Hi Elad, responding here as I (rich) have some experience of working with you guys from Edgeware days.

I was asked to add some context that may be helpful for setting expections on all sides, since it seems people just want to spend treasury money without any real thinking as to what outcomes might be good and its just depressing to watch.

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You guys are great at leveraging momentum to drive attention - this is after all your well worked model of distributing content to both 'high value' sites (CoinDesk etc) and then the long tail of sites, social media and stuff like 4Chan.

The work you did on the original Edgeware Lockdrop was hugely successful and I know the founding team were really happy, hence why you were re-recruited to work on Edgeware.

We cut the contract with you guys short - and I was the primary person who pushed that decision since it became obvious very quickly that there was no actual strategy, just hope, and that wasn't going to work for anyone.

It is for the same reasons now that I wouldn't spend this money without first digging into a deeper critical assessment of what people want to achieve with this kind of spending.

Truth is, much like in Polkadot now, there wasn't any focused strategy in Edgeware, people just wanted to spend money because the base assumption is there's loads of it and MArkEtInG makes NUMBER GO UP !

From here people assume adoption (in some general, non specific sense) will naturally follow, though if you ask them, they don't really know what they mean by adoption.

The connective tissue is that MarketAcross are masters of concentrating attention around direct financial incentives and adding fuel to speculation around tokens, launches and such like, but they are not miracle workers.

It is said that everyone is a genius in a bull market, and so this is where this model works best at creating fomo around token prices, though this is harder and harder to achieve simply because there is more and more competition and an increasingly undifferentiated market with a vast supply glut of unused blockspace.

What is worth bearing in mind for Polkadot (and Kusama) is that there is no 'big speculative story' to pump out to the masses right now, so people should manage their expections as to what this kind of spending and indeed all of the Content Creation proposals can achieve.

Whether people choose to believe it or not, the engine room of Polkadot's marketing to date has been the parachain auctions, same on Kusama. Everything else dwindles into the background, beneficiaries of financial incentives that made everyone look incredibly smart, because they encouraged speculative fomo.

However once you remove the degen financial games and you're left with the boring (but important) product of Polkadot as 'software' and its associated 'coretime' offerings.

People say they want 'adoption' of this technology - but really people see this through the proxy of their holdings, so there is definite tension between optimising marketing towards number go up of $DOT and driving meaningful demand and indeed direct payments for coretime.

And this is where things really change when it comes to MarketAcross and indeed all the spending on Content Creators and marketing in general.

As yet, no one has creating successful marketing campaigns or incentives that have had meaningful impact on the underlying demand for the resource that Polkadot sells.

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If someone has, please show me.

Despite tens of millions of spend by the treasury to date, the on-chain impact has been limited if we are to assess the metrics of the DOT internal economy, which is what DOT holders should care about.

There have been no standout parachains / differentiated narratives, just endless copy/pasta, vast spending and then some weird collective hallucination where people just forget that and begin a whole new cycle of spending, paying the same people again with deliverables matched to more off-chain deliverables.

we’re a deliverables-based agency, there’s no retainer fee to working with us, meaning the budget is not gonna “run out” until we execute the amount of deliverables described in the proposal, so we can take some time with building the strategy and approving it with the team that we’d work with until we’re aligned and good to go.

All whilst people build out an echo chamber that purges alternative perspectives, critical thinking and objective assessments of what HAS and what HASNT worked to date.

Until people focus strategy and rewards of treasury spending to driving direct on-chain impact - with objective measures of ROI, like coretime revenues being a measure of progress things won't improve, it'll just be another merry go round of inflated expectations, loads of activity, lots of people being very busy but with vanishingly little impact wrt to the network itself.

If you fund stuff, at least try to reward proponents who can create actual impact, or at best, at least have that conversation with them.

If MA can figure that out, all power to them, they should be rewarded handsomely.

They are smart, well connected and incredibly capable, but they do not exist in a bubble.

So by all means work with them, but don't fool yourselves into thinking this will be some magic bullet to address what are fundamental issues with the positioning of the technology and a continual disconnect from the reality of the network.

Greetings, Sir Elad Mor and the MarketAcross Team,

Firstly, we sincerely appreciate the time and effort invested in the comprehensive PR, content marketing, and social amplification proposal. At Polkadot Philosophy, we steadfastly commit to initiatives that empower and elevate our community. However, we find it necessary to articulate a more granular perspective on the proposal at hand:

The request for 21,400 DOT, equating to roughly 100K Euro, represents a significant amount. While we acknowledge MarketAcross's past contributions, we advocate for a more granular budget breakdown concerning the specific deliverables. The community would greatly benefit from a detailed forecast outlining the direct impact of each activity, the anticipated growth metrics in community engagement, and the strategic plan for achieving these benchmarks.

Considering the uniqueness of the Polkadot community and the desired target audience of builders, tinkerers, and innovators —with its distinct ethos and technical sophistication—requires a customized approach. The content and outreach must inform and resonate deeply with the audience. Thus, we advise that the proposal include a strategy for creating bespoke content that addresses the target audience's evolving interests, potentially with examples of successful past tailored campaigns that have yielded high engagement.

To assess the campaign's efficacy, it is imperative to establish a robust framework for measuring success. This framework should encompass qualitative and quantitative metrics, including but not limited to community growth rates, engagement levels, conversion metrics, and overall sentiment analysis. It would be advantageous to outline how these metrics will be tracked, reported, and analyzed to ensure transparency and accountability. We encourage strategies that provide immediate visibility and support the long-term growth and self-sufficiency of the Polkadot ecosystem. The proposal would be strengthened by articulating how MarketAcross intends to build lasting community relations and knowledge-sharing infrastructures that endure beyond the campaign's lifecycle.

In conclusion, while we are enthusiastic about the potential uplift Your services can provide, we firmly believe that refining the proposal to address these detailed concerns will significantly enhance its alignment with the Polkadot community’s expectations and values. It is through this lens of detailed scrutiny that we can collaboratively foster a campaign that is not only successful but also sustainable and community-centric.

We await your elaboration on these points and are eager to engage in a productive dialogue to benefit the Polkadot ecosystem. We will abstain, waiting for your response and following this and broader ecosystem marketing discussions.

Warm regards,

Jimmy Tudeski
Founder, Polkadot Philosophy