Speaker 1: 0:00

the supermarket where there's multiple checkout lanes. There's a Bitcoin checkout lane, the Ethereum checkout lane, the Solana checkout lane and the Algorand checkout lane, and so if you pay with Bitcoin, obviously you have to wait 20 to 25 minutes for your transaction to go through. If you're paying with Ethereum, you're going to pay more in gas fees than you are paying for your oranges.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Hello everyone and welcome on the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Juri Bilast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm actually really excited to be joined by Marek. Hello Marek, how are you? Hi, juri, I'm doing great. How about you? I said I'm excited, marek. You know why? Because it's now the second episode on the road that I have a Belgian on my podcast. It was like 200 episodes, no Belgian and now two episodes, so you're really happy with your Dutch, because we should have English subtitles maybe.

Speaker 2: 0:56

No, I don't think so, because most of the people listening to this podcast actually are coming from the US, and I think that's why you're living yes, I am living in the Bay Area.

Speaker 1: 1:05

San Francisco Bay Area.

Speaker 2: 1:06

So, guys, if you are now wondering, who am I talking to? Mark van Lerbergen and I know Hapen as his name, of course, as a fellow Belgian. Mark joined Algorand as a CMO in March 2024, with over 20 years of marketing leadership experience. He was the CEO of Ruline, a conversational AI startup, and CMO at Medallia At Google. He launched Android and led marketing for Google Play, hardware and retail. Mark holds an MBA from Stanford and an MS in engineering from the University of Kent. He lives in Sunny Valley, california, and he advises startups. That was as an introduction, Mark. I know there was so many things to tell about you, but this was like very short. You have been involved in launching iconic brands like Android. How did your experience at Google shape your approach to marketing in the web3 space, especially with Algorand?

Speaker 1: 2:09

Thanks, joeri. So of course, my Android experience was very interesting and, I think, very relevant to what I'm doing right now. I think, if you think about Android in the early days, the two core elements of focus for Android marketing was really developers attracting developers because Android is an operating system and is nothing without the developers and the second aspect of that was community and building the community of hardcore kind of Android fans. And those are the two key elements of focus, and so I still remember the Android community was hardcore. We called it the Android army, and the Android army would go to battle against the iPhone army, and so every single time Android or iPhone would launch a new feature, the Android army would swoop in and say on Android, we launched this two years ago and stuff like that. So we had a really strong community.

Speaker 1: 3:00

And so I feel with Algorand it's very similar. Algorand also you could look at Algorand blockchain as an operating system and you need the developers, you need the ecosystem for it to really work, and so a lot of the focus in my job is on developers and attracting more developers to the blockchain. But the second component is, of course, the community and the Algorand fans, and that really can spread the word about Algorand and was unique about Algorand and so those are, I think, very strong kind of comparisons between kind of the original Android marketing and how I think about marketing at the Algorand.

Speaker 2: 3:32

Foundation, that's interesting. Now, community that's an aspect I hear almost every time on the shows, but interesting. Algorand recently underwent a large rebrand as part of its 2 billion transaction milestone. Can you walk us through the strategy and the vision behind this rebrand?

Speaker 1: 3:54

Yeah. So the Algorand rebrand happened because there was an insight, which is that, look, algorand has been around for five years. We've recorded 2 billion kind of transactions over that period of time. We've never been gone down in those five years. We'd never fork. We're the grownup chain, and so we wanted to make sure that our brand reflected this identity of being the grownups in the room here.

Speaker 1: 4:19

We're not one of these chains that's still in beta today. We're like, really there, and that's really was the context of how we thought about the rebrand. And so when you think about the rebrand, it's not just your logo and the colors and everything like that. It's really all about what is the value proposition that you're trying to communicate and who are you trying to communicate it to? What does that audience look like? And so we thought long and hard about those two elements. And so our value proposition is really clear. We really hear we enable blockchain solutions at the real world scale. That's really at the core, what we're trying to provide.

