New technology continues to drive innovation. Web 3 is now upon us. Welcome to the Marketing Accelerator Podcast, featuring three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker. Today, I'm speaking with Stephanie Lynch. She's the co-founder and a senior partner at Braver Element. That's a boutique agency that's driving innovation and onboarding brands to Web 3. Stephanie, to understand where we are with Web 3, I think it'd be helpful for you to give us a bit of a history lesson. Tell me about Web 1.

Stephanie Lynch: Well, Drew, when the internet was born, it was built for read-write content. It was static and one-dimensional. It was also heavily centralized, so it was owned by big companies like AOL, Netscape and eventually Google.

Drew: So, compared to how we use the web today, Web 1 was very basic. How did things change with the transition from Web 1 to Web 2?

Stephanie: Web 2 is the dawn of e-commerce, with the ability to transact over the internet. So, content became read-create content, and social media forged new ways to interact. So, it was largely an evolution from Web 1 so that now you could transact in a different way. There was interplay between the participants. However, it continued to be centralized, and companies continued to own that exchange, companies like Meta or Facebook and Google, of course.

Drew: Web 3 is fast approaching. What does that look like?

Stephanie: Web 3 is sometimes called the ownership economy, and I really like that moniker because if you think about that evolution from Web 2 to Web 3, Web 3 is read, write and own content and assets. So basically, think about it this way. The internet was the highway for Web 1 and Web 2. Blockchain is the highway for Web 3, and the blockchain technology is basically a public ledger. It shows the history of all transactions, and they are immutable, meaning they can't be changed. So again, it's open, it's public. Think of it sort of like as a public Excel spreadsheet, but it's also decentralized so it can be stored across computers and servers all over the world. No one entity actually owns the information. And the reason why it's really important for businesses to think about this is that consumers are rallying to blockchain because it offers this new way to create transactions through largely cryptocurrency and other kinds of tokens like NFTs. And, it also helps these consumers create communities because they have transacted together.

Stephanie: And just like digital transformation strategies helped onboard Web 2 companies to e-commerce, companies need to understand how Web 3 technology works and they need to have good use cases for their customers. A lot of companies were not prepared for e-com, and they lost market share and sometimes they lost their entire business. So, to put it into perspective, adoption of Web 3 is happening faster than social media adoption, and the younger generation, particularly Gen Z, highly entrepreneurial segment, and they will have major buying power in 10 years. Are you gonna be ready?

Drew: Now, that's a great question, Stephanie. Is your business going to be ready for Web 3? The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com, where we accelerate marketing leaders to higher performance and increase job satisfaction. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.