The Impact of Blockchain Technology on Ad Targeting with Asaf Nadler | S4 E10

Asaf: 0:00

Our deep belief is even for the deepest crypto users, they're like any other person spending the majority of their time scrawling on social media and spending their time reading their news or some popular website that they love, which is where we use our audience data to capture these audiences anywhere they spend their time and target them, even when they're, for instance, reading the news on Yahoo Finance and showing them an advertisement of Web3.

Joeri: 0:31

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I have a guest on the show that I met in Paris during Paris Blockchain Week. Hello Asaf, how are you doing?

Asaf: 0:49

Very good. Thank you so much for having me, Joeri.

Joeri: 0:51

I'm excited to have you on. It's always nice or great to meet people in real life and then having them on the show. Even we were not able to record it live in Paris. Happy to have you today. Hello guys, if you're wondering, who is Azaf? Azaf Nadler is the CEO and co-founder of Addressable, specializing in data-driven user acquisition for Web3. Azaf has 18 years of experience in data analytics I have also a background in data analytics, so already a common point and prior to Addressable, he was a director of data science at Akamai Technologies. Asaf holds a PhD in software engineering, focusing on big data analytics, AI and blockchain, with over 10 publications and 350 plus citations Wow, citations, wow. Now to start it Azaf, can you share how your journey led you to co-found Addressable and start where you want to start?

Asaf: 1:53

Absolutely so. I think that my entire journey was in tech, probably started writing code somewhere in the third grade. Born and raised in Israel, lived there my whole life, did the probably typical course of military service tech service in 8200. That's an elite military intelligence unit where I was working on a variety of kind of engineering and research roles for 10 years. Data was always the big love of mine. After 10 years in the military, I moved forward to work for Akamai Technologies, where I stayed for seven years, ultimately leading the data science group, with researchers and data scientists scattered across Israel, europe and the West Coast of the US. So it was mainly about data analysis, cybersecurity.

Asaf: 2:43

But somewhere along the way I took a turn which started on my master's and PhD, where I deviated from cybersecurity and data to exploring the world of cryptography and blockchain. I met my advisor, who I admire a lot. We started working on the design of a block DAG, which is now a well-familiarized concept, and I was working mainly on the proof side of things of how to build and design blockchain protocol not from the code level, but from the theory level and the proofs about how to analyze whether a protocol is secure, how to analyze incentive compatibility and game theoretic incentives and I just fell in love with that. Blockchain to me at the time seemed like the most advanced technology I was dealing with. So while a lot of people were drawn to blockchain from the speculative financial value or from the hype, I was drawn to that actually from the tech and theory behind that. I just fell in love with that and I continued on and released a few more papers about blockchain which were well cited and you can find them on my scholar page and I think that I got to the point in which I became an expert on blockchain from the academic perspective and I was an expert on data science with 17 years of both military experience and in corporate experience and I started seeing the inevitable connection between the two texts. It seemed like blockchain is so promising and it has such an immense future in our life and, on the other end, with everything that I did with data for so many years, I started seeing so many applications to that.

Asaf: 4:35

So, together with my two partners, toma and Toma, we were doing very thorough market research, asking a lot of companies in the space what are their data needs. Market research, asking a lot of companies in the space. What are their data needs? And it seemed like there was one that kept coming on consistently, which, if you think about that in two sentences, blockchain companies raised more capital in 2021 than cybersecurity companies in digital health and education tech. And then you're asking them, one by one, what are you planning to do with this money? We're saying, oh, we were planning to invest that in growth. It's the Web3 CMO story. We're planning to invest that in growth. Great, how are you going to do that?

Asaf: 5:16

And the repeating answer was we don't know. What do you mean by we don't know? We don't know who the audience is. We don't know where they're coming from across the world. We don't know gender distribution, interests. Even our own users are not giving us their mobile numbers or their emails so we can contact them pretty much guessing. And we heard this answer repeats itself across so many companies in the blockchain space. Repeats itself across so many companies in the blockchain space, ranging from financials to gaming, to developer tools companies, to blockchains and to us doing data and cybersecurity and data analysis and blockchain. For so many years, we were confident that if we can put the data together into a single place, we can help this industry grow and it brought together everything we've done for 17 to 20 years with a world that we love so much and want this industry to grow. So that's somewhat of the origin story.

Joeri: 6:16

Yeah, it's always nice to hear when a founder finds a problem or a gap in the market and you come together and you build, and now you have addressableio, which actually I've been lucky to test it out myself and my first impression is wow, this is something I've never seen. But now for our listeners, can you explain how you are now integrating blockchain technology? Yeah, to transform, let's say, the digital marketing practices that we know today?

