Commentary

Why 'Onchain' Is The Next New Ad Industry Jargon

When it comes to leading next-gen digital media and marketing innovation, the U.S. ad industry likes to brag that it’s always one step ahead, but Europeans have leap-frogged the States in at least one next new thing: jargon.

In its sum-up of last week’s special Digital Spring Summit, the Cologne, Germany-based DMEXCO conference nailed the transition from old school to new school digital marketing by dubbing it “onchain,” as opposed to online.

The chain DMEXCO is referring to, of course, is the blockchain, which is the core component of most Web3 innovation enabling new forms of decentralized, autonomous, secure and indelible forms of marketing that could not otherwise exist without it.

And while the U.S. marketing industry seems focused on the brightest and shiniest parts of Web3 – especially the irrational market values surrounding the collectables nature of NFTs, or the speculative nature of crypto – the DMEXCO summit focused more on the practical (and pragmatic) evolution of digital marketing technology, and how the blockchain can create more meaningful experiences for brands and their consumers.

“The future is ‘onchain’ instead of online,” the conference organizers stated, in their spring summit post-mortem, noting, “Digital goods massively increase in value when they are linked to unique non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Intermediaries and brokers lose their influence in the blockchain era. Digital wallets will be a new form of identification and login. And crypto firms will rise to the ranks of the top 10 companies over the next ten years.”

And while the U.S. already is bracing for an early market crash around the hyper-inflated NFT marketplace (see The Wall Street Journal’s “NFT Sales Are Flat-Lining”), at least one DMEXCO speaker – Christopher Obereder – predicted several crypto and NFT firms will be among the global top 10 within ten years.

“NFTs have changed the world for many artists. The same creator who previously sold a painting for a few thousand dollars can now get several million for the digital version,” he noted.

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