I saw a post from someone criticizing me indirectly. They said there was an employee at DFINITY who was moving somewhere else, that they had worked in marketing for DFINITY, and that they'd had a great time working there. This person was saying how that's an example of great marketing. And I thought, yes, that's an example of paying for marketing. But if you judge that as great marketing by the standard of having a paid employee, then having the Network Nervous System create its own marketing fund would be at least that good, if not a lot better.
What transparency is there in a paid employee?
This person was talking about how having a paid employee do marketing is a great way to do marketing. But what transparency is there? You could assume an employee at DFINITY would probably get hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, including their salary, benefits, and all of that, especially if they're living in Switzerland. So this employee probably got anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 in paychecks to do marketing for DFINITY. Now, here's my question. I agree with that. Absolutely. I agree that DFINITY needs to pay people for marketing to get their message out to the most important places.
Now, it's interesting. If you look on the DFINITY website, almost everybody listed on there is an engineer. There are very few exceptions. One is Dana, who's a social media manager, and there's another employee, Emma, who is a senior growth manager. Almost everybody else on the entire DFINITY page is a software engineer or developer. You have Pierre as the chief business officer and Josh as the chief operating officer, and there's HR up there. But almost everybody else on the DFINITY website is engineering. Which is good, because engineering is something we can't do very well as a community. We need DFINITY working together, with all the engineers working as closely as they can with each other. That makes sense. It also makes sense for DFINITY to spend some money on in-house marketing. Absolutely. But the question is: so far, has DFINITY's in-house marketing been effective at moving the price? Not at all. And at the same time, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be spending money on it. I agree with DFINITY spending millions of dollars a year on marketing, and I agree that it can be very effective marketing.
Where the argument falls apart
Where the argument falls apart is when you have people in the community celebrating that DFINITY is spending money on marketing, who have no problem that DFINITY has spent tens of millions of dollars marketing ICP, from ICP hubs, to paying people to work on marketing directly in the company, to things like paying for chain spec, which it looks like they do, and giveaways like the money for testing the multi-DEX app. DFINITY absolutely has spent tens of millions of dollars on marketing over the years. However, where can we see any of the results? Where do we have any vote, or any say as ICP holders, on the money DFINITY spends on marketing? For some reason, the default position of many people is to think, well, it's good for DFINITY to spend money on marketing, and let's celebrate this person who's made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing marketing at DFINITY.
But the same people saying that are often also saying, well, you can't give Jerry anything. You can't give any of these other creators anything. It's ridiculous that we should use any inflation from the Network Nervous System to pay for more marketing. And those two positions don't make any sense together. If you're supporting DFINITY spending money on marketing, which they should be doing, then that's something you have no accountability over and no control over. You just have to trust them. And so far, the results indicate that for the money they've spent on marketing, at least in terms of price, we have almost nothing to show for all the tens of millions of dollars DFINITY spent. I mean, $25,000 of that did go to me, and a small portion did go to some other content creators as well.
A publicly transparent marketing fund
What I'm suggesting is that we have a very publicly transparent marketing fund on the Network Nervous System, where everybody inside and outside ICP could easily see exactly how much money was going in and exactly who it was going out to. If you think that paying money to an employee to do marketing at DFINITY is something that should be celebrated, then certainly the Network Nervous System paying for something totally open, where we could all judge the results, is a position you would logically support. But the problem is a lot of people are not operating on logic. A lot of people are operating on unquestioned, unthought-out assumptions. And that's what we need to break. We need to become more thoughtful than that.
Because in case you haven't noticed, many of the other prices in crypto have moved. I realize that at the end of the day, we shouldn't have to come down to price and say, well, there's fantastic technology, but so what, the price hasn't moved. But guys, everybody outside ICP does think that way. They look at the price and they think there's nothing interesting happening here. The chart looks like a rug pull. The price has done nothing but go down. To me, there are two basic ways that's going to change. One is that the technology gets such serious use that the price has to go up based on the bills being paid to run computation on ICP. The second way the price goes up is marketing.