Asaf: 6:49

Absolutely so. The challenge again is that consumers in the blockchain world which, if you think of that, it's anybody that has a wallet they're pseudonymous, nobody. You can see their data on the blockchain, but you don't know who they are, where they're coming from. So, for any company looking to acquire these users whether it's a Web3 game looking to acquire gamers, whether it's an exchange looking to acquire traders or an NFT collection looking to acquire NFT users there's a gap in understanding these users and acquiring them. And the way in which we solve the gap and that's the big focus of the company is associating data of wallet owners from the blockchain that's all of the activity that takes place on the blockchain and how these companies are thinking about the users with social data, which enables the understanding of this audience.

Asaf: 7:46

For instance, where are these audience coming from or what's their topics of interest in? Who are they influenced by? And, most importantly, with a few clicks, the ability to target wallet owners of your selection. Can be gamers, it can be traders, it can be. It can be traders, it can be developers, it can be NFT collectors with advertisements. So with a few clicks, you build an audience. You launch an advertisement campaign on X, on Reddit on display ads targeting these users where they spent the majority of their time. That's the core value.

Joeri: 8:26

It's interesting that you mentioned twitter. You mentioned X. These days we call it.

Asaf: 8:47

Yeah.

Asaf: 8:48

So starting with the importance of being an X is as, beyond being one of my favorite social platforms, it's where a lot of the crypto and Web3 discussions take place, so that's absolutely the place to be, whether it's easy or not.

Asaf: 9:02

The place where it's not easy for a lot of companies to advertise on X anything that's related to Web3 is a lot because of policy, because we're living in a space in which, on one end, we have tons of innovation and, on the other end, there are some less reputable campaigns that are damaging from that, making policy a difficult issue.

Asaf: 9:24

The good news is we're collaborating very heavily with X and when doing this collaboration and with our ability to understand Web3 companies, we're doing a due diligence process which enables us to onboard advertisers onto X from all across the Web3 space. That includes gaming, that includes DeFi protocols, exchanges, as well as Layer 1's developer tooling, and we're doing the bridging between X, a platform that wants to grow. It favors its advertisers. It wants to grow both on advertising but also on Web3. Just listen to the current manager of the company, right Into a world in which, to be frank, it's very difficult to do this due diligence without a deep understanding of the industry of the tech, and this is where we're finding ourselves helpful to unblocking a lot of advertisers that want to be in front of tons of Web3 audiences.

Joeri: 10:27

Amazing, and so X was your first choice, and you also mentioned Reddit.

Asaf: 10:33

Yes, yes. So what we're looking for always is where do the consumers spend their time? That's the leading question when thinking about what ad channels and ad platforms do we support. So Reddit is absolutely one that's picking up and starting to get traction, with a lot of crypto and Web3 discussions. It's a lot about DeFi and kind of using the space. It's a lot about innovation. Reddit is so deep in that and we see a lot of Web3 advertisers aiming towards there, which is what it was a platform of choice to integrate into our platform okay.

Joeri: 11:12

And then the third option was display ads. Is that also display ads? It's like the google display ads or others. Where can people find or see these display ads?

Asaf: 11:22

perfect, so. So on the display outside, we have a collaboration with Adform, one of the world's biggest DSP. It's a 650 people company been in the space for quite a while now. We're collaborating with them to get access to their inventory that includes more than 400,000 mobile applications and websites on which we can place the ads, and that includes both the crypto native website that CoinMarketCap and CoinGeckos of the world, and a lot of crypto news and other places where Web3 users are spending their time in the context of crypto. But I think, more broadly than that, our deep belief is, even for the deepest crypto users, they're like any other person, spending the majority of their time scrolling on social media and spending their time reading their news or some popular website that they love, which is where we use our audience data to capture these audiences anywhere they spend their time and target them, even when they're, for instance, reading the news on Yahoo Finance and showing them an advertisement of Web3.

Joeri: 12:32

I mentioned, I was testing out the audience. You call it the audience generator or the definition of the audiences. Like you, also have the traditional Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, X ads you have that too, but it was really interesting to see how I could, for instance, target users with an interest in metaverse, that have mana or that have sand in their wallet and maybe also have an ENS domain. I made this combination and it was really interesting. Wow, this really is powerful, and you don't only see how many wallets, but you also see the value of those wallets, so this is really useful data for marketers. I'm wondering, too in everything that you're doing, data is important. Does AI play a role, too, in your tool of in what you do with your business?

Asaf: 13:23

Absolutely, absolutely so I think nowadays we see AI being spoken everywhere. There's rarely any company that doesn't do AI. I think that for us, ai has been in our foundation as a team. I think that the majority of papers I published are probably around AI and, in the world of marketing, of blockchain. A lot of what creates tons of opportunities for AI is that there's tons of open data Right In any other domain. That's not Web3, where there's tons of open data.