Speaker 1: 4:54

And then, when you think about the Algorand builder, it's not the meme coin hacker, right, it's the builder that really is very ambitious, that's driven to solve hard problems, that has their feet planted in the real world, and so that's the profile of the builder that's currently developing an algorithm, and so those two kind of elements really informed us in terms of, like, building and revising the brand, and so we try to communicate those two elements in the way we create a brand. So in our visuals like our visuals will typically show stuff that are a scale so in our visuals like our visuals will typically show stuff that are scale Our visuals will show real people, will show real footage in the real world because, unlike many other blockchains, when you look at their marketing, they look like this very theoretical kind of like techie way of presenting themselves. We're not doing any of that. We show real people, we show real use cases and we show scale, and that's really what the brand is designed to communicate.

Speaker 2: 5:47

Yeah, that's also interesting what you're saying and comparing it to other blockchain companies, because, of course, things that you said also in traditional marketing are really important, of course, that people your audience can recognize themselves in what you're doing. So, are there differences? Do you see key differences between marketing strategies for, let's say, traditional tech companies and then blockchain, web3 companies?

Speaker 1: 6:13

Yeah, I think there's two key differences that I see.

Speaker 1: 6:16

One is like the community aspect and, as you mentioned, as you point out, like communities, the range of everybody talks about communities and even in traditional marketing Android was more traditional marketing we also talked about communities. I think there's a big difference, I think, between kind of like community-driven kind of approaches in Web 2 versus Web 3. Because of the decentralized nature of Web 3, ultimately marketing ought to be decentralized too. So it's not just about, like me, coming up with messaging and then using my community to amplify that message. Of course that's part of it, but the more important part of it is actually making the community part of the creation process of what the ecosystem is about and what it is that you're trying to communicate. So it's much more about also listening to the community, engaging with the community, helping them have a voice in how the marketing gets created and then ultimately have a stake in amplifying it too. So it's much more community driven as opposed to just community enhanced. So I think that's one key difference.

Speaker 1: 7:16

And I think the second key difference from a Web3 perspective is that we are still dealing with the reality in Web3 that there are significant barriers to entry.

Speaker 1: 7:26

There's no way to avoid that.

Speaker 1: 7:28

It's still very tough for regular users to download a wallet and have to understand that they have to write down this 24-word seed phrase and all of that stuff, and so marketing needs to account for that. You can't just go out and blast and do a Super Bowl ad because you're just going to waste a bunch of money doing that, and a lot of the marketing tactics that you see in Web3 are much more kind of hand-holding right. Let me show you how you download the ParaWallet, let me show you how you create an account, let me show you how you do a swap and stuff like that, and so these kind of learn and earn programs. We just launched, actually, a big program with Coinbase, coinbase, coinbase Quest, where we're basically holding people's hands on how you start doing transactions and how do you engage with DeFi protocols and algorithms, and then we pay you in some algos for doing so, and so I think those are the marketing tactics that are really important, because it basically helps onboard people into this ecosystem that is still more complex than it should be.

Speaker 2: 8:24

Yeah, that's why education is important. That's also what I'm trying to do with the podcast educate people because, for if we still keep talking about concepts like Web3 and blockchain, consumers will not know what we are talking about. You're not asking yourself. You pay your credit card what is happening? But yeah, let's come back to your experience at Google with Android. You let the launch of Android into, let's say, the most popular mobile OS, and I'm now curious how this launching and scaling a product in Web3, how does it? How it is different from your experience with Android.

Speaker 1: 9:02

Yeah, so there's a couple of differences. The focus on community and developers, as I mentioned, is similar, but I think there's differences too, and I think we have to be real about that too. Like, android was owned by Google, the most beloved brand in the world, that helps, I have to admit it. That helps Also the use case, the use case defined. I mean, a smartphone is a smartphone. Everybody knows what a smartphone is. You don't have to explain, educate people about how to use a smartphone.

Speaker 1: 9:26

I think that helped too.

