigate OATH.

Proposal Motivation

Our team is delivering a tremendous amount of new technology and initiatives this quarter. While our own upgraded marketing strategy has improved visibility by nearly 10x in the past 2 months, it is important that we validate our own marketing through the use of 3rd party content creators.

By initiating partnerships with educators and KOLs, we can access new audiences and better spread our ideas across the crypto and DeFi industries. Our reach is currently in the tens of thousands out of millions of market participants, and with our heavily optimized X content, I feel we can grow our reach by an order of magnitude with the right partnerships.

With fewer posts, we are engaging a wider audience and familiarizing DeFi users with the OATH brand. Leveraging this increased familiarity, I feel that advocacy by trusted content creators will greatly improve our ability to convert those acquainted with our protocol into actual users.

I have spoken to a number of creators within our network:
https://twitter.com/crypthoem

https://twitter.com/Ceazor7

https://twitter.com/Subli_Defi

https://twitter.com/jediblocmates

https://twitter.com/rektdiomedes

Who can help to boost our brand visibility and market buy-in through their newsletters, educational content, and brand engagement. This is just an example of potential KOLs, and I would be interested in the community’s favorite content creators to add to this list.

Furthermore, I seek to resource an effort to bring awareness outside of our network. While the OATH Ecosystem community is fairly ‘in the know,’ composed of DeFi power users and industry participants, there are huge swaths of the market who have never heard of us.

In order to reach outside our current obtainable market, I would like to allocate half of a proposed marketing budget to an agency who would help us find new KOLs and community members that have less overlap with our current user base.

The reasons behind your submission of the proposal.

I am submitting this proposal to gain feedback from the community on the best way to spend funds earmarked for advertising and promotion. Historically, we’ve spent very little on these efforts, so getting buy-in and feedback would be excellent.

Proposal Specifics

The OATH Ecosystem needs greater awareness in order to grow to the required level to be a large player in the DeFi space. At current volumes and size, our team has a hard time securing oracles for our assets and support from centralized exchanges.

We believe that this represents a significant mismatch between the size and reach of our organization within the industry and the current level of market penetration. We’ve made sufficient progress on the B2B end of our marketing strategy that the current growth inhibitor is our ability to sustainably service yield requirements for LPs.

I propose a flat amount of USDC and OATH set aside each month for well aligned KOLs and educators who can help to grow the size and reach of the OATH ecosystem with crypto-friendly consumers.

Team Experience

Our team has operated successfully in the crypto industry for 3 years, and is very familiar with the needs of the OATH Foundation.

Key Objectives & Success Metrics

• We seek to grow engagement on X
  • 100% growth in both impressions and engagement within 30 days of initiating this marketing strategy
• We seek to increase market volume of the OATH token
  • ~$100,000 daily volume for the OATH token by the end of the marketing strategy
• We seek to grow the TVL and MAU of our DeFi platforms
  • $5m TVL in Digit.xyz
  • $15m TVL on Ethos.Finance
  • $15m TVL on Reaper.Farm

Length of Engagement & Budget Breakdown

I propose a 3-month campaign with a budget of 8,000 USDC and $8,000 in OATH per month.

Execution of this strategy will be handled by the OATH Foundation team and advisors.

Community Support

Please suggest any influencers that we should make contact with or comment your own information if you feel you could help impact this campaign.

Partnerships

Surge Strategies, OATH Ecosystem Advisors

Risk Assessment

Any time you engage in a marketing partnership, there is the potential for brand risk. If this proposal is approved, we will open another discussion in the forums to finalize the proposed list of KOLs for approval from the community.

Additionally, there is the risk of this effort being ineffective. In a low liquidity environment, the impact of educators and KOLs is greatly lessened, but we feel with intelligent allocation of resources, we can achieve the KPIs illustrated above.

[Teenus]

Fully support this, I think with all the effort that’s been put in from the team it would be stupid not to divert some resources in this way to increase adoption. If there was any time to push through a proposal like this, its now.

One question/concern - If the allocation is 50/50 OATH/USDC, how do you plan on using the funds, would it be the creator’s choice? It may be more beneficial to allocate a larger percentage of Oath to get more genuine support from these creators since they’ll be more vested in its success.

[Cato]

I only read the first sentence. I will read the rest but i need to make the suggestion that Oath does NOT pay KOLs and educators with the OATH token for the simple reason that they will dump it the first chance they get. And this is only the best case scenario. The wrost case is that they will use it to get bOATH to vote for things that will increase their pay or power. Influencers are just that; influencers and we should treat them as such.

We should instead pay them in USDC only. However, if any of them do state that they wish to get paid in OATH or a portion of it in OATH, then we can do so.

[A_S]

I hear your concern, but some could hold it.