Asaf: 13:56

Startups typically need to start by collecting one by one first party data, which takes a lot of time to train AI. In our case, we start with a world of open data, which gives a wide variety of use cases. So, to name three problems in which we constantly use AI to improve marketing, the first one of them is identity matching and the ability to look at different identifiers and find the relationship and association between them based on a variety of behavioral patterns, and what that enables is for marketers to translate the way in which they're thinking about the target audience in on-chain terms, like any marketer that I'm speaking to saying oh, I want to find developers that are deploying code into Avalanche, or I want to find traders that are trading a specific token or I want to find NFT collectors of specifics? Great, we need a way to connect the dots. We're using a lot of AI for that. We're also using AI for attribution. So, for anybody less familiar, attribution is the art of associating the revenue or the outcome of a campaign with what was the source. And in the rest of the world, attribution is becoming a bit broken and very difficult, with all sorts of privacy measures jeopardizing attribution.

Asaf: 15:18

With Web3, there is a lot of opportunity with a lot of the open data and we're using AI to connect the dots.

Asaf: 15:24

We just announced, for instance, a partnership with both AppStar and Singular, some of the biggest mobile measurement partners, to also tap into mobile analytics alongside ad analytics and web analytics and blockchain analytics, bringing everything into one place so that we can tell advertisers what's working, what's driving on-chain conversions to their protocols, to their games, to their exchanges. And the third part is knowing that there is very little performance marketers in the space and most companies are built from tech people finding it difficult to navigate growth tech people finding it difficult to navigate growth. We're investing a lot of AI into interpreting the data from all around, providing our users with simple insights, recommendation and understanding of what takes place in our campaign and also using that for automated optimization. So even if you're not an expert in performance marketing, you can visit our platform and understand which segments are now buying, which segments are drifting away from what you're doing, and get the help from us to automatically improve your conversion rate all across the farm.

Joeri: 16:44

Yeah, like I mentioned, I've tested out the audience part, the reporting part, because I don't have a campaign. I guess I don't see reports yet. By the way, to the people who are now listening, you should definitely stay until the end if you're interested in Addressable, because I give you a coupon code and you will have an interesting discount if you want to try out Addressable. So I tried the audience. I don't have reports yet, so now I'm wondering how does that look like? Is it a kind of a dashboard? Can you explain a bit more about the reports, analytics that we can expect to see in Addressable?

Asaf: 17:24

Sure, Absolutely, absolutely so.

Asaf: 17:27

On the input side of things, if you're thinking about what the funnel looks like for paid media, it almost always starts with an advertisement on X, on Reddit, on display ads, which a user clicks, in the cases of mobile, to an app store from which you can download the mobile app and ultimately, a user connects their wallet and converts on the blockchain. And what we make sure with the input is to track everything. We're both getting analytics and performance measurement from the advertising platform. We have a pixel that gets website analytics from the web page and also track wallet connects event. We have a collaboration with both AppsFlyer and Stingler so that on the mobile, we have integrations to get data regarding mobile conversions and we track more than seven blockchain at the given point in time, and that's ever-growing.

Asaf: 18:28

So the goal of tracking performance is delivering events from all across the funnel, both web and mobile, into a single place and having a dashboard, exactly as you said it, to create transparency. That's the most important thing transparency and clarity. Having someone who's not necessarily a performance marketer going on the application and learning how well are things going and for anything that can go even better, what is that? Which segments are converting more? Which segments probably need a different messaging, or so automated campaign optimization that can tweak the different segments of audiences that you're trying to reach out to and improving the performance on a daily basis so you get better cost per conversion, better cost per click, better cost across the different funnels.

Joeri: 19:24

Awesome, and is there maybe a campaign or a success story or maybe for people to understand really practically? How does a campaign look like? Can you give an example?

Asaf: 19:37

Absolutely so. There's tons of case studies on the website and what a typical campaign funnel looks like. So, from the advertiser side, there's a message that you want to promote. You might be launching your product or launching a new token, or launching a new feature, and you want to acquire more users to sign in, to subscribe, to download the app, to convert on the blockchain. So for doing that, the only thing that you need to do within the app is one describe the target audience in blockchain terms. This is how I think almost all marketers that we work with think about their audience. So it can be, for instance, people who own a specific token, has at least a thousand dollars in their wallet, or play a specific game, for instance. Then you build a campaign within the product that's targeting the audience that you built and you can upload the creatives in order to launch a campaign very simply. And the third thing is that you track the performance and see what's going on with a campaign and enjoying the experience of the campaign being optimized automatically.

