Media.Monks’ Catherine D Henry says The Great Convergence is coming

At the exchange4media TechManch 2023, currently being held in Mumbai, Catherine D. Henry, SVP Web3 & Metaverse strategy, Media.Monks, delivered the keynote address - Beyond the Hype of Web3: Potential and Challenges.

She broke down how Web3 technology offers marketers new ways to engage with their audience and provide more personalized experiences.

The session further delved into how by leveraging decentralized identity management, smart contracts, NFTs, and decentralized marketplaces, marketers can create new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Beginning her address by noting that while her specialism is in new technology, and specifically, web three and Metaverse, Henry said that increasingly everybody wants to hear about AI. “It's funny because year after year, it feels like we have so much pressure to respond to market demand because of technology. Technology is driving what we're doing very quickly, every day. It feels like every year, there's something new.”

In 2019 it was the crypto craze and the prices of Bitcoin shot up. In 2020 everyone was online playing games like Animal Crossing, Roblox, Fortnite. “In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was making Meta a Metaverse company and nobody even understood what that meant. And then of course, 2022 had NFTs Web3 and now AI. It's a lot and I am an emerging tech specialist. I've been doing this for 20 years, and I've never ever seen the markets move as quickly as they are today,” she went on.

Henry then drew up a big picture of what's happening in the tech space, saying that it's not about one particular stream or the other, as it's not metaverse versus Web3 versus AI. “I wanted to really give some perspective to what we're doing as marketers, to cut through the jargon and the hype and really focus on what's important with respect to how we can be successful in this new media landscape.”

Using the classical century-old story of ‘Erewhon’ by author Samuel Butler, Henry went on to describe the Great Convergence and “how all of these new technologies are coming together, the value of culture, and, specifically, how we as marketers can take advantage of this historic moment and drive the change, as opposed to letting technology and its demands and the demand of the popular imagination, drive what we're doing”.

“Technology is powerful. It's changing how we work, how we relate with customers, and importantly how we relate to one another with important consequences for everyone in this room. You may have noticed that Erewhon is an anagram for nowhere but today I really want to focus on where we are today,” she said.

Henry went on to take the audience on a deep dive into these emerging technologies, and when and where Web3, the Metaverse, NFTs and even AI meet, interact, and synergize, leading to the kaleidoscopic digital media landscape that we find ourselves in today.

She pointed out how NFTs are no longer a dirty word or joke as people had come to recognize them for what they were, digital assets, which had value, and was no longer hyper-inflated into yet another faddish internet bubble.

She further illustrated that as technology becomes more immersive and all-encompassing, all of these tools will not only be integral to daily lives but help transform them in unprecedented ways as we move to an even more digital mode of life, something Henty has written about in her upcoming book, Virtual Natives.

“Digital Natives" is a term that was first initiated in 1998. Mark Zuckerberg was probably a freshman in college before social media as we know it was even born. And since then, a lot has changed. We no longer surf in cyberspace, on the information highway. So why are we still using the term digital natives?” mused Henry.

She continued, “Today, we've got virtual natives: kids who've learned to type before they go to school. Why? Because their parents probably met on a dating app. They were given phones instead of keys or a rattle to play with. And so, when they first arrive at school, they already know the type before they can, right. These kids are virtual natives and they learn to swipe before they could even speak. So for them, their reality online is as real as their reality offline.”

“So the great convergence is really about how technology is convergent after all, it's really about how technology is being adopted and transformed by culture and driven by this new cohort of virtual natives,” she concluded.