This week, Salesforce announced the web3 Advisory Board to help guide Salesforce clients to web3 in a “trusted, responsible and sustainable way.”
In February, Salesforce announced plans for an NFT cloud that will allow brands to create, manage, and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, there was considerable backlash from hundreds of employees who objected to the potential for fraud and environmental impact. NFTs are struggling to dispel their fraudulent image, but with the Ethereum merge behind us now, there aren’t many environmental concerns.
Nonetheless, Salesforce launched its first NFT Cloud pilot in June. Brands are looking to adopt web3 as part of their loyalty and rewards programs. And they look to the future and work on experiments in the Metaverse.
Digital marketing has gone through many stages such as search engine optimization, Google Adwords, banner ads, social media and more. Web3, including the Metaverse, is the latest addition to the strategy toolbox.
A Salesforce 2023 State of Marketing survey found that 51% of CMOs already have a web3 strategy with virtual products and virtual reality as the most popular technologies.
“Web3 opens the door to a new era of brand-consumer relationships. Harnessing its potential requires new ways of thinking and approaches to business problems, and we are on the cusp of this journey.” We created a great board to guide us,” said Marc Mathieu, SVP of Strategic Customer Transformation and Innovation at Salesforce.
The web3 Advisory Board includes:
- Erica Wykes-Sneyd, Global Vice President, adidas Web3 Studio
- Sebastian Borget, Co-founder and COO of The Sandbox
- Keith Grossman, President, Time
- Aaron Rajan, Global VP of Technology, Unilever
- Brendan Lynch. Global EVP, Enterprise & Revenue, Ticketmaster
- Sandra Law, CEO, Global Blockchain Business Council
- Ian Rogers, CXO, Ledger
The mainstream brands represented by the board, Adidas, Unilever and Ticketmaster, are very active on web3.
privacy issues
We applaud Salesforce for taking this step with the purpose of leading to trust, ethics, and insight. We believe this is not an exhaustive list of members, but also includes ethics and sustainability experts. Industry insiders are vital when it comes to privacy.
Public blockchain transparency is a brand dream. A wallet address is a gold mine of information about a client. Some of it can be used internally, such as helping brands build a better image of their customers across different channels such as stores, online, and the metaverse. that’s fair enough.
But transparency also means being able to see your customers’ engagement and spending habits with other brands.
Web3 wallets leak far more financial information than cookie tracking, which is being phased out. Over time, this issue is likely to be addressed in different ways, eventually having multiple sub-wallets and unlinked spending habits across brands.
Meanwhile, there are ethical issues, especially when wallets are tied to real-world identities.
Meanwhile, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was an early adopter of web3, especially through one of his other businesses, TIME Magazine. TIME has launched several NFT collections, invested in his OpenSea NFT marketplace, and worked with Galaxy Digital to publish metaverse content a year ago. Salesforce has made web3 investments in blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs and infrastructure provider Blockdaemon.
