Zcash Media Launch Plan

[David_Heisenberg]

Hi all,

We just submitted our proposal to launch Zcash Media and release the two ZCG-funded videos we have made! Please find the proposal here:

Zcash Media Launch Plan

Also, we noticed that the long-form proposal (complete with illustrations, diagrams, budget breakdowns, etc.) wasn’t able to be downloaded from the grants website (we included a pdf file as an attachment to our grant). Please use this link if you have problems viewing the long-form proposal: 220312_Zcash_Media_Launch_Plan_Proposal.pdf - Google Drive

Please let us know your thoughts! We are eager to make a successful debut for Zcash Media

Warmly,
37 Laines team

[David_Heisenberg]

Title:

Zcash Media Launch Plan

Applicant name:

David Boyer

Team member name:

37 Laines

Pitch: A one-liner elevator pitch version of your proposal

Proposal to launch Zcash Media - a multi-platform educational hub for Zcash

Total Request (USD):

$213200.00 USD

Have you previously received a grant from Zcash Community Grants (formerly called ZOMG) or ZF?

Yes

Please provide details:

We have received two previous, ongoing grants from Zcash Community Grants: ZF Grants - Zcash Short Documentary and ZF Grants - The Ceremony, Powers of Tau, and Halo Video.

Are you seeking or have you received funding from other sources for this proposed project?

No

Applicant background:

37 Laines is an award winning film production company run by Natasha Mynhier and Jeff Hammerton. Out of our offices in Santa Monica, CA and Denver, CO, 37 Laines produces high quality creative work for clients across the US, including branded content, commercials, short films, music videos, digital content, web-series, live events, and documentaries.

Our team of filmmakers has been enhanced in recent weeks by adding on a top notch strategic marketing team. Here are some of the leading members of the Zcash Media Team:

Natasha Mynhier - Producer / Content Lead

Natasha Mynhier is a director, editor, cinematographer, and the founder of 37 Laines. In 2020, she won a Gold at the Cannes Young Director Awards for her short film In A Beat. She strives to make socially conscious, thought provoking films, and has a passion for projects that involve science communication.

David Boyer - Producer / Research Team Lead

David is a Postdoc currently studying neurodegenerative diseases at UCLA. He has experience in managing technically demanding projects involving multiple interdisciplinary partners, as well as coordinating and executing long-term research grants. David has co-authored 20+ academic articles and is practiced in relaying detailed scientific information to general audiences.

Sue Heimsath - Marketing + PR Strategy Lead

Sue is a seasoned, innovative marketing professional with a successful 20+ year track record of developing and implementing marketing strategies for both start-up and high-growth, global technology organizations, such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Dell and HPE. Sue has spent the latter part of her career leveraging her vast marketing skill set to establish lucrative technology partner relationships and executing joint programs that drive mutual revenue growth. Sue is also co-owner of Synergy Sales and Marketing Solutions marketing services agency. Sue is based out of southern New Hampshire.

Jess Carroll - Digital Strategy Lead

Jess Carroll is a digital marketing expert based in Toronto, Canada, specializing in the entertainment industry. She has worked with major creators (AsapSCIENCE, Molly Burke, KindaTV), film/tv productions (Murdoch Mysteries, Departure), podcasts (Amazon’s The Lamb), and video games (My Singing Monsters), using her skills in audience analysis, content strategy, and social and paid media to help clients earn millions of followers (and $$$).

Zcash Media will also have the following personnel for digital strategy and content creation.

Kevan Shah - Crypto Digital Strategy Consult

Eli Wanket - Head of Post Production

Edgar Sardarian - Editor

Very True Story - Animation

Lime Studios - Sound Design

ADVISORS

Naomi Brockwell - Crypto Media Host / YouTuber

Michelle Lai - Former Zcash Grants Member

Linda Xie - Producer, ETH Film

Carrie Weprin - Producer, ETH Film

Description of Problem or Opportunity:

While cryptocurrency has seen more large-scale adoption in recent years, conversation about cryptocurrency and coin adoption can often be fraught and complicated. Zcash’s powerful tech, historical relevance, and solution to the privacy problem has yet to be promoted on a large-scale. This has led to a lack of wider public awareness, difficulty in onboarding new users, and less awareness of Zcash’s development to ZEC holders and users. To counter this, 37 Laines has made two high-quality, entertaining, and educational videos about Zcash that feature world-famous interviewees and cutting edge education. However, without a proper distribution plan, there is a large risk of the videos not breaking through to a large audience. To overcome this challenge, we propose a distribution and marketing plan to help Zcash on its path to becoming a world-famous cryptocurrency known for its integrity, scientific rigor, high-profile supporters, and mission-based ethos.

Proposed Solution: Describe the solution at a high level.

37 Laines has assembled a distribution and marketing team to build out an entity we are calling “Zcash Media”. In this way, Zcash Media will not only have the content creators necessary to make high-quality educational videos, but we will also be able to make sure the release of our two ZCG-funded videos adds another storied moment in Zcash’s history.

