Amaresh Godbole demystifies marketing & creative applications of Web 3.0

Though increasingly becoming a part of today’s business conversations, the world of Web 3.0, Metaverse, NFT, cryptocurrency, blockchain can be a baffling one to navigate for marketers and creative people. Acknowledging this confusion, Amaresh Godbole, CEO Digital Technology Business, Publicis Groupe India, sought to decode ‘Marketing & Creative Applications of Web 3.0’ in a Masterclass held on Day 3 of Goafest 2022.

Godbole explained, “Fungible is very simply interchangeable. One rupee is interchangeable with one rupee, they have the same value and they can be changed between each other, but a diamond ring and your engagement ring are not fungible. Engagement ring holds value, there is a reason, there is a meaning and story attached to it. So, you can’t just swap your engagement ring for another diamond ring and say that it’s the same thing. That’s where non-fungible comes in. When they say non-fungible tokens (NFTs), for instance, it is giving engagement ring a value because collectively there is a story you decided to attach to it.”

He admitted that there are a lot of terms here that could be confusing and the biggest favour that we could do ourselves is to simplify those terms. “How do you turn features into benefits? So, let’s not focus on features. There are people who are building on blockchain. I think as marketers, we need to simplify and look at the application and benefits of Web 3.0,” he maintained.

Elaborating further, Godbole said, “Web 1.0 was primarily search and read. It was like putting books and brochures online. They basically allowed you to go and find and read those catalogues. Web 2.0 was probably what all of us have lived through over the last 10 years so, which is a combination of creating, interacting, being able to consume content, upload content, social networking with other people. That’s what made the web really exciting and exploded over the course of the last decade.”

“Web 3.0 stands for decentralised and immersive. When I talk about decentralised, that’s when I talk about things like blockchain, NFTs, etc. When I talk about immersive, that’s my interpretation of the term ‘Metaverse’. A lot of immersive experiences have been bucketed into a collective noun, called Metaverse. A lot of those technologies existed and continue to grow.”