Marketing is NEAR

Inspiration

One of the biggest issues currently faced on NEAR is a lack of liquidity. This issue plagues even leading NFT Marketplaces and DeFi projects during the Bear market. NEAR has the infrastructure required yet competing blockchains seem to have far higher liquidity eg. SOL/ADA/ETH. We wanted to build a Marketing tool which could bring more users to NEAR projects, and even capture liquidity from competing blockchains.

Additionally, although blockchain data is open-source and publicly available, we are aware that ours and others services are effectively 'using' their data. Hence, we want to be able to incentivise users for their blockchain interactions, through profit sharing and enhanced recommendations.

What it does

We provide tailored project recommendations to users of the NEAR Wallet - based on their interactions with the blockchain. This is done using a Machine Learning approach which recommends similar products using publicly available information, such as the NFTs owned/minted by a user wallet, or DeFi protocols to which liquidity has been provided.

Marketing is NEAR also connects projects that want to create and share their advertisements with those that want to be paid to host them ; Creators will benefit from reaching a wider targeted audience, and the host will be rewarded for providing ad space.

This could be used by NFT Marketplaces / NEAR News outlets / Analytics pages / Gaming / DeFi protocols (any project that wants to market themselves better on NEAR or get paid to help others)

How we built it

1) Built a Website for ad publishers and creators.

on which: Ad creators can create their ad and define a marketing objective: Reach (maximise impression and pay per impression, for ads that are targeted towards users that MAY be interested in your product [where users can specify a Max budget, supported by an Ad Fatigue mechanism] and Brand Awareness (target ads to users that already interact with your product as they are most likely to interact - maximises clicks on ads).

2) Ad creators will have to add credit to their account. This is done with the use of Roketo for recurring payments, or through one off near payments. This credit will be consumed as their ads receive more impressions and clicks.

3) Publishers create advertising zones on their sites: Once an ad is created, the website automatically generates a JS injectable script that call's our code to serve the ad. This will have to be included in the code for the AD publisher's website.

A matching algorithm connects the creators ads with publishers:

I. This uses the end user's logged in wallet, fetched through local storage

II. An ML recommendation system personalises the ads

III. Marketing objectives and goals are set by the ad creators (different strategies will be used for different marketing goals).

IV. The ad will then be displayed to the end user. Impressions are calculated according to the load of the page and clicks are calculated once the user clicks the ads.

Challenges we ran into

getting data from near index for explorer postgresql server
Finding a meaningful application given the short time we had: in our case we used NFT Mint data, but this can be expanded on any use case. ( would have liked more nft buy / sell data / FT data)
Making a complex idea simple to understand
Using data from other chains may take a while as we are not familiar with their resources. For the sake of the hackathon, the project was ran on only near data but CAN and WILL be extended to other chains

Accomplishments that we're proud of

great feedback by both other teams and NEAR mentors
overcoming challenges

What we learned

The future of marketing is NEAR
Learnt about other projects
more about the Ecosystem
pros and cons of projects marketing on NEAR

What's next for Marketing is NEAR

We are looking to collaborate with some large projects and expand services to include cross chain interoperability. Additionally we will carry out effective branding and marketing of our own services as we continue to work on it.

we will also need to work on the tokenomics with regard to how we reward users that interact with advertisements.