The AliensKnow Academy A-Z proposal

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The AliensKnow Academy A-Z funding proposal

Description: Explain why your project is vital to the success of Zenon, both in the short and long term? In other words, what problem is it solving?

The 2021 crypto_culture’s marketing campaign for Zenon included:

  • Twitter ads (over 7m people reached, highly targeted audience, custom content created with trusted ZNNAliens such as shazz, lazy prius or dr. greenthumb),
  • sponsored articles (cointelegraph, bcc news)
  • press releases (prnewswire)

The campaign started in late summer and ended in November 2021, when twitter restricted Zenon ads. The awareness campaign was one the reasons of the price increase of ZNN in the second part of 2021.

AlienKnow Academy foundation is based on the key learnings from the 2021 campaign, such as:

  • Create fresh, original community content about the hot topics in ZNN ecosystem (eg. Accelerator-Z)
  • Boost the content with ads on multiple social networks (eg. facebook, Instagram, tiktok)
  • Use community guidance

URL: https://medium.com/@TheAliensKnow_Academy/start-building-5e65a79b3747

Team: The project is set to expand with new content creators, but the foundation was set by Crypto_culture_ and Dr. Greenthumb. We are long-time supporters of the Zenon network, and we delivered original content and worked on multiple awareness initiatives for Zenon (eg. twitter ads campaign with #thealiensknow tag -1m views)

Phases

What is your high-level roadmap?

  1. Create fresh, original community content about the Accelerator-Z in order to help the growth of the community and the ecosystem in general
  2. Boost the content with ads on multiple social networks (eg. facebook, Instagram, tiktok).
  3. Create creative contests on Twitter in order to engage content creators join Zenon Accelerator program through AliensKnow Academy or with an own project.
  4. Ads could be further optimized with the use of retargeting. This means a pixel will be installed on a targeted website. I’ll post in another post the targeting details so far, pixel codes, and other details so the community can advise on better use of the ads budgets.

Phase 1**
High level overview of main tasks:

  • Create ads that comply with advertising polices.
  • Use an a real identity (name, id documents, bank accounts, etc) that can be verified as the owner of the pages and ads in order to comply with Meta or TikTok advertising polices
  • Ads will target video views, new followers and most important link clicks campaigns with the target: https://zenon.network/accelerator.html or if the community will request other click links
  • Targeting, analytics, pixels and other details that optimize the results of the campaign will be detailed in other forum post. Any suggestion to optimize the ads and budget from the community will be taken in consideration and implemented right away.
  • Due to comply issues with one or more of the Advertising Policies the ads can be suspended, in this situation any amount that should be used for ads will be returned to Accelerator-Z fund.

Completion of Phase 1 will be measured by:

Achieving task 1,2 and 3
Post all the videos (2) on all social media pages of the Aliens Know Academy
Run ads and post the results on forum.zenon.org with the results and other details

Phase 2**
High level overview of main tasks:

Dive in to the Accelerator-Z opportunities and create 3 new videos of almost 1 minute and the short versions for ads.

  • Task 1
    Create 3 new videos about Accelerator-Z (how to apply, opportunities, top projects founded by Accelerator-Z)
    -If the community requests for other topic to be covered by Alien Know Academy will be taken in consideration.
  • Task 2
    Create short videos for ads
  • Task 3
    Run ads campaign (see task 3 from phase 1)

Completion of Phase 2 will be measured by:

  • Achieving task 1, 2 and 3
    Post all the videos (3) on all social media pages of the Aliens Know Academy
    Run ads and post the results on forum.zenon.org with the results and other details
    Phase 3
    High level overview of main tasks:
    Contest for community creatives to create new stories, animations to be posted on all Alien Know Academy social media pages
  • Task 1
    Create social media posts and visuals in order to announce and promote the contests
  • Task 2
    Post the winning videos and create short ads
  • Task 3
    Run ads campaign (see task 3 from phase 1)

Completion of Phase 3 will be measured by:

  • Achieving task 1, 2 and 3
    Run contests on all social media pages of the Aliens Know Academy and post the winning videos
    Run ads and post the results on forum.zenon.org with the results and other details

Funding

Total Requested Funding = 3750 ZNN and 37500 QSR
Project Duration = 3 months

How did you calculate your budget?
Phase 1:
1250 ZNN + 12500 QSR — (social media & content management— on multiple platforms 20% + strategy / art direction for the two initial videos 20% + copywriting 10% + animations 30% + sound 5%+ 15% ads*).
*ads budget is 15% of the total budget in this phase. The ads budget will be split in advertising cost 50% and other costs 50% (ads management, legal taxes or conversions fees, ZNN price variations). Any budget that will not be used will be returned to Accelerator-Z

Phase 2 — to be developed after Accelerator-Z funding is approved
2500 ZNN + 25000 QSR — for 3 new educational videos, scripts/ art direction 20%, animations/sound 35% + social media management on all tAKA pages 20% + ads management/costs**)
*ads budget is 25% of the total budget in this phase.The ads budget will be split in advertising cost 50% and other costs 50% (ads management, legal taxes or conversions fees, ZNN price variations). Any budget that will not be used will be returned to Accelerator-Z

Phase 3— to be requested and developed after Accelerator-Z Phase 0 &1 funding is approved
1000 ZNN + 10000 QSR for contest for social media creators on facebook, Instagram and tiktok to create and share new AliensKnow Academy stories.