The first way is essentially what we've been trying to do so far. DFINITY has funded tens of millions of dollars into marketing, which in terms of the price has been completely ineffective. They probably could have not spent any of the money on marketing and the price would be the same, maybe even higher, because a lot of the money they spent on marketing was dumped with no results. I'm actually still holding at least half the money DFINITY paid me, and I've lost that in the value. If they'd spent all that money paying people like me, I would imagine that in 90% of cases the ICP price would be way higher than it is with whatever's been done so far. But DFINITY should just keep doing whatever they were doing, and maybe that will work in the long term. In the short term and the foreseeable future, though, there is no good reason for the ICP price to move without marketing, because marketing is how all the other prices are moving.
You can't compete with flywheel marketing on technology alone
Dominic Williams has frequently cited the flywheel marketing of these other chains. The other chains are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, some of them billions of dollars. You just can't compete with that in the short term on technology. The technology may need years and years before it moves the price from where we're at today. If you're okay with DFINITY spending money on marketing, the logical position would be that having a publicly transparent marketing fund directly on the Network Nervous System is the best chance we've got to do what we can ourselves to market ICP. That is what I'm in favor of. That is my sole cause in the ICP community at this point. We need to do what we can. It is clear we cannot depend on DFINITY to do marketing. And they shouldn't do marketing. If you look at the website, they should do engineering. They can do whatever they want, but as a community, we need to support ourselves.
We need to be a self-supporting community where the most active ICP content creators get paid, and where we bring new people into ICP who have demonstrated they are prepared to create quality content for ICP. We bring them in with marketing. We could set up our own flywheel marketing in ICP, where the more we bring in and the more effective marketing we do with the Network Nervous System paying for it, the more the price is likely to appreciate in the foreseeable future. From there, we'll have more money for marketing, and we can create our own flywheel marketing operation. To me, there's almost nothing to lose by supporting this.
Inflation is not the problem
On the opposite side, if you can't stand any more inflation from where it's at now, I did a video about this: inflation is not the problem. It is marketing. The price is where it's at because of marketing, not inflation. The lack of marketing is not going to change, and there's no reason to expect anything is going to change unless we do something about it. If you want to keep the inflation the same, shave whatever you want to put into the marketing fund off the voting rewards function. Or even have the voting rewards function fund the marketing directly, so that a small percentage of maturity gets put into a marketing fund. Right now, there are 100 million undisbursed voting rewards. You could take a percentage of the undisbursed voting rewards and put that into marketing.
But guys, gals, men and women of ICP, if you want the price to move, the number one solution is marketing, at least in the short term. There's no getting around that. It doesn't matter whether you want to debate that or not, or whether it should be that way or not. We need more marketing, and we need to do it ourselves. Those are the cold, hard facts. We need to do it ourselves. And the Network Nervous System is the only blockchain in crypto capable of putting all of this on chain, actually setting things up to validate it, and having an entire community platform you could build out where people can audit all the marketing proposals and have some transparency. You could set up an entire social media style marketing platform directly on the Network Nervous System, or connected with it, that would make all of it as transparent as possible. You could show all your followers and your ICP videos, and very easily prove that you were giving real value.
Take up the campaign
At this point, opposition to this idea just seems crazy to me. There's not one single argument I've seen that effectively counters what I'm saying, unless you're happy with the ICP price missing out on the gains in the rest of crypto. Unless you're happy with how things have gone so far with the ICP price, it is unreasonable to expect things are going to change in the foreseeable future without marketing. So if you want marketing, I encourage you to take up the campaign. Talk about how we need the Network Nervous System to do whatever it needs to do to print tokens for marketing. That's what we need. That's the only discussion that matters in this community right now, to me, and anything you can do to contribute to that, I invite you to do. Every video I make on this campaign lands on my ICP Crypto playlist.
If you'd like to talk with me, I'm only listening on jerrybanfield.com. I'm not listening to DMs on the forums. I'm not reading message requests on X. If you want to talk to me, you go to my website and join the chat. You can join my Skool, schedule a call with me, or leave a tip. That's how you can reach me.
So thank you for reading. I hope we can get this done. We need to get this done. So let's get this done.