The Treasury Isn’t Your Personal Brand Fund

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Influencer personas need to stop being subsidized with company or DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) money.

The Web 3.0 marketing scene is rife with this. It’s mismanagement of community funds – and trust – and it needs to stop.

Marketing funds are just that. They’re funds for marketing, and 99% of the time, they’re for a product – not a personal brand.

But when marketing means dishing out funds for tables, tours and timelines that primarily benefit an individual’s reputation or brand, it’s not an investment.

Many teams steward funds that are allocated to marketing that never reach the sectors promised, and this sloppy practice is akin to a failure of governance.

Lifestyle marketing converts the budget into personal network expansion, treating recognition inside a small circle as success, while the project’s value proposition staggers.

It’s a practice not going unnoticed by regulators, like the United Kingdom’s FCA action against ‘fin-fluencers,’ leading to arrests and takedown requests.

Those left with the bill in the end are the treasuries, funded by investors and communities that have hopes and beliefs in the project’s future.

To reiterate – this needs to stop.

Pay the piper, publish the receipts

Treat marketing funds with the same discipline applied to treasury management and exchange listing – publish who is paid, why, how much and how performance is measured – also, insist on post-campaign reports.

Set ceilings for creator fees, events, travel, sponsorships and other expenses and require formal approval with a written ROI hypothesis to exceed them.

There’ll quickly be a shift away from filtering treasury funds to personal branding as they go to exactly where they belong – marketing the actual product/project.

Give the board – or whichever body has governing oversight – a monthly run-through dashboard that reveals movement on-chain in verified actions.

Provide them with audits, retention results, transparent incident reports, credible statistics and user support outcomes and performance metrics.

These details are what separate genuine marketing from personal brand funding and what distinguish good marketing from poor marketing.

Do it right or don’t do it at all.

Pay for outcomes, not aura… please

If creators must be hired, make sure to contract them to push the marketing angle – not toast to personal branding.

Every brief should be focused on naming the exact user action trying to be driven and the movement expected from that action.

If the creator can’t do that, don’t buy the post.

Disclosures can’t be optional either, since compliance will come knocking. And when it knocks, it doesn’t knock on doors – it knocks down walls.

No price talk, clear risks, permanent archives of what was said and when it was paid for.

Loose controls here can cost more than the campaign, and in the worst cases, they jeopardize the business.

As such, make sure to track everything – on-chain and verifiable wherever possible.

Earned media should be tracked, too.

It should pump out coverage that teaches rather than peddles personas, so make sure it sticks to the facts and minimizes anything overly promotional.

Substance over sloppy flattery wins the day here.

Keep the spending where it earns its keep – allocating most of the budget to education and support for users.

This directly pushes the marketing angle by introducing new and returning users to use cases, not fin-fluencer personalities.

Then keep it simple. Publish the receipts.

Once a month, share expenditure with those that need to know (and keep it on verifiable channels), report audits and incidents, share roadmap changes – and top it all off with pain point fixes.

Drawing the line is one thing when it comes to treasuries being used for personal branding. Holding that line is another beast entirely.

Treasuries are not a personal brand ATM, and projects treating marketing as their personal piggy banks for fame will pay for far different outcomes than expected.

Put the money back into teaching the product and remember that’s the only flex that will ever matter.

Catie Romero-Finger is the CEO and co-founder of BABs, a Web 3.0 data-driven growth and advisory firm. She’s an expert with 20 years in tech marketing and PR globally and was recognized by the Female Tech Leaders Community as an influential woman in Web 3.0. Catie helps founders and creators across blockchain, crypto, DeFi, fintech, GameFi and Web 3.0 to build sustainable brands, utility-driven products, real communities and multiple revenue lines.

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