Thank you again to everyone who provided some great questions! First, we’d like to provide what will hopefully be clarity on the purpose of this proposal by distinguishing from what we’d consider the primary objective and the secondary objectives.
The primary focus of this program is to help maximize the effectiveness of the LTIPP / STIP.b incentive programs by establishing a marketing campaign. The DAO is about to be spending 60m ARB and for only an additional 0.4% of that total cost we hope to address some of the pain points discovered by our conversations from LTIPP applicants, STIP recipients, and other Arbitrum DAO participants.
Arbitrum DAO could be doing a lot more when it comes to marketing and growth strategies. The key insights we presented in the Background Section are likely just a few examples of actions that need to be taken. Additionally, as Pedro mentioned it is very difficult to measure the success of a marketing campaign as we have no concrete data for comparison. Thus as a secondary objective, we’d consider this campaign serving as a pilot program for the DAO, generating data and learnings to lay a foundation for future campaigns in the long term.
Questions from @cp0x:
We completely agree that projects should also be maximizing their own social and marketing channels. However, we would still argue that helping advertise these projects at an ecosystem level is in Arbitrum’s best interest. Generating more noise and content across social media will help bring more attention to the ecosystem. Linea’s Surge campaign that was announced yesterday is a great example of this type of support: an announcement + retweets of the project’s own social posts to boost awareness of projects building in the ecosystem.
Arbitrum’s main social accounts are managed by the Foundation, so we can not commit on their behalf that this can be exactly replicated. We have had a promising conversation with their team but there are compliance concerns (as @pedrob mentioned).
We’ve broken down the Program Manager’s responsibilities and the amount of time we expect each will take to complete. These responsibilities will mainly be split between 2 team members (@Cole_404 and @Pruitt), with additional help from the other members of the 404 DAO governance team if needed. This does not include the time our team has allocated to get this proposal to this point and due to these being rough estimates we rounded down our request to 50,000 ARB
| Stage | Responsibility | Estimated Time Spent | Compensation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Campaign | - Creation of the notion hub, engaging with all involved projects to receive all relevant information within the hub - Coordinate between council and agency to ensure brand unification is on track - Coordinate with Arbitrum Foundation to influence brand assets, messaging and design - Organize and conduct weekly calls for agency and council to align on brand direction, visual identity, and messaging - Prepare council reserve ideation form - Research and engage with potential partners derived from council reserve ideas - Prepare form to acquire quests for Layer3 ecosystem map - Delivery of brand kits to each project - Understand compliance concerns with language for social media and ensure agency is aware of any compliance measures that need to be taken - Coordinate with all projects on launch announcement and synchronized rollout |
70 hours per week for 4 weeks = 280 hours | 19,600 ARB |
| Campaign | - Provide announcements regarding marketing updates, budgeting updates and other relevant updates - Coordinate between marketing agency and projects for weekly content highlights and spaces - Assisting Council stay up to date on content decisions and brand strategy from agency - Research and engage with potential partners derived from council reserve ideas - Coordinate execution of reserve fund ideas in tandem with the marketing agency - Coordinating brand unification between agency and Layer3 - Manage collaboration between Layer3 and agency - Creation of bi-weekly reports |
30 hours per week for 10 weeks = 300 hours | 21,000 ARB |
| Post Campaign | - Coordination between agency and council for post-mortem - Preparation of analysis of post campaign insights - Creation of Final DAO report including recommendations for next steps and longer term program |
40 hours per week for 4 weeks = 160 hours | 11,200 ARB |
| Total | NA | ~ 740 hours | 51,800 ARB |
From our conversations it was clear that it’s not a given that users across the industry are aware of these incentives. We admit that we do not have hard data to back this up, but overall, we believe that Arbitrum should be taking every effort to use these programs as an opportunity to reach new users across ecosystems, widening its user base, and showcasing the innovations happening across the ecosystem.
Questions from @pedrob:
After the initial questions on objectives and timelines (addressed above in first paragraph), you next presented several research questions:
We’d agree these are all important questions that the DAO should be working on answering and many of them also came up in our conversations with stakeholders. The findings and answers to these questions should dictate future, larger marketing campaigns. This is mainly why we decided to present this proposal as one campaign instead of a series and kept the timeline relatively short.