Asaf: 20:44

From the consumer side. The consumer is typically spending the majority of their time in social media. They're scrolling through their X feed and then they see an ad which just looks like another tweet. There is the word ad on the top right, but it's really unnoticeable. It's a very native experience and when they see that they're saying, whoa, that's interesting. I never learned about this game or I never learned about this token. I want to learn more. They can click that. They're redirected to the social page of the game, to the landing page, to the app, depending on what you set the campaign to be, and then they're going into this funnel. So this is what it looks like on X. On Reddit, it's really similar and with display ads, it's a banner ad or video ad shown in website or mobile application that the user visits.

Joeri: 21:38

A question that I always ask, or always try to ask, is because, of course, it's an exciting adventure you're on, but what are you now the most excited about with the things that are happening within your company? Addressable or maybe if you look at the market on itself?

Asaf: 21:56

I'm curious so I'm super excited about lots of things, but if I'm trying to use kind of recency bias to one specific thing that we're noticing recently, I'm speaking to a lot of VCs and accelerator and gaming studios and portfolio asking about what's new. What are people currently building? Where do we see the future going? And what I see on the market is, besides the bull run and the Bitcoin halving and lots of excitement of crypto, what I see is a lot of shift of I would call it web3 to the mainstream. So what we're seeing is stable coins like usdc and usdt now being traded on telegram, which I think that's going to go on the mass. We see web3 games. That now has a better experience, an easy mean of stepping in. With account obstruction, you can easily download a game. You don't care that it's related to Web3 until you want to cash out or do something differently.

Asaf: 22:56

And I think that on the mainstream, web3 is going to go mobile and it's going to go on different platforms, which, on one end, that's the happiest thing that can happen to this industry.

Asaf: 23:08

That's exactly what happened to the mobile industry, I think, 10 years ago when mobile apps started to be a big thing. On the other end, that means that the industry needs better infrastructure of analyzing the data, the marketing data of what's happening around, and I think that addressable is exactly at the right place to take the data of what happens anywhere in your campaigns, in the advertisement, in the website, in the mobile, but I think, even more importantly, everything that takes place anywhere. That's the beauty of the blockchain. It's anything that happens anywhere, so you, as a leader within your organization, as a marketer, as a manager, can be in touch with what's actually happening and how to improve on growth. So I think that the recent integration with the mobile analytics partner, the automated campaign optimization using AI I think that we're seeing that drives a lot of growth within the space and creating clarity for a lot of our customers, which is something that I'm truly excited about.

Joeri: 24:17

Well, I'm also excited about already seeing your new tool. For me it's a new tool actually. What is possible? If now you are listening to the show and you're also interested to check it out? As always, there is a blog article, there are show notes. You will find a link in there. This link is my special link, which goes to the addressable site and if you dare use the discount code web3 cmo, like Web3 CMO Stories, Web3CMO you will have a 10% discount. But now, Azaf, if people they hear you speak and they want to connect with you, they want to learn more, what do you suggest and where can they go to?

Asaf: 25:03

So I'm a friendly person and I love people reaching to me everywhere. I met Joeri on a boat in Paris, which was a lovely event, drinking champagne and talking, looking at the sand right. I'm approachable everywhere and I really love chatting to a marketer. It's anything but a sales conversation. I love hearing marketers and people into the space with the excitement and the pioneering atmosphere of what's currently taking place in Web3. I'm approachable on Twitter. I'm approachable on Twitter, I'm approachable on Telegram, I'm approachable on LinkedIn and, if you want, you can even make a reach out on the website. I love chatting to everybody, so if you want to put the notes about how to contact me, I'm absolutely happy to chat to everyone.

Joeri: 25:46

Oh, of course, that's what we always do and yeah, I noticed that I was at the boat, making networking, doing making connections like you do. It was direct, really good energy. Okay, tell me what you're doing. So we both love networking and if you love networking too and you see me at one of the events, by the way, if you are at consensus now listening, feel free to come to me, to come talk to me. So again, thanks for listening everyone. Thanks asaf for coming to the show thank you, you're for having me so, guys, indeed it was an interesting episode.

Joeri: 26:24

If you want to test out a tool, let me know what you think about. Happy to have a chat about that too. If you think that this episode is useful for people around you other marketers, entrepreneurs, people you meet on the boat be sure to share this episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this and, of course, I would like to see you back next time and PS, something I always forgot. I would like to see you back next time and PS, something I always forgot. I would love to have some more reviews on the show so that more people find it. So if you are now listening and you think I like your show, take a few minutes and leave me a review on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much and see you back next time.