Using both USDC and OATH means that KOLs have a stake in the success of the marketing campaigns (at least in my opinion). Also offloads the financial impact to the treasury as we, the team, have A LOT of OATH that hasnt been utilized effectively.

[Ceazor]

Fwiw.

I am farming OATH in various ways, and stacking it as bOATH currently.

And if I’m included in this I will just be adding to that.

I have always liked JB and the byte masons, but I’m quite spread thin on attention so it might not show.

Regardless on how this goes, I will just continue to do the same. Donations or not.

Ceazor

[Cato]

Okay, i read the resr of the proposal. That last point was a bullseye. We are in a bear market and both funds and attention is spread thin on other projects and chains.

For more effective use of funds, instead of focusing on KOLs and influencers, why not expand Oath’s brand and image by partnering up with other YT news/interview channels, similar to Blockbytes? Instead of shilling Oath, Bebis or others can be interviewed to explain to new audience about Oath and what they are building, etc.

I would imagine this would be less costly so perhaps start here?

As for partnerships, we should definitely start reaching out to other projects to get them on board to use Chapters and Digit. Ve(3,3) dexes can be onboarded to have their LPs in Digit. Ince the team includes other tokens and LP on Digist w ecan see what projects can be onboarded

We recently partnered up with Yearn Fi, an OG in this space. But the most popular yield aggregator is Beefy. We should definitely speak to them to list LP tokens from velodrome, retro etc.

Another partnership is offering Chapters on opBNB. And i dont mean just for projects there, but also getting Binance’s and CZ’s attention

[Cato]

Another suggestion is how the team markets Oath. Oath’s big advantage, apart from the team, community and tech is its longitivty. It has been around for 3 years, a long time in this space and it is still building! You guys should market that. Investors will love that a project is still around and has not died. It gives them more confidence in knowing that the project has every intention of surviving this bear market

[Marph]

Would love to see Taiki Maeda doing a video on the Oath ecosystem, maybe doing an interview and showing how he is farming it.

@thehumblefarmer on YT

He is also the founder of @HFAresearch, the Humble Farmer Army.

Imo it would be worthwhile to consider him and HFA!

Cheers

[Subli]

Thanks a lot Justin for quoting me as your partner to spread the words.

To reply on some on the concerns above, i think i need to introduce myself and what type of media support i can use to support Oath growth.

So, some already know me, starting my journey in Defi 2 years ago, i’ve been in contact with the Byte Masons since spring 2022 as user, and summer 2022 as making some contents about The whole Oath vision. I’ve always loved reaper and the educative content they build to teach defi.

I’m also an Optimism Super Ambassador, maybe the one having the largest reach on the OP Superchain, and very close to the whole superchain ecosystem.

And finally i’m also the founder of The Optimist media, the One & Unique media covering DEFI on the OP stack. Some stats:

• weekly newsletter + podcast
• 10k Subscribers
• available in 13 languages
• Som high level subscribers (VCs, Project/blockchain Teams like Mantle or Layer0, Worldwide media like Cointelegraph)
• Team of 20 members, most of them being active on the Optimism community

Whatever if the DAO will decide to partner with me or with The Optimist, OATH will be converted in bOATH and staked.

I’m deeply aligned with the vision of the Oath Foundation, and like the team… Not a surprise Charles is part of The Optimist team… And for so alpha, i’ve already planned for next week a complete article summarizing these past 3 months which has been really incredible.

I’m open to any question of the community.

Some reference links:
https://x.com/Subli_Defi
https://x.com/Th3Optimist

The Optimist | Subli_Defi | Substack

[Cato]

I would agree that KOLs and educators would get OATH and the stake it. But that is if they want to. Unless they explicitly ask for OATH, it would be counterproductive to give them a token they dont see as valuable. Hence why i suggested to just give them usdc.

Now if they ask to be paid in OATH, then by all means.

Yes, it does create more strain on the treasury, but it would prevent a sell of and investors from panicking. This pre-otoken options. Post-otokens might be a different story, as ppl can get oath for much cheaper

[yuvi]

I think this is a reasonable approach.

I would prefer to pay for KOLs outside of the OATH/Optimism communities because that is where we should focus on attracting users.

People like rektdiomedes and the blockmates team have a different audience than what we are used to so I anticipate bigger impact paying them over OP native or OATH related KOLs.

As for payment, it’s likely KOLs will prefer stablecoins as payment, and if we pay them with OATH, then it is entirely up to them what they do with it.

I would like to see them stake it as a vote of confidence, and maybe they agree to stake it for a duration, with the incentive of helping OATH appreciate by the end of the term, but ultimately it should be up to them.

$8K in OATH per month is not a significant price impact and we shouldn’t be afraid of service providers selling.