Doing this level of research before a LTIPP/STIP.b centered campaign is not possible and by adding it we fear it might complicate the scope of this pilot campaign. There is a new Social Media Fellowship Group from the Onboarding Working Group that has reached out to us and they appear to be working on answering similar questions. There may be an opportunity to collaborate there to have an additional proposal focused on conducting this research.
Regarding concerns on roles and responsibilities:
Advisory Council:
Since this is a pilot program, it is fair to ask why an Advisory Council is necessary. We included a council for primarily two reasons.
- They serve an important role in understanding and upholding the culture of Arbitrum. While Rogue House is familiar with Arbitrum, we have included previous CMO’s and Founders who have experience creating campaigns within Arbitrum. This is to ensure that the unified brand and content strategy align with the current culture.
- Other council members bring a vast network and perspective of what is happening in other ecosystems. If additional resources or skills are needed, these people can help us quickly obtain the talent we may need to produce something of high quality.
Regarding KPIs and measurement of council members performance, we are not trying to be dismissive in this case as we’re normally supportive of quantifiable benchmarks, but we are not sure if this is practical. These members will be mainly serving in an advisory role that is in a limited part-time capacity. They are more so in place to provide expertise and guidance, rather than performance.
We would’ve also liked to include members from the Foundation or OCL on the Advisory Council. From what we will admit were brief conversations with our contacts, this appeared like it would not be possible for COI reasons. In the interest of time we did not fully explore this path, but agree that open lines of communication between these parties is crucial and is something we have been working on building over the last month.
Lastly, in the situation that a conflict of interest (COI) is present during any decisions that will be made by the Advisory Council, the PM will make sure the affected council members recuse themselves from the decision. In the case a vote is required for any decision, a COI exists, and there is a tie, then the PM will step-in to break the tie. Additionally, we’d like to note that Rogue House has no existing COI with any of the projects participating in the LTIPP or STIP.b programs.
Rogue House:
Rogue House has prepared a data room with some examples of their work. They are a newer agency but will be on the community call on Monday to share more about their background.
Project Manager:
404 DAO will be providing comprehensive reports that include insights from the marketing activities, budgeting, and any other relevant updates. To clarify, the marketing reports will be created in tandem with the marketing agency but is the responsibility of the PM to bring to the DAO for reporting purposes.
Measuring Success:
As you mentioned, in order to measure success we need to create a baseline. With LTIP in the works, it is our understanding that there will be additional needs for marketing campaigns which can use the data from this pilot program to measure success. You are correct though in that it may be difficult to distinguish the results of the marketing campaign from the incentive programs themselves. We believe their success goes hand in hand.
Compliance concerns:
We have not conducted a study, but compliance is an important consideration and something that we and Rogue House are aware of.
Questions from @jameskbh:
You are correct that this initiative started with a focus on discoverability and that is still an important objective. We will be addressing the discoverability issue by tagging protocols on the Arbitrum Portal, creating a Layer3 ecosystem map, and a Notion Hub. The incentive program identity rebrand/unification is another key piece that will help increase the exposure of these protocols to a broader audience (explained in more detail below).
In regards to execution, Rogue House will be responsible for building the foundational program messaging and visual identity, which is an important first step prior to the detailed execution strategy. The foundational decisions will inform and dictate the content strategy direction. This is also why the unified brand is paramount, making sure the campaign identity is cohesive helps ensure more effective & consistent communication in content across all channels. A unique look, feel, and tone of voice helps users immediately recognize the program over time. Also, to be clear, when referring to branding in this case we are not attempting to do a massive rebrand of the Arbitrum DAO. This is only for the campaign itself; similar examples are Onchain Summer or Linea Surge.
The agency budget covers the details of the execution strategy we know will happen. Paid ads for example may be a part of the overall crafted strategy and is why we’ve included the reserve budget to help cover additional ideas.
We hope this provided some clarity around the program and answered your questions.