Did you estimate development hours against a certain rate, and then multiply that by the current price of ZNN & QSR?

Yes

If yes, how many hours did you project? What was the rate you used? What was the market price of ZNN & QSR at time of budget formulation?

  1. social media management on all tAKA pages, scripts/ art direction, copywriting
  • Phase 1: total hours for phase 1: 38 hours ( 750 znn @ 2$/znn —> hour cost 40$/h or 20 znn/h)
  • Phase 2: total hours for phase 2: 50 hours ( 1000 znn @ 2$/znn —> hour cost 40$/h or 20 znn/h)
  • Phase 3: total hours for phase 2: 10 hours ( 200 znn @ 2$/znn —> hour cost 40$/h or 20 znn/h)
  1. animations/sound
  • Phase 1: total hours for phase 1: 12 hours ( 300 znn @ 2$/znn —> hour cost 50$/h or 25 znn/h)
  • Phase 2: total hours for phase 2: 35 hours ( 875 znn @ 2$/znn —> hour cost 50$/h or 25 znn/h)
  1. Ads
    The ads budget will be split in advertising cost 50% and other costs 50% (ads management, legal taxes or conversions fees, ZNN price variations other liabilities). Any budget that will not be used will be returned to Accelerator-Z
  • Phase 1: 200 znn @ 2$/znn
  • Phase 2: 625 znn @ 2$/znn
  • Phase 3: 200 znn @ 2$/znn
  1. Creative Contests prizes
  • Phase 3: 600 znn @ 2$/znn

For the QSR requested, the amount will be deposited for further use. If the QSR will not be used in any activity related to the benefit of the community the amount will be returned.

Did you estimate your budget based on comparable projects? If yes, can you explain the logic behind their pricing model and can you explain that logic to the Pillar operators?

AlienKnow Academy foundation is based on the key learnings from the 2021 campaign (detailed above) such as:

  • Create fresh, original community content about the hot topics in ZNN ecosystem (eg. Accelerator-Z)
  • Boost the content with ads on multiple social networks (eg. facebook, Instagram, tiktok)
  • Use community guidance

Do you need to buy tools to do the job?
All licenses or tools needed for the job are provided without additional costs

Project and Payment Milestones:
Phase 1
Funding Request: 100% (1250 ZNN and 12500 QSR)
Duration: 1 months August 2022

Phase 2
Funding Request: 100% (2750 ZNN and XX QSR)
Duration: 2 months September - October 2022

Phase 3
Funding Request: 100% (XX ZNN and XX QSR) after phase 1 and 2 are completed.
Duration: 1 months

Other Information

Risks, Assumptions, Known Issues, Dependencies: What are the variables and dependencies? Do you have contingency plans for significant assumptions, variables, and dependencies?

Variables are related to the ads budget because of the possible advertising policy violations. Also some liabilities could arise from the promotion of decentralized communities by an advertising agency (company registered in European Union in this case) if the ad agency will receive fines or warnings from authorities. Also the market volatility is liability.
The advertising of decentralized communities/protocols has many unknowns to be discovered only by creating and challenge the status quo.

Contingency plan: In the case of more funds available due to lower creative cost or ZNN price increase or issues with the ads policy the extra funds will be first used for more creatives and specific social media activities (contests/giveaways for new artists joining Zenon community )

Have you previously submitted a proposal (either in Accelerator-Z or Incubator)? If yes, how did they turn out? Link to all previous proposals or finished products

No

1 Like
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The proposal still fails to explain funnels and how you plan to prove that your ad spend results in KPI’s i.e. new submissions to accelerator-z etc I left some feedback here.

Like I’ve said many times in other posts related to marketing: it’s easy to spend money in marketing, but extremely hard to prove the value they return… keyword: prove.

ZenonOrg pillar marketing organizations will try to set new benchmarks for performance marketing. Content creating just isn’t enough, there’s much more to a funnel than creatives/visuals/stories.

Unfortunately we’re keeping our pillar votes to no for now. We know we can deliver more value with our public performance tools soon enough once we launch the .org systems.

