Uber And XION Showcase Web3’s Advantage In User Acquisition

Customer acquisition is getting harder than ever for businesses of every size due to the limitations of the traditional web-based advertising model. These days, companies are spending billions of dollars annually on blunt, ineffective advertising campaigns with very little to show for it. 

Such challenges call for drastic solutions, and Uber has responded by turning to the XION blockchain’s novel Web3 technologies to power a much more efficient, verifiable and incentivized customer acquisition strategy that’s already showing positive results. 

Traditional Ads Are Losing Effectiveness

Over the years, Uber has noticed that its online advertising campaigns are slowly but surely losing their impact. Its new user acquisition costs have increased steadily as a result of various challenges faced by the traditional online advertising industry. 

These days, the impact of online ads is significantly lower than what it used to be, due to intensified competition with every brand throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at the same ad platforms. Brands are also dealing with rising “ad fatigue”, where consumers are, to be frank, becoming seriously disconcerted by the invasive ads that seem to follow them across every website they visit. The use of ad blockers has increased, and more consumers than ever are choosing to purposely avoid clicking on ads. That’s led to declining rates of engagement, which forces brands to spend more than ever before to keep up with their user acquisition targets. 

In addition, companies also have to deal with tougher regulations. Privacy laws such as Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, and Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency policy have dented brands’ ability to effectively target consumers. There’s also the growing ad fraud phenomenon they have to navigate, with an estimated $84 billion worth of advertising spend lost to fake ad impressions in 2023. 

Faced with these challenges, Uber last year came to the conclusion that traditional online advertising is no longer sustainable. It was a stark realization that led it to implement an entirely different customer acquisition strategy that’s only possible with Web3 technologies. 

Web3 Incentivizes User Engagement

Uber’s revolutionary solution was to launch an entirely new user acquisition strategy based on offering powerful incentives to high-value targets using an app known as EarnOS, powered by the XION blockchain. 

EarnOS makes full use of Web3’s innovative capabilities, allowing Uber to target customers of rival brands such as Bolt, Lyft and Grab. Those users can securely connect their accounts to EarnOS to verify their ride histories, and in return for providing this verifiable data, brands like Uber can offer them tempting rewards and discounts in return for using its service. 

The beauty of this approach is that it means Uber can target only the most likely prospects – consumers who are already using ride-sharing services. It’s much more efficient than relying on “hit and miss” ad impressions, which seek to lure in less-likely customer prospects. 

With its Web3 campaign, Uber enables riders who use its services to enter regular sweepstakes, with the number of entries corresponding to how many times they ride with one of its competitors. By doing so, it can engage riders who are substantially more likely to switch from one of its rivals to use its own services. 

To reassure consumers that their privacy is preserved, Uber points out that EarnOS uses a cryptographic technology called “zero-knowledge proofs”, which allows for their ride histories to be verified while preserving their anonymity. What’s more, consumers can retain full control of their information and choose who they want to share it with. 

EarnOS also helps Uber to engage with consumers over the longer-term, as it can offer ongoing incentives to ensure they continue to use its services on a regular basis. The more consumers use its ride sharing services, the greater the rewards they can earn. It fundamentally changes the nature of Uber’s marketing strategy from passive, ad-based customer acquisition to one that rewards user engagement. 

Blockchain Abstraction Is Key

Uber’s next-generation customer acquisition campaign has only been made possible recently thanks to XION’s incredible innovations in blockchain abstraction. Until recently, interacting with blockchain has always required a high-degree of technical skills on the part of the end user, limiting its effectiveness. 

For instance, blockchain users are required to create a crypto wallet and secure it with a seed phrase, and then they need to go through the drama of signing up to a crypto exchange, including KYC, to be able to buy the cryptocurrencies required to use blockchain services. 

XION changes that by abstracting away these complexities. With it, users can create a non-custodial account (really a blockchain wallet) using an email and password, so there’s no more seed phrase to worry about. They can use that account with every single app in XION’s ecosystem, and they don’t have to worry about buying different crypto tokens or paying gas fees or waiting for transactions to process. Everything is simplified to the extent that they won’t even know they’re using a blockchain-based platform. It’s Web3, but not as we know it. 

Next-Generation User Acquisition

By providing Web3 capabilities with a Web2-like user experience, XION can potentially transform the nature of customer acquisition across every industry, helping hundreds of brands to shift to a much more effective, laser-targeted, incentivized engagement model with verifiable results. It provides a way for brands to reward users located anywhere in the world, and they won’t even need a bank account or have to worry about expensive cross-border transactions, as these rewards can be paid out in blockchain-based stablecoins that can be sent anywhere in the world instantly. All this while preserving user’s full anonymity, ensuring any and all sensitive data is secured. 

Given the growing ineffectiveness of web-based advertising, blockchain abstraction technologies such as XION’s have the potential to transform internet digital marketing forever, enabling every brand to adopt a strategy based on incentivized, laser-targeted engagement. What’s more, advertising will no longer be a one-way street. Because Web3 allows brands to verify consumer behavior, they’ll be able to measure loyalty and gain insights that allow them to tailor their products and services specifically for different consumer subsets, enhancing their services. 

Finally, Web3 also solves the ongoing problem of ad fraud by verifying ad impressions, enabling brands to trust the results they’re seeing.