Ganesh Kumar Bangah makes waves wherever he goes. For the uninitiated, Ganesh is widely regarded as one of Malaysia’s greatest serial entrepreneurs and a visionary technology industry leader.
It’s not surprising then that Ganesh was seen by participants at the recent and highly successful SourceCode 2022 summit as the ‘Crowd Favourite’. The event was organised by GroupM and held over two days at The Chateau Spa & Wellness Resort on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur last week.
SourceCode by GroupM is a digital focused client summit addressing the latest innovations, strategies, developments, challenges and future insights in the digital marketing industry.
The conference enhanced participants’ knowledge on digital innovation, digital strategy, latest trends and programmatic in the current ecosystem.
Ganesh had delivered a captivating presentation entitled Web 3.0: The Next Frontier in Marketing for Brands and even left industry veteran Professor Harmandar Singh in awe.
He started his first internet business, MOL AccessPortal, at the age of 20, developing it to become SEA’a top online payment gateway and the region’s first internet company listed on NASDAQ.
“He then bought Friendster, with around 100 million users, and made a play to combat Facebook.”
Web 3.0, or ‘the future of the internet’ as Ganesh described it, is indeed the ‘next frontier in marketing for brands.’
This stems from the reality today that, although online marketing today and its dependence on social media is ideal for distribution purposes, the platforms involved have a tendency of building ‘walls’, resulting in brands losing control of their customers.
“In addition, data from consumers tend to be in silos; hence, brands cannot retarget buyers from popular marketplaces like Lazada or Shopee.”
The underlying technology of Web 3.0 is blockchain, whereby it manifested ‘a global computer hosted by millions of people’ with software that can be written on the blockchain for specific tasks, such as royalty payouts utilising NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
“Since millions of people host it, no one can control it and build walls,” said Ganesh, who is in a strong and unique position to do so as his business encompasses two highly exciting digital value propositions: e-commerce spearheaded by Commerce.Asia and digital growth marketing represented through Netccentric-Nuffnang.
Commerce Asia Group has over 92,000 active sellers, posting group gross merchandise volume (GMV) of USD1.5 billion last year throughout Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, and would be establishing its presence in Singapore and Indonesia from next year onwards.
Meanwhile, Netccentric-Nuffnang – with more than 20,000 influencers, key opinion leaders, celebrities, and content creators who collectively reach over 20 million engaged social media followers throughout Malaysia and Southeast Asia.
The Group today has one of the largest and most impactful social media influencer communities in the region having represented international household brands throughout various captivating marketing campaigns.
Ganesh’s solution is its new NFT tech platform that that offers crypto-less user experience (whereby users no longer need to create wallet nor purchase cryptocurrencies while being able to also send and receive assets via email): a Mobile App (offering access cards together with redemption and loyalty cards, geo-location activation, merchandise, chat and communities), as well as distribution and promotion through influencers (together with incentive mechanism for influencers.)
Cross brand collaboration makes this solution even more appealing, with Ganesh citing that a consumer could, for example, watch a movie at a cinema before getting a discount at a food outlet.
For brands, the tokens will provide opportunities to increase revenue, build loyalty and gain access to Web 3.0 analytics.
Influencers in the group’s network will be able to promote and market NFTs minted using NFT Tech to their followers. In return, influencers will be able to earn income linked to their issuance and transactions involving the NFTs.
“Our transition into becoming a Web 3.0 creator platform is set to generate value for all our stakeholders, especially brands and influencers,” said Ganesh.
Benefits for brands include:
Beyond Likes: Extend the engagement of influencer marketing with utilities and analytics to enable tracking of purchases, attendance of events and foot traffic.
Own your customers: Utilise the Blockchain to communicate directly with your customers, bypassing the big platforms.
Extend your reach: Collaborate with other brands in Web 3.0 to build your customer base.
Platform-as-a-service: NFT Tech’s easy-to-use platform is ready to get your Web 3.0 strategy executed and up and running quickly.
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