• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 18, 2024

After a career spent writing for and advising CMOs on the next new thing, author, consultant and former agency exec Joe Jaffe is becoming one.

Jaffe has joined startup Benjamin Capital Partners -- a startup marketing an unusual financial services app Benjamin, which pays consumers cash in exchange for performing tasks for brands -- as CMO.

"If I tell you everything I've done before has led up to this, you'll like, how many times have I said that before," Jaffe, a serial entrepreneur who has repeatedly tried to reinvent marketing's wheel throughout his career, told MediaPost during a briefing held before this morning's announcement. "But I'm not saying it this time.

"It's not something I was looking for," he said, explaining there were two reasons he made the leap.

"Of all the work I did for CMOs, I never thought I'd be one. That, plus this really is the realization of everything I've written. It really is "Life After The 30-Second Spot," and it's completely "Flipped The Funnel," he explained, citing two of the more famous books he has published that embody his ongoing pursuit of the next disruptive movement in advertising, media and marketing.

In his last incarnation, Jaffe was all-in on Web3, literally tokenizing himself in a series of NFTs people could buy and sell.

Before that, he had launched the S.S. Beagle, a new age brand consultancy with a Darwinistic approach to brand survival.

Now as a CMO himself, Jaffe will get to test his theories hands-on, in real life.

And while Benjamin isn't a major brand -- yet -- he believes its disruptive business model will make it one, albeit with the right combination of both B2B (convincing marketers to pay cash direct-to-consumers) and B2C (convincing consumers to install and actively use an app so they can be paid directly when they complete tasks desired by brand marketers.

What kind of tasks?

"We're focusing on disrupting four categories," he explained, citing: "The first is shopping. The second is gaming. The third is advertising. And the fourth is banking."

If Benjamin sounds like a mashup of loyalty marketing apps like Ibotta, gaming install marketing, rewarded opt-in advertising, and fintech, that's because it is intentionally designed around that kind of spoke-and-wheel design, concentrating initially on those sectors, but with bold ambitions of being the all things marketing/everything app.

One of the big things differentiating Benjamin from other apps competing in each or combinations of those sectors is that it pledges to pay consumers 100% in cash (the name Benjamin is a reference to $100 U.S. bills featuring Benjamin Franklin on their notes), not in points, swag, discounts, or other forms of non-monetary consumer promotion.

Consequently, Jaffe's mission is to market to two separate but interdependent audiences -- brand marketers and the consumers they're trying to reach -- with a simple, unifying message that brings them together through an app exchanging values between them that can be expressed as hard currency.

Since coming out of beta in October 2023, the Benjamin app has had more than 2 million downloads and it claims its monthly active user base has grown more than 20 times since the beginning of this year and that the rate is accelerating.

By comparison, one of its chief competitors, 12-year-old Ibotta, claims to have had 50 million downloads to date.

Convincing marketers to pay cash to consumers may be Jaffe's biggest challenge, but it also is integral to marketing to consumers, creating a chick-and-egg dilemma.

"The goal is to generate a minimum of $100 per month per user," Jaffe said, holding his personal Benjamin account up to a video screen to show that he himself has already earned $280 since installing the Benjamin app about five months ago. His current balance is $249.80.

To earn it, he had to log in to the app each day, linked all his credit cards, and engaged with online games, watched rewarded opt-in ads, and shopped and scanned various store purchase receipts.

"I probably log into my account 20 times a day and it's not just because I'm the CMO, it's because I want to see what my claims are," Jaffe said, explaining how the Benjamin app's reward mechanics work on a gamified level, not just because of the cash earnings, but the extrinsic value of "earning."

"We're trying to make this as transparent and friendly as possible," he explained. "So that means avoiding points programs and exchange value that confuse users," Jaffe added, concluding that the mechanic he personally is most interested in is his ability to test and prove what he's been preaching to brand marketers all along.

"I have a real opportunity to implement so many of the frameworks that I've written about and advised marketers to use. Now I get a chance to implement them myself, which is personally rewarding."