The event industry is one of the oldest industries with historical growth consistency. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the event industry will grow by 44% from 2010 to 2020, exceeding most growth predictions for other industries. Each day, thousands of events happen across the globe. These events happen for various reasons. Interestingly, 79% of US marketers generate sales using event marketing.
One of the biggest problems facing the industry is marketing. Industrial statistics show that:
- 50% of vendors have problems with getting people to respond to invites;
- 40% have problems with getting people to pay attention to invitees;
- More than 30% cannot minimize no-shows;
- Nearly 30% find it hard getting people to the event;
- More than 20% have problems with confirming who is attending.
Google and Facebook have taken over the world of online advertising with 54% and 45% advertisement revenue respectively. Most event organizers use these platforms for online advertising while 13.6% of organizers do not have any experience running campaigns on these platforms. Organizers using these platforms face serious challenges. 73.6% that use online tools are victims of ineffective online advertisement. The current centralized online advertisement platforms are designed to enrich themselves at the disadvantage of the users.
An example is Jack – a concert organizer who uses a CPC model for advertising. His Action is ―buy tickets‖. With average CPC on Facebook as $0.32. He gets 1000 clicks, but only 30 people complete ticket purchase. Jack ends up spending $320.00 while his real expense based on full conversion was $9.60. That is a 3333% unnecessary expense.
CPA system cannot interact with FB or Google API, hence it's limited. CPA systems are also centralized. Viral effects only happen when people have a reason to share.
A decentralized peer-to-peer protocol for event marketing which rewards its participants would allow for more effective & economic event marketing without going through a centralized advertising platform/ institution. The nature of events (i.e. concerts) entails that people attend in groups. A reward based P2P marketing protocol will allow for the fastest mass adoption of crypto-tokens as more connections will be formed faster according to David P. Reed‘s Law (2N−N−1).
Event organizers need results. Unfortunately, 73% of event vendors are victims of ineffective online marketing while, 26.4% do not know which online tools to use. There are projects (such as KickCity), that proposes a model where the event organizer, user promoting the event and attendee is rewarded while smart contract facilitates instantaneous, transparent and fair distribution of reward. Such a value system according to Reed's low will have an exponential growth of connections.
For example:
Event organizer Stacy creates an event ̳A‘ with ticket cost at $100 per seat. She obtains and allocates, let's say, 1,000 tokens for marketing. Users on a platform see her event with a specified number of coins and are motivated to promote it. They can invite their friends within the platform to the event or use unique links to promote the event outside the platform. Once a ticket is bought, the system automatically allocates tokens to the person or a group of people responsible for the sale or event registration.
Smart contracts help enforce fair distribution of rewards based on user contribution. Attendees who buy tickets, receive rewards for buying on the platform. Users can buy with FIAT or obtain tickets using bitcoins, Ethereum and tokens for less price due to the fact that third parties (banks) are bypassed. For every promotional campaign, tokens from the pool will be shared among users who bought tickets.