Zcash Media proposes to build a vibrant ecosystem of researchers, content creators, and digital strategists all working in conjunction with the Zcash community [please see associated long form proposal]. The Digital Media team will strategize on “What audiences see” including release of videos on YouTube and promotional content on related channels. The “Strategy to support the ecosystem” will be led by the Public Relations team to connect with media outlets, perform market research, counsel Zcash Media on how to bring awareness to Zcash on a global scale, and work in collaboration with ECC, ZF, ZCG, and Zcash community to help attain a unified voice. The research and content creation teams will lead the production of video content with input from Public Relations R+D arm.

For this current proposal, the Zcash Media ecosystem aims (i) establish its presence on various social media platforms, (ii) launch our Tier 0 short documentary, and (iii) launch our video explaining the Halo upgrade and revealing the identity of John Dobbertin. The activities surrounding these aims are outlined in the following sections.

Solution Format: What is the exact form of the final deliverable you’re creating?

Creation of Zcash Media channels on YouTube, Odysee, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and promotional materials released on additional social media platforms (e.g., Telegram, Reddit). In addition, we will feature promotional materials on third-party media outlets related to the release of our educational videos. Our two ZCG-funded videos will be released in their entirety on YouTube and Odysee.

Technical Approach: Dive into the how of your project. Describe your approaches, components, workflows, methodology, etc. Bullet points and diagrams are appreciated!

Our technical approach includes a comprehensive digital marketing and public relations strategy. PLEASE SEE LONG FORM PROPOSAL FOR FULL APPROACH.

Dependencies: What external entities is your project dependent on? What involvement is required from ZF, ECC, and/or other external organizations? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?

At the moment, our work does not depend on external organizations. Our main dependency is the video hosting and social media platforms that we will be posting material on. In addition, although our proposal could be completed without further collaborations, we think it is important to work in conjunction with ZF, ECC, and the Global Ambassadors Program to ensure united messaging.

Execution risks: What obstacles do you expect? What is most likely to go wrong? Which unknown factors could jeopardize success? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?

The primary concern to consider when executing the proposed campaign is to ensure the community feels that we are aligned with Zcash’s ethos/principals. To address this, all of our decision-making and output is crafted to keep the Zcash community/ethos front-and-center. We have continuously met with and had Zcash stakeholders review our work and plans, and have only proceeded when consensus among all parties is reached.

Another important risk is the ability to stand out in the massive crowd of crypto YouTube channels. However, we believe the production quality, marketing strategy, and high-profile individuals featured in our work will allow us to stand out.

Lastly, some risk of censorship exists due to the moderation policies of large companies like Google surrounding cryptocurrency advertising. However, we plan to address this in two ways: 1) our content is clearly educational in nature with talking head interviews and explainer animations. This should mitigate the risk of being seen as an advertisement. 2) We will simultaneously use the Odysee video hosting platform to put our educational videos. Odysee is less susceptible to censorship than YouTube.

Unintended Consequences: What are the negative ramifications if your project is successful? Consider usability, stability, privacy, integrity, availability, decentralization, interoperability, maintainability, technical debt, requisite education, etc.

By putting different people front and center in our videos, we risk unintended downsides if anyone featured were to have something extremely negative in their history or future come to light.

Evaluation plan: What metrics for success will you share with the community once you’re done? In addition to quantitative metrics, what qualitative metrics will you commit to report?

We will share a comprehensive review to the Zcash Community at the end of our launch phase. This will include detailed evaluation metrics from our marketing campaign gathered from all our social media sites. These include, but are not limited to: number of views, impressions, watch time, and mentions. In addition, our project can be evaluated qualitatively by soliciting community feedback on the success of Zcash Media’s launch.

Hardware/Software total budget:

$0.00 USD

Please provide justification for the total hardware/software budget:

N/A

Services total budget (cloud, hosting, etc.):

$0.00 USD

Please provide justification for the total services budget:

N/A

Compensation total budget:

$213200.00 USD

Please provide justification for the total compensation budget:

Please see long-form proposal for full breakdown of budget. In brief, our budget covers two months of work for 5 project managers (digital strategy, marketing/PR strategy, director of content creation, director of research/writing, head of post-production), one full-time editor, paid media, third-party media outlet placements, overhead costs, and support staff (line producer, graphic designer, project accountant, etc.). Project lead and editor positions are all paid for two months of full time work at ~$50/hr while other personnel are paid a project specific rate that is competitive with the industry standard.

Do you require startup funding?

Yes

Start up funding - detailed explanation:

Startup funding will be needed to pay portions of the following budget items: Marketing Lead, Digital Strategy Lead, Digital Strategy Consultant, Marketing tools, Line Producer, Director, Wrtier, Graphic Designer, Legal, Editors. Due to the short time frame of our launch plan, scheduled to occur before the NU5 update, startup funds are necessary to be able to hit the ground running.

Start up funding - USD value of payout upon approval of grant:

$70550.00

Milestone 1 - estimated completion date:

04/07/2022

Milestone 1 - USD value of payout upon completion of deliverables:

$48150.00

Deliverable 1.1

Zcash Media channels are created on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Odysee.

