Marketing For Good: How Cleo is Leveraging Blockchain and NFTs for a Greener Planet (video interview)

We were recently interviewed by the team behind The Human & Machine for their Youtube channel as an example of an innovative project using the Blockchain and NFT’s to help support marketeers (and more) bring some eco balance into their campaigns.

Here is an AI generated transcript. Please excuse any typo’s (bad bot).

Introduction

Jason Sibley CEO of Cleo is joining us on the Human Machine to talk about how blockchain is being used behind a new trend called Marketing for Good.

Jason Sibley's odyssey from Web1 to Web3

I started working for the only outlet for computers in the Uk back in 1990, and we had a product called the 486 Sx. It was the birth of modern computing.

My first job in marketing was bringing affordable computing solutions for the home. 12 years later, I launched my own agency, and for the last 21 years, we've been helping Blue Chip clients from technology to Consumer, Electric, into Finance bring products to Market and generate Pipeline.

So my history up to this project has been working with brands, helping campaigns launch, but always looking for that opportunity to apply the technology to the market. I tell customers it's Web5 now, because Web 2 plus Web 3 is the next step. I've seen the advent of so many different things in those years, including convincing people that the Internet was good, email marketing, search engine marketing, and social media accounts.

We have really seen Communications evolve dramatically in my time, especially in marketing. Now we are being able to add this transactional layer on top, I could never imagine what we were doing today 20 years ago when we started the agency.

The genesis of Cleo

Cleo and why does it need blockchain?

The single biggest problem in marketing today is the value exchange required at point of contact request. We cannot sell something to you unless we get your email address and your permission to contact you. A lot of people approach the pinch point by creating dumb down content, but that just fills their pipeline with people with a very low propensity to buy something, and sales and marketing have a fight over those leads.

A horrible virus went around and pushed a load more money into the digital space. This made first party data providers like Facebook and Meta and Linkedin and Twitter more control, and the buyer getting younger, they are much more digitally savvy.

Cleo was born out of the idea of giving people value in return for their information and attention, and it dates back two years.

Explanation of ‘Marketing for Good’

We started really simply two years ago by saying there's got to be an exchange of value. So we started rewarding somebody's attention, particularly in a sales meeting, with money in the form of a gift card.

Giving somebody money feels wrong, feels a bit like bribery, but it works where you meet with something of value for your attention.

The issue with gift cards are not scalable because they have to be manually verified, bought with via package the gift card up, and sent out. This also costs $150 dollars to get the gift card out.

We've got a couple of people in the agency that are real advocates for doing some good for the planet, so instead of giving you a gift card, we're actually doing something good out in the world. And this is the one single cause that impacts every child on the planet.

People are spending money on ads and nobody clicks, and they're building websites that people don't visit. Cleo is a platform that helps brands bring greater balance to their marketing campaigns. We feel really good about Cleo and are going to transition to being a staff owned agency over the next few years so I can focus on helping take clear go to a global market.

Cleo can be used by a much broader network than just the customers that we know. I think it's important to understand the context of the projects, and I think there's a parallel in the crypto industry with what you were seeing there. It helps build a community of people that want to do good, and I think that's nice.

How Cleo leverages blockchain tech

Cleo is using blockchain technology to provide a transparent platform for the ESG space, so users will be able to see where every dollar is going.

The blockchain enables us to have a global program, a currency that can be utilized in every country, and a completion certificate in the form of a really nicely designed Nft.

If somebody plants 100 trees or removes a ton of carbon from the atmosphere, they get an on-chain digital certificate in the form of an Nft that sits in their account. They can print it off and hang it on their wall.

We want to give people the ability to share their helping and tell their story, and to show off their certificate or trophy. A large Global Telesales agency tried a program where they planted trees for meetings, but they found it difficult to get proof of the trees being planted. So they switched to Cleo, where they got a digital certificate saying the trees were planted.

I told him to plant 20 trees or 100 trees, or 50 trees and 500 plastic bottles from the ocean, instead of 65 cents to attend a sales meeting. We couldn't do that without the blockchain, and for me, it was when that moment twigged and I realized that the blockchain helps this project. I've been part of supporting marketing projects that have gone on and done really well supporting marketing projects.

We want to do an Nft what can we attach it to and we've found that the blockchain was the answer rather than the question.

Cleo’s partners

So let's say you represent an organization that wants to initiate people to actually plant trees.