[bebis]

We love Taiki, i will try to hunt him down!

[jorn]

100% agree with your statements.

I am in favor of paying in USDC and OATH as originally proposed.

Just as @bebis laid out that paying out OATH will help …

@bebis

incentivize thought leaders to further investigate OATH

… we can think about offering digit USDC relics instead of plain USDC. This would get recipients even more engaged. Once bOATH has been integrated with digit offering such as payment might be another attractive option.

[Cato]

I like your idea of offering USDC and bOATH relics. By default, this gets KOLs to use the products. But again, i would still urge not to force these educators and KOLs to receive bOATH if they dont want to

[Lunaman]

Fully support this proposal. I think strategic KOL campaigns make a lot of sense to expand the community and bring attention to the product and developments. In general this type of efforts are looked upon badly since many are related to pumps and dumps and short term activity.
I agree with this view however this is the case for many protocols BECAUSE they don’t have an innovative product or are not serious in their efforts to build a successful business in the long term.
This is obviously not the case with the Byte Masons and thus these type of campaigns are necessary to keep growing. The best technology does not win, the best marketed one does

[Fly]

I think the 50:50 split between USDC and bOATH is very smart, it could definitely engage thought leaders more

[ericbal]

Hey everyone, and hello @bebis!

I’m brand new to this forum, but @Subli encouraged me to join the conversation, so here I am.

Allow me to introduce myself briefly. I’m ericbal, and I entered the world of cryptocurrency back in 2017. Over the years, I’ve had my fair share of experiences, including some setbacks where I lost both time and money in various projects. However, these experiences have taught me invaluable lessons about the industry

In my offline life, I work as the head of strategy at communication agencies. This background has led me to focus on assisting projects with their marketing and communication needs, covering areas such as branding, content creation, community strategies, and production.
One of my notable collaborations was with CRE8R DAO**,** a content agency you might be familiar with, where Ceazor played a pivotal role. I served as one of the two Project Managers. CRE8R successfully supported numerous projects, generating over $1 million in earnings.

While CRE8R excelled in content creation, it had room for improvement in terms of reach and influence. Recognizing this, I decided to establish my own influence agency approximately height months ago. I’ve built a network of more than 75 active CTs, including individuals like Subli and RektDiomedes, with whom I’ve previously collaborated.

So, what exactly do I offer to my clients?
I take care of all aspects of CT management, which can be quite time-consuming for organizations. Here are the main tasks I handle:

• Clients select the CTs they wish to collaborate with from a curated list.
• I reach out to the selected CTs to gauge their interest and confirm pricing.
• I provide assistance in crafting effective briefings for clients.
• Once I’ve collected all the draft materials, I conduct an initial review and share them with the client for their input.
• I facilitate communication between the client and the CTs, managing the editing and revision process.
• I coordinate publication dates to align with the client’s preferences.
• I ensure that the content is published on time and share it with the client.
• I handle the CT payments as an escrow wallet, serving as the intermediary between the client and the CTs.

If you’re considering working closely with CTs in the near future, working with seasoned experts in the field can save you time and enhance your effectiveness.
It’s maybe an option you are considering.
If so, feel free to ask any questions or share your feedback.

[Surge]

Thanks a lot Justin for proposing the idea and quoting us a partner for the initiative.

We fully support the program and feel that KOL identification with unexplored distribution can yield rich dividends while also increasing the overall brand appeal for OATH.

We feel that the OKRs highlighted by Justin are perfectly achievable and provide a lucrative risk:reward for the DAO. Surge will work alongside the OATH team to implement key parts of the initiative centered around increasing overall brand recall for OATH products amongst retail.

As highlighted by Justin, we would be looking forward for suggestions around KOLs that you feel can create impact and would have the highest overlap with the audience we are targeting. We would be helping the OATH team in reaching out and onboarding them for the OATH program.

[Surge]

Hey Ceazor, nice to be connecting with you.

Please share your social profile and contact details.

[Surge]

For more effective use of funds, instead of focusing on KOLs and influencers, why not expand Oath’s brand and image by partnering up with other YT news/interview channels, similar to Blockbytes?

We second your opinion and also plan to target news channels, YT, podcasts with relevant distribution overlap. We are looking at thought leaders in the CDP, L2, Yield space rather than spreading thin with generic news outlets. Happy to hear your suggestions and recommendations.

As for partnerships, we should definitely start reaching out to other projects to get them on board to use Chapters and Digit. Ve(3,3) dexes can be onboarded to have their LPs in Digit. Ince the team includes other tokens and LP on Digist w ecan see what projects can be onboarded

Agree to the proposal here. We have implemented this strategy for Aurelius with the idea of collaborating with other projects to have product level integrations.