Speaker 1: 9:28

And then, thirdly, it also helped that we were partnering with carriers and OEMs that were spending literally billions of dollars in marketing their phones, and so that, of course, was a tremendous amount of leverage.

Speaker 1: 9:47

And even if I had a billion dollars, which I don't, the marketing that we would have to do, as I mentioned before, I think, has to be different, because even if I had the money to run a Super Bowl ad, I think a Super Bowl ad would be wasted, because I don't think, as I said, the barriers to entry in the ecosystem are such, or in Web2 in general are such, that if you run a SuperLAT, I think most of that money will actually not be productive use because of that issue, and so I think we have to really focus as an industry on like really making the onboarding of new users a lot easier, and so, for instance, we participate in an alliance called the D-REC alliance, which is the idea behind that is to make it easy to recover your private keys in case you have an issue, by basically sharding your private key and making and splitting it and giving it to friends of yours, and so you can use your social network to reconstitute your private key and so have it safe, so you don't have to write down those 24 words anymore.

Speaker 1: 10:39

So stuff like that, or liquid auth, which is a new standard that we launched to facilitate the connection between dApps and wallets in a decentralized way these are all ways and innovations that we are part of and that we hope will make it easier for people to on-ramp onto blockchain and get rid of some of these UX barriers to entry, and so I think that's going to be critical for the industry, in my view.

Speaker 2: 11:03

Yes, you talked about campaigns with Google and with Android and this super board ad, but you did something really successful. A recent campaign that you launched got a lot of attention, and so I saw that my listeners also saw it. If not, you can a bit explain what it was about? And, yeah, and how did you ensure that it resonated so so much with your audience?

Speaker 1: 11:25

yeah, so it's a funny story in a way. I was basically one month on the job and let me just explain what the ad was about. So it's basically a supermarket ad playing in the supermarket where there's multiple checkout lanes. There's a bitcoin checkout lane, the ethereum checkout lane, the solana checkout lane, the Solana checkout lane and the Algorand checkout lane, and so if you pay with Bitcoin, obviously you have to wait 20 to 25 minutes for your transaction to go through. If you're paying with Ethereum, you're going to pay more in gas fees than you're paying for your oranges, and if you're paying with Solana, of course 70% of the time your transaction will fail. And with Algorand, as the grown-up chain, your transactions just go through, boom very quickly. So that was the setup of the ads. So the interesting thing about it was that.

Speaker 1: 12:07

So somebody in the it was basically completely. We talked about community driven. This was completely community driven. So somebody in our community tweeted to me and said Mark, here's a script. You should look at that script. We should film this.

Speaker 1: 12:22

And it was exactly the script that I was just talking about and I thought to myself this is actually a great idea, let's go do this.

Speaker 1: 12:28

And so I found a producer and a creative director.

Speaker 1: 12:31

And then we put a call out to the community and says, hey, who wants to be the Solana guy and who wants to be the Ethereum guy?

Speaker 1: 12:38

And so we got a couple of members from the community to fly over to New York and so the whole ad was actually filmed, not with professional actors but with actually people from the community, and then we launched it and then the community went crazy for it and just started spreading it like wildfire, and so I think over the course of four days we had like over 2 million views of the video at pretty much no cost to us. The whole thing costs us like $30,000, so way less than what a Super Bowl commercial would have cost us. But it was an example of a really cool community-driven initiative that was created by the community and where's my phone doing? My phone is talking to me, sorry and it was completely community-driven and then community-amplified as well, and it hit the nerve because our messaging, as I mentioned, is all about the real world scale and that's what we're trying to communicate in the ad and also showcase that the other ones may not be ready for real world scale, and so that clearly hit a nerve with our friends from other blockchains.