We've done a lot of research with our initial partner, Earth9, and we've identified three projects that we want to support for tree planting. We're targeting planting at least a million trees with our partners called Eden Reforestation this year.

We found a partner in Thailand called Second Life who take plastic out of the ocean and recycle them into something good. They are also working with a football team in the Uk who are using recycled plastic from Thailand to make their football kits.

We have inventory in each of those three areas for our client campaigns to come into, but I am not an expert in this space.

We've already started recruiting for an ESG board, which will review applications for suppliers to the platform. We're not a marketplace for carbon credits, we want to work with very specifically hand-picked projects that we can verify good is being done and they meet our criteria. We're also setting up an impact investment fund, which is owned by the token holders.

Cleo is a company that aims to reduce the amount of plastic in the oceans by investing a portion of its profits into environmental projects. This is their way of giving back to the community and also to the environment.

Core advantages of Cleo for brands

Cleo offers improved engagement at a lower cost per lead, a four good reward that is actually self-funded by the reduction in the cost per lead, and improved lead quality because the Cleo system qualifies the lead and actually asks them sales qualifying questions in the execution of the good.

Online webinars have been incredibly popular in the last two years, but the cost per click has increased and the on-page conversion has decreased. As a result, fewer people are signing up for a webinar and fewer people are actually turning up.

When you have those maths up, it costs somewhere between a thousand and twelve hundred dollars to get somebody to attend a webinar. If you carbon offset their entire computer for a whole year, you can reduce the cost per attendee by around $600.

They keep doing what they're doing, attend my webinar, but they have this really nice little offer which improves all of those metrics by small percentages, but adds up to a dramatically lower cost per click.

We recognize that your time is worth something, so we're gonna do some good in the world on your behalf.

The Cleo offer is a free money offering that will reduce your costs and give you a better quality lead and an improved pipeline that will convert with sales.

The planet gets a nice helping hand, the brand feels good, the people involved in the campaign feel good, and we just sit in the middle as this little technology layer.

Why Cleo chose Polygon network

Starbucks built their Nft loyalty program on Polygon, and Cleo chose the same blockchain. They wanted something that was scalable and interoperable, so they chose Polygon because it has a great engine for producing Nfts, and it's also Ethereum compatible. Building your own is a whole nother monster, so I don't think you guys want to go there at this point. There's just so much choice, and I'm sure people will have some bias against something else.

The users don't really care what blockchain run, and we're not selling a blockchain project, so you know it's not complicated to make a change on that piece of the technology.

What's on the horizon for Cleo's roadmap?

Cleo's first live campaign will be with Lenovo, the manufacturer, so that's what we can look forward to.

We have around 10 other large Blue Chip clients and brands planning to start campaigns in Q2, and we are also actively talking to 200 marketing agencies to bring Clio to their clients.

We're also launching a schools program called Planet Together in Q2, and it's about helping schools go net Zero through getting their students to create things that they turn into Nfts within the Clio platform. Kids make Nfts, parents come in, find their kids drawing in Clio, and the kids have their studs instead of sticking it on their fridge. And we've got five Schools starting in Q2, we've got another 50 in the pipeline.

This seems to have resonated really well with our audience, so we're mixing very small rewards with a chance to win a very big reward. The rewards go from as little as 65 cents up to about 850, and the carbon offsetting happens for 380 years on average.

Lenovo will be the first campaign to go live in mid-march, and we will be completely transparent about the operations and what we're doing.

How the Planet Together initiative works

We've worked with the Iso certification to assess the schools' carbon impact and built a model that makes it easier for them to offset their carbon footprint. Then they divide that cost by the number of pupils to give themselves a Target raise per pupil.

In essence, the money comes in from parents, grandparents, and other people, and gets turned into the token and the good gets executed. The Nft then becomes that completion certificate, and the school will eventually raise enough money to be 100 Net Zero.

You get the school the Nft and the parents the Vera Certified Completion Certificate at the end of the campaign.

We believe that very soon there will be a Carbon Tax in Europe and that people will have to prove that they are meeting their sustainability goals or they will be taxed for not meeting them. We've opened Cleo up to allow private individuals to do some good.

We've talked about the marketing sense of Clio, but there is also a consumer sense where you can just do the good directly. You don't have to give your time, so that's not our key value proposition.

If people want to learn more about Cleo, they should join our Discord server and ask questions, or visit our website, which has all the links to our social accounts.