Salesforce Appoints web3 Advisory Board – Ledger Insights
This week, Salesforce unveiled its web3 Advisory Board to lend a helping hand in guiding Salesforce clients into web3 in a “reliable, responsible and sustainable manner”.
In February, Salesforce announced plans for its NFT Cloud that allows brands to create, manage and sell non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, there was significant backlash from hundreds of employees who objected to the potential for fraud and the environmental impact. With the Ethereum merger now behind us, the environmental aspect is less of an issue, although NFTs are struggling to shake off the more fraudulent image.
Nevertheless, Salesforce launched its first NFT Cloud pilots in June. Increasingly, brands want to adopt web3 as part of their loyalty and reward programs. And they’re running metaverse experiments with an eye to the future.
Digital marketing has been through many phases, such as search engine optimization, Google Adwords, banner ads and social media. Web3, including the metaverse, is the latest addition to the strategy toolbox.
The Salesforce 2023 State of Marketing survey found that 51% of CMOs already have a web3 strategy with virtual products and virtual reality as the most common technologies.
“Web3 opens the doors to a new era of brand and consumer relationships. Realizing its potential requires a new way of thinking and approaching business problems, and we’ve put together an amazing board to help us on this journey,” said Marc Mathieu, Salesforce SVP of Strategic Customer Transformation and Innovation.
The Web3 Advisory Board includes:
- Erika Wykes-Sneyd, Global Vice President, adidas Web3 Studio
- Sebastian Borget, co-founder and COO, The Sandbox
- Keith Grossman, President, TIME
- Aaron Rajan, Global VP of Technology, Unilever
- Brendan Lynch. Global EVP for Enterprise & Revenue, Ticketmaster
- Sandra Ro, CEO, Global Blockchain Business Council
- Ian Rogers, CXO, Ledger
The usual brands represented on the board, Adidas, Unilever and Ticketmaster are very active within web3.
The privacy issue
It is commendable that Salesforce has taken this step with the stated purpose of guiding on trust, ethics and insight. We believe this is not a complete list of members, which also include ethics and sustainability experts. Industry outsiders are essential for privacy.
The openness of public blockchain is a dream for brands. A wallet address can provide a treasure trove of information about clients. Some of it can be used internally, for example enabling brands to build a better image of customers across different channels such as in-store, online and in the metaverse. That’s fair enough.
But transparency also means they can see the customer’s engagement with other brands and their spending habits.
Web3 wallets leak far more financial information than cookie tracking, which is being phased out. Over time, this problem will likely be solved in different ways, eventually resulting in a person having multiple sub-wallets that prevent their spending habits from being linked across brands.
Meanwhile, there are ethical issues, especially when wallets are associated with real identities.
Meanwhile, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff embraced web3 early, particularly through one of his other ventures TIME Magazine. TIME has launched several NFT collections, invested in NFT marketplace OpenSea and a year ago partnered with Galaxy Digital to publish metaverse content. Salesforce has made web3 investments in blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs and infrastructure provider Blockdaemon.
