What is Web3 in marketing?

The proposition

Web3's marketing pitch rested on three claims: users would own their data and identity through wallets rather than platform accounts; ownership of digital assets would create new loyalty mechanics; and decentralised identity would make cross-platform targeting possible without intermediaries.

Each is technically coherent. The question was always whether enough people would adopt wallet-based identity for any of it to matter commercially.

What has actually worked

• Token-gated access for genuine communities, where holding something confers real membership and benefits.
• Wallet-based loyalty in categories where users already hold wallets, particularly gaming.
• Provenance and authenticity for high-value physical goods, which is a supply chain application rather than a marketing one.
• Not mass-market NFT campaigns, which produced a great deal of spending and very little durable value.

An honest assessment

Most Web3 marketing activity between 2021 and 2023 did not survive, and the reason is instructive rather than merely embarrassing.

Brands adopted the technology before establishing what problem it solved for their customers. A collectible with no use, issued to an audience with no wallets, sold on a speculative premise, is not a loyalty programme — and calling it one did not make the mechanics work.

The residue that survived is where wallets already existed and ownership already meant something. That is a small set of categories and it is real. The pattern generalises: technology adopted before the customer problem is identified produces activity rather than results, which is worth remembering as the same enthusiasm now attaches to AI.