Speaker 2: 13:35

And people that are now listening. I want that they didn't see the ads. I will put the links in the show notes so that they can watch it after they listen to the podcast episode. And here is something I will cut out. I saw at a certain moment you had slow internet. I just said if, for one or another reason, you would go out of the podcast, you can just refresh your screen and come back in. We don't lose anything because it's recorded locally. Yeah, I didn't see it was. It happened once. So I just want to make sure that if it happens that we just cut out this part, so don't worry about it. Yeah, so be sure to check out the show notes, mark. There are always show notes. There is always a blog article linked to every podcast episode.

Speaker 2: 14:15

Yeah, I really liked those videos. Really well done, really clear message and people can recognize themselves in it. I love that. Now, with the whole Algrant story in every business, there are also some challenges that you had that you have faced during the rebranding process. Can you talk a bit about those?

Speaker 1: 14:34

Yeah. So, as I mentioned, like a rebrand is not just about the colors and the images you use. It's about the message you're trying to communicate and so landing on. And so it forced us to go through okay, what's our value proposition and how do we articulate this in the most kind of concise way possible? And that is quite an extensive process because you have to build alignment not just internally within the foundation, but also because we are a community of different projects, you want to make sure that kind of like value proposition also resonates with people in your communities. So any kind of like rebrand process like that requires a huge amount of communication and kind of building alignment with all the different stakeholders, both inside the company and then outside the company, to make sure you build consensus, so to speak, around what you're trying to achieve.

Speaker 1: 15:22

And that is always a big challenge, no matter what kind of rebrand you do. That's always, I think, the biggest challenge of a rebrand. So that's one element. The second thing, I think, is that, because we are targeting developers that are entrepreneurs, but also developers that work at enterprises that can take advantage of a blockchain for supply chain issues, traceability, etc. The rebrand had to take into account of like pretty varied type of audiences and make sure we speak to all of them, and we can't just focus on the B2C versus the B2B component to it, and so we had to work across them.

Speaker 1: 15:56

So that was the second challenge, and I'd say the third challenge, which is a challenge that any marketer has, is that, as you very well know, the challenge of marketing is that everyone has an opinion. It doesn't matter if you're a marketer, a professional marketer, or you're an engineer, or you're in finance, or everybody has an opinion on marketing, and so that makes the job of a marketer more difficult, I think, think than many other jobs. If I'm sometimes jealous of my ccto john, I'm not gonna like give an opinion on, like the quality of the software code that his team writes, but they for sure will have an opinion on the marketing that I do, and so that's a challenge I think that any marketer has out. There is like dealing with that and making sure that you can build excitement and consensus around what you're trying to achieve.

Speaker 2: 16:44

Absolutely. And, by the way, I'm also a fractional CMO, being in a meeting with the CTO and these developers, and they are talking about something. Sometimes I don't even know what they are talking about, so it's so technical sometimes. So, yes, and of course, they maybe have their opinion about marketing too, but it's everything in life. They are not in the shoes, they don't see the world in the same way. But, yeah, marketing it's interesting, it's storytelling is really important to make it interesting for people. But also what you're telling should be correct, and the technical accuracy is also important. So you need to balance those two. And then when you have so a complex product like a blockchain platform and you have both developers as an audience and non-technical audience, that's also a challenge. So how do you balance that?

Speaker 1: 18:31

so it's something to me, actually something I learned from my days at google. I think at google we were always also because google was very much of an engineering driven company, like all of the top positions within google were always kind of engineers, and so there's always a very engineering driven culture, and so, as a marketer, like we were always very precise about making sure that any marketing that we do would be technically accurate. And if you're not sure, you remember but the first kind of Super Bowl commercial that Google ever did Parisian Love was basically a story told through search results. Right, so it was. Actually you couldn't be more technically accurate than that, because it was like it was basically search results. That was basically the ad, and so I think, but the lesson I learned from that is that I think you can tell compelling stories while also being technically accurate, and that's also what we're trying to achieve.

Speaker 1: 19:23

Like one of the videos that we launched shortly after the supermarket one was one to illustrate a very technical subject, which is atomic swaps, and we used it using a hot dog stand in New York where we basically showed people the effect of like counterparty risk, and so it was done in a very fun way and I think it was a good story, but it was also technically accurate.