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still, you will need creatives, stories, and communities. I’m building exactly this.

the ads budget I’m happy to share 100% with your organizations so we can achieve better results. I really think that fresh creative content and new artist joining the Zenon community will have a long-lasting effect and also a boost for any performance mkt activity you plan. Zenon visuals were a very strong point in the evolution of the ecosystem. This creative fuel is limited, I spent a lot of hours so far and budgets from my own pocket for zenon ecosystem development, so without any support from Accelerator program this fuel could run out.

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this was #thealiensknow campaign results vs. price action.
@mehowbrainz

I think that I’m the only one in this community that has some marketing results to show, some benchmarks, and a proven history of mkt investments and successful actions.

The costs for the phases are an estimate, also is hard to predict the future. In the case of more funds available due to lower creative cost or ZNN price increase or issues with the ads policy, the extra funds will be first used for more creatives and specific social media activities (contests/giveaways for new artists joining Zenon community). Also, I have no problem returning the unused funds.

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a little marketing competition will do great for zenon, Voted yes. Hope others will do also

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Is there any way you can prove the causal relationship between that campaign and the increase in interest for the project?

Iirc this was also around the time the team released alphanet and hinted at btc interoperability - basically a speculation fuelled mainnet pump - which happened at the pico crypto market top.

I’m not saying that this campaign did not contribute to that inflow of interest. But (and this is what @mehowbrainz is also criticizing), there is no way to quantify how much the campaign contributed to it.

It’s impossible to say what degree of causation vs correlation these two charts show if no funnel/conversion tracking is used.

As a result, this AZ grant might be a shot in the dark that would, at worst, lead to a lower price because you have to liquidate the received znn to cover your costs. All the while the campaign may not generate new capital inflows.

At the very least, this campaign should propose some measurable target success metrics / KPIs based on which the AZ grant is paid out. E.g. its successful if 3-5 new serious AZ applications result from it. Or if the price/volume/LP liquidity increases by x amount.

This would show a targeted approach with a quantifiable result in mind.

As it is, this AZ application aims to get compensation for the creation of content and payment of ad space without explaining

  • who it is targeting (e.g. devs)
  • where (e.g. hackernoon)
  • for what (e.g. call to action to develop bridges)

And most importantly, it doesn’t specify a measurable outcome to deem it successful or not.

For these reasons I am sorry but I would not fund this grant.

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You are right, but you are missing the point of the project.

Ads to boost the post are a regular tactic, and the budget is mostly for creating a platform of communication that has a twist and creates a differentiating factor in the crypto space.

the info that you requested is in the proposal, but for you I’ll answer again

  • who it is targeting (e.g. entrepreneurs, marketing, sales teams, crypto entushiasts)
  • where (e.g. facebook, tiktok, twitter, instagram)
  • for what (e.g. Join Accelerator-Z)
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It sounds like spray and pray which is not an efficient allocation of capital in my opinion.

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is an angle of approach, is not the only one and for sure is not the most effective. But is a project that should at least attract new people that will be interested in Zenon and this project. Any brand needs constant communication campaigns and constant creative work behind it, and new fresh creative minds, for what I see #theAlienKnow Academy is the first project with this mission.

Most global brands are focused rn on PR campaigns more than traditional ads campaigns. Do you really think that there are tools to determine the results of any mkt activity, post or article in the sales reports? All the kpi for pr articles are related to sentiment or media exposure (reach, media value), I do these reports for my clients. But if you combine all the mkt efforts then you will get a snowball effect like in November 2021 for zenon.

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The #1 goal of this community right now should be to attract a very specific segment of people that can help grow the network. A segmentation of “entrepreneurs, marketing & sales teams, crypto enthusiasts” is not soecific enough and way too wide of a spectrum to efficiently target…

A generic PR campaign that aims at building zenon’s brand will likely be very ineffective at reaching this goal because the content and its placement cant be tailored to the very target segments most important to this community if they have never been soecifically defined in the first place.

Any marketing campaign worth its money is based on proven success metrics that result from tried and tested content and placement efficacy to convert specific target personas/segments. The ability to measure and track the impact of every $ spent in a granular way is what allows you to know what to spend it on in the first place.

Zenon doesn’t need undifferentiated brand recognition campaigns because there is no brand yet to recognize.

Again, at this stage spray & pray will be ineffective. A sniper approach is what we need imo.

And I’m sorry but the argument that it works because last November’s pump is dangerously flawed because of the very fact that no conversion metrics can prove it. It’s mostly correlation until actual causation can be proven with data.

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Absolutely, yes.

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The campaign in November reached a large crypto lookalikes audience of millions. Is hard to prove that wasn’t correlated if we take into consideration the engagement on the @zenon_network Twitter page (10K followers and an engagement of only few comments or likes), other mkt activities that were non-existent.

Big numbers also drive sales. Creatives drive sales.

Tell me how you quantify the sales of any product after an article on a printed magazine, or OOH display.? :slight_smile:

Believe me that OOH advertising is working without any tool to determine the exact sales.

