Enterprise-grade solutions should be a welcome sign for brands, said Nich Seo, director of go-to-market at agency Media.Monks. These tools, modeled after the adaptability of SaaS software, are built to fit within pre-existing tech stacks, such as a Web3 loyalty program.
NFT company OneOf launched a SaaS product this month that is built on three features: a crypto wallet, loyalty program and data-rich secondary marketplace for branded assets. Depending on what a brand already has established, OneOf will help fill in the gaps, or offer the entire solution to those with no infrastructure yet in place.
Data comes in, value goes out
Having better access to consumer data is a core component of OneOf’s SaaS product. The platform allows brands to set up a secondary marketplace for their assets and other rewards, through which consumers can buy and trade as they would on OpenSea. The trading activity provides more data for brands than the classic, “one-to-many” model for loyalty, in which a single party is responsible for sending rewards to a multitude of recipients.
“When you tokenize rewards, and allow consumers to trade, you offer a many-to-many loyalty program,” said Danny Wright, chief brand officer at OneOf. The result is more streams of data to collect and analyze.
Bringing SaaS solutions to Web3 provides a clearer value exchange between brands and consumers, said Charlie Silver, co-founder and CEO of Permission.io, a Web3 advertising platform. Permission derives its name from its product: an infrastructure through which brands ask permission from consumers to access their data. In return, brands give consumers a token called ASK—a crypto coin that can be sold for U.S. dollars on various crypto exchanges.
Permission last year inked a partnership with cloud platform Treasure Data to provide brands with more tools for organizing and segmenting the data they collect from their consumers. The tie-up is reminiscent of another SaaS product gaining popularity in the marketing industry: clean rooms. While they occupy different digital worlds, both clean rooms and Permission are focused on the kind of first-party data that is becoming increasingly important to have as third-party cookies are phased out.
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Silver views this data upheaval as a reason for brands to migrate to Web3, in particular because of the fundamental transparency afforded by blockchain technology. When services are built with crypto guardrails, he said, there is less risk that the brand will be operating in a walled garden—the very reason a data upheaval has occurred in the first place.
But instead of getting a consumer to opt-in via their email, Permission does so via their crypto wallet. This core identifier is built into Permission’s service—brands will need to provide them to consumers before they can begin any exchanges.
This brings the story back to the primary function that wallets built inside enterprise tools serve marketers: scalable onboarding. With the right positioning, brands can help consumers circumvent all of the complexity around registering for wallets—from receiving a seed phrase to setting up intermediaries—by making it as easy as an online sign-up. From there, a marketer can begin to build out its Web3 ecosystem.
“Making layers of technology invisible is all a part of defrictionalizing the path toward adoption,” said Media.Monks’ Seo.