Speaker 1: 19:45

So I think it's not one or the other. I think you can do both, and to me the critical component of any of this is that you have to, as a marketer, like interface with the engineering teams and have the engineering teams kind of review like the scripts that you're trying to put out there and make sure they're technically accurate, and so it's basically a partnership. In my mind it's always a partnership between the marketing teams and actually the engineering teams to ensure that the stories you're trying to sell are technically accurate. And I think but I think to me there's no balance I think you can do both. I think you can tell compelling stories while being technically accurate at the same time.

Speaker 2: 20:25

Yeah, I love that. Now I've already seen in the beginning of the episode that you have a different vision on Web3 marketing. If you talk to people, there are a lot of people that call themselves Web3 marketers. What are maybe some of the misconceptions about Web3 marketing and do you think marketers can address them?

Speaker 1: 20:45

Yeah, I can go for a long time on that one, I imagine. So I think one of the major misconceptions in Web2 marketing is that Web2 marketing is unserious. It's meme driven. It's like full of hype, with overhyped products, with maxis that are snarky and that do nothing but like paint black and white pictures of their chain versus the other chains versus the other chains, with a lot of attention-grabbing tactics and promises of great wealth if you do this and that and promises of great losses if you don't, and so a lot of that stuff is going on and it's terrible. It's terrible because it also, in my view, it's not just the marketing that's terrible, it also puts the entire industry, it gives the entire industry a bad rep about. This is nothing but swindlers and black money and this and that and gambling and stuff like that, and it's reinforced by a lot of the marketing that is happening, and I think it doesn't have to be that way.

Speaker 1: 21:44

I think there is a different way and in our case, like we very much focus on developers, we focus on the entrepreneurs, we focus on the enterprises and we show them how blockchain can really be part of kind of the overall tech stack that they have and show the benefits and show the use cases of like blockchain technology and make it real. We have so many kind of great kind of use cases like company like travel x that create the second hand market for airline tickets, or like a lofty who basically allows you to buy fractional real estate for as low as 50 dollars. So these are all very compelling use cases that all are using blockchain as an essential component. But it's not the hype. It's like highlighting the real use cases and the things you can really do with blockchain that you wouldn't otherwise be possible to do. Those are, I think, the interesting things to market and interesting to position blockchain technology as a whole.

Speaker 2: 22:37

Yeah, I love that. What I always like to ask Is at this moment, what are you the most excited about when it comes to, maybe, something that Algorand is doing or the market in general In the period that is coming? I'm always curious to hear that.

Speaker 1: 22:53

So I think it's a lot of things that are super exciting. I think one of the things that we are very excited about and that's coming up very quickly is taking rewards. I think we are one of the few blockchains that don't have consensus rewards in our protocol, and so what we really want to do as part of this real world scale is really put a big step forward in terms of decentralizing the network and giving the stake in the network in the hands of many more people, and so we're launching, towards the end of this year, these consensus rewards. That will be a major step forward in how the network is decentralized and put in the hands of like thousands and thousands of different people that can actually help us secure the network and achieve this kind of real world scale that we're going after and the mainstream adoption that we're going after. So that's one thing that I think is super, super exciting, and I'm looking forward to marching.

Speaker 2: 23:46

Wow, yeah, we will for sure follow that story. Everything that happens. So many things are happening in the Web3 world. Follow that story, everything that happens. So many things are happening in the Web3 world. And I guess that marketers, entrepreneurs it's not always easy to follow everything that is happening. So any advice for those people how to follow everything maybe the new shiny objects maybe or avoid following that and maybe focusing on the narratives that they need to tell. What would be your advice to the listeners?