How do you create the benchmarks to optimize your campaigns without a creative and some test budgets?

All the creatives so far used by the community are almost 100% derived or similar to the content from zenon_network page. theAliensKnow Academy is a new content approach.

If approved I would really like you to help me with the creatives for the phase 2 videos and other strategy details. And this time it will not be a pro-bono project for you, me, or other znnalien involved in this project

14

I’m glad you asked. The test budget should be the marketeer’s entrepreneurial risk to bear. If you ask for the community to pay for your time to experiment instead of delivering results (i.e. growth), it just looks like you’re trying to get paid and offset your risk.

If I’m a trader trying to set up a hedge fund, I dont go to investors asking for money to develop a strategy - they’d laugh me out of the room! Only when I have a strategy that I know works (and am able to prove it does!) I ask investors for money to scale it.

This AZ application is asking for money to experiment without even proposing a strategy, let alone one hat has been tried and tested.

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ok now im torn

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I’m generally opposed to paid advertising with no specific goal or conversion target. From all the research I’ve done in the past and my direct experience in real estate, paid ads on twitter, facebook, reddit, etc don’t yield results. Paid placement for an apartment for rent on an apartment search engine, such as apartments.com or zillow.com, are very effective. I can track the impressions to lease execution or phone call, email, or some touch point. And I can compare apartments.com with zillow.com based on lead generation and lease execution. Then I can refine ad dollars based on effectiveness.

I am in support of brand awareness type marketing that is grass roots articles, art, videos, blog posts, tweets, medium articles, etc, that improve SEO and create brand awareness. But paying to place that work on Facebook, for example, will not help. Our target user likely does not use facebook.

How will we measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign so we can determine where and how to spend ad dollars, if at all, in the future?

I personally think we should do some SEO analysis to figure out how people are finding us. Then create content (or improve existing content) around how we are being found to expand that footprint with community created content and art.

In summary, I am in support of creating community content, art, videos, etc… I’m not in support of spending $znn on ads that cannot be measured.

Please Note: I have a commercial account with Moz.com to track SEO. I would be willing to setup a profile under my account for someone to use to measure SEO for our project. It’s not easy to use and took me a LONG time to figure out how to use. But it’s VERY effective once you understand what the tool is telling you.

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The hourly rates and the hours counted in the proposal are at least 50 % discount vs. regular clients in the agency. The main difference here is the fact that we are promoting financial services/ cryptocurrency/ decentralized networks that have no liability, usually for this type of client have a premium of at least 100% to our costs.

In any agency after you select your creative crew and approve the brief - you pay them for their work. Who creates videos and visuals for free? What is the quality of a creative work that is made without any cost?

A few hundred euros for 1-minute animation is a ridiculous price, it’s impossible to find a professional team to work on an animation for this budget. Also few hundred euros for boosting your ads on social media is just a mandatory strategy to grow your profiles. If the pillars expect infinite charity from the community members I’m sorry to say that won’t happen in real life.

I have already spent a ridiculous amount of unpaid hours for Zenon in the last year creating stuff for this community

so what is wrong with wanting to be paid for your work? or what risk do I want to offset?

The point of #AlienKnow Academy is to create a creative community that creates fun, educational content for social media channels and the community to use for specific mkt activities. I’m not asking for a banner campaign or to scale a hedge fund or to get rich (you have the hour rates, if the znn price goes up all the budget will be reused or returned) - I’m asking for creating a platform of communication and a competent creative community that is working in a stable environment (clear budgets/briefs before starting to work).
The SEO / funnel part is really easy to integrate when you have an audience who reacted to the organic community content and a creative team that understands the product and the audiences.

Anyway thank you for your feedback, It’s valuable and I hope will inspire you and others to apply with better proposals to the A-Z.

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How would you decide where to place ads and measure effectiveness of those ads?

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first, we need to place ads for our social media channels in order to grow the audience, based on the targeting details provided by the ad app (age, gender, location, interests, lookalike audiences)
second, we need to have short ads 12 sec with a link to zenon.org or zenon.network
then we put a pixel code on the targeted page to retarget with specific massages to achieve a specific action.

or if the advertising policy is violated, we will run a contest on the page to achieve the growth of the audience base and increase the quality of creative work ready to be shared organically

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I was drawn to this line in the original post.

" * Boost the content with ads on multiple social networks (eg. facebook, Instagram, tiktok)"

My experience / impression with these networks is:

  1. Facebook = boomers who are not target users / participants
  2. TikTok = mostly pump and dump outlet for projects like Cummies and other rug projects that have no value. People share these posts if there is an attractive woman or something absurd. Most of the videos on there look sort of like this.

  1. Instagram I don’t have any experience with it in crypto so can’t speak to it.

Can you provide examples of ads on these platforms that you find effective?

1 Like