Speaker 1: 24:16

So, from a marketing perspective, I think if you're new to Web3 or coming into Web3, the key thing I would say is what I said earlier is you don't fall for all the hype, and I think the marketing really ought to focus on all the kind of the use cases that your technology enables. And so, ideally, I think the way kind of blockchains will achieve mainstream adoption is if blockchains become invisible. Right? If I mentioned the example of Travelex with airline tickets, right? So they have a phenomenal kind of blockchain-based product that allows you to buy airline tickets, resell airline tickets and create like a whole second-hand market for airline tickets, which has huge benefits to the consumer and also to the airline companies.

Speaker 1: 24:57

They don't talk about blockchain. Like, blockchain is completely invisible. It's essential because without it you couldn't make this work, but it's completely invisible. And I think ultimately they focus on the use cases and the benefits that blockchains can deliver without necessarily having to talk about blockchain technology by itself. If you're like creating a service, a browser-based service, you don't talk about TCP, ip and you don't talk about any of the underlying technology of your browser. You talk about your product and your services and how they can benefit users, and I think that's what good Web3 marketing should focus on, and it's not because you use the word decentralized that your product will have appeal. No, your product is like is solving a particular use case and solving particular problems. So focus on that rather than on the buzzwords and the hype that mean nothing to to regular people.

Speaker 2: 25:46

No, instead it's more a negative right, like we had had the NFT hype and people hear the word NFT, even if the technology is really solid. You think about hype, you think about speculation and so on. Same thing, a bit with metaverse, has been the hype and now if people don't avoid that word? So, yeah, it's interesting and blockchain for me that's a technology, but if we really want to have mass adoption, we need indeed to avoid those terms.

Speaker 1: 26:15

Yeah, and the potential is absolutely amazing. There's no doubt about that. I did mention, for instance, there's a company on our blockchain called Hisapay that is doing cash-based assistance using blockchain to families in Afghanistan. That's an amazing impact, and so I think that Afghanistan as a country pretty much is not banked More than 90% of the people don't have a bank account and so being able to have blockchain there as a way for people to receive money and do transactions and everything like that in a safe and secure way is unbelievable. So the potential of blockchain technology is unbelievable, unbelievably big. But I think that the marketing needs to reflect that and needs to reflect the use cases and not just all for the hype and fall for the next mincoin craze and stuff like that absolutely so, mark.

Speaker 2: 27:07

I think this is a really motivating message to end this podcast episode with, and I guess we could talk for hours, but if now our listeners, they want to know more about Algorand and everything that you are doing, where would you like me to send them?

Speaker 1: 27:23

Algorandco Algorandco that's our main website and that's where you'll find all the information about Algorand, about our ecosystem. If you're a developer, that's where you find all the information about how to get started. If you're an entrepreneur, we have specific guides for you to help you build a business on top of Algorand. So that's the website to go to, where you'll find all the information.

Speaker 2: 27:44

Amazing.

Speaker 1: 27:45

As I said, there are show notes, all the links and before I forget, sorry, before I forget, if you're outside the US and you have a Coinbase account, you can actually try Algorand for yourself, and so we launched a Coinbase quest Coinbase where we will help you download our pair of wallets, do a swap, participate in a DeFi protocol, a lending protocol so we'll hold your hand and we'll let you experience Algorand for yourself, and you can earn some algos in the process. So that's another way for you to experience what Algorand is and how it operates. Wow.

Speaker 2: 28:20

There you have it, a real good call to action at the end of the broadcast episode. Go try these out and maybe, if you see Algorand at an event, go say hi to them, like I did when I was in Paris. Next week, by the way, I will be in Barcelona. There is also a blockchain event European Blockchain Convention, and then there is, of course now my listeners know I've moved to Lisbon there is always the Web Summit, which is, of course, a really big tech event where I'm always going. So if you see me there, come and say hi.

Speaker 2: 28:49

So, mark, it was really a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much. Thank you, juri. Guys, what an amazing episode. I learned a lot. I like the way how Mark explained everything, so there are a few interesting lessons here. So be sure to share the episode with people around you if you think that this episode is useful for them, and I'm sure it is. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, please do that, because these five stars will help me reach an even bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time, take care.