Deliverable 1.2

Zcash Media has asset lists, branding, content calendar done

Deliverable 1.3

Zcash Media Soft Launch - Initial promotions start on social media channels.

Milestone 2 - estimated completion date:

04/17/2022

Milestone 2 - USD value of payout upon completion of deliverables:

51050

Deliverable 2.1

Zcash short documentary released

Deliverable 2.2

Zcash Halo / Dobbertin video released

Deliverable 2.3

Consistent social media promotion

Milestone 3 - USD value of payout upon completion of deliverables:

43450

Milestone 3 - estimated completion date:

04/30/2022

Deliverable 3.1

Coindesk campaign

Deliverable 3.2

Continued social media promotion

Deliverable 3.3

Comprehensive Zcash Media launch review delivered to Zcash community

Total proposed USD value of grant:

$213200.00 USD

How was the project timeline determined?

The project timeline was determined such that the release of our two main videos occurs before the NU5 upgrade goes live. This will allow maximum exposure to not only our videos, but to the Zcash NU5 upgrade. In general, we aim to release our ZCG-funded educational videos on a regular cadence (weekly/biweekly) to build our YouTube/Odysee following.

[Shawn]

@David_Heisenberg

Milestone 2 - USD value of payout upon completion of deliverables:

51050

Deliverable 2.1

Zcash short documentary released

Deliverable 2.2

Zcash Halo / Dobbertin video released

Deliverable 2.3

Consistent social media promotion

I’m confused. You need $51k just to release the the primary and secondary videos ZOMG already funded?

[anon35140610]

I have a question, and it’s purely out of personal curiosity. I’m wondering how you arrived at $17,000 out of the $213,000 being the number that was allocated to paid media?

I’m also curious about Telegram advertising. How would you go about this? Via telega.io? Sponsored messages or?

[37L]

Hi Shawn,

Please refer to page 18 and 19 of our proposal document for more information on our milestones.

220312_Zcash_Media_Launch_Plan_Proposal.pdf

It is challenging to include all the necessary information in the short hand format of the grant website, so the long form proposal offers a more comprehensive perspective. Specifically, pages 18 and 19 should show you who is working throughout this period and what exactly we will be spending on. In addition, the other pages of the proposal break down the numerous strategies and surrounding activities supporting the release of these videos (upkeep, continuous content creation occurring in parallel to marketing work to prepare for future video releases, 3rd party media placements, outreach to influencers, event planning, community management, etc). There are many moving parts to pull this off so that it makes a big splash.

If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask

37 Laines Team

Edit (since we can’t have three consecutive responses):

Also @Shawn,

After some further thought, we think we can see where the confusion may come from. When we listed our deliverables, we were advised to list the most easily verifiable form of the deliverable, since this makes it easy for ZF to check that the deliverable was completed.

We realize that the actual release of the videos can occur with the click of a button. But we are considering the releases of the videos to be akin to “premiere” events whereby lots of strategic planning goes in to make sure as many people as possible attend or see the release, and that third party news outlets will cover the news featured in our videos. This requires a ton of coordination effort.

Therefore, we put the two releases of the already ZCG-funded videos as two deliverables for Milestone 2 as opposed to listing all of the hours of work that will occur behind the scenes as a deliverable (this is harder to prove). Instead, the veracity of the work that went into the premiere of the videos will be judged by the amount of viewership our videos receive, the community sentiment of our video releases, and other quantitative and qualitative metrics from our social media platforms.

Lastly, the third deliverable for Milestone 2 will be “consistent social media promotion”. This entails not only work hours to plan, create, and execute promotional content, but also to have full-time community management to help address matters that may arise when we start to promote Zcash Media.

Warmly,

37 Laines

[37L]

Hi @anon35140610,

We determined our proposed paid media budget by identifying which audiences we would like to target, and where that audience may receive their information (e.g., Twitter for crypto investors vs. Instagram for crypto curious). Once we knew which platforms we would like to use, we based the total budget for each platform on those platforms’ ad costs guided by our digital strategist’s experience in how to weight each platform for maximum efficacy.

To add some additional detail: we have allocated only $17,000 to paid media (a relatively small amount of the total budget), in favor of directing the bulk of our marketing budget to grassroots outreach efforts. To accomplish this (as well as numerous other tasks), we identified two full time experts (selected out of a pool of applicants including agencies like Coinbound) to build an organic marketing approach. This approach will rely on direct outreach and collaboration with influencers who we would seek to promote our materials for free due to their interest or relationship with Zcash. Our overall strategy for both paid media and grassroots approaches is outlined on pages 8-14 of the long-form proposal.

As for Telegram, Kevan has worked in the crypto space for years marketing numerous projects and has developed a list of hundreds of targeted telegram groups where we can pay to have sponsored posts. In his experience, $10,000 spent on sponsored posts over the course of ~one month across ~10-100 large cryptocurrency-specific Telegram channels can ensure ~1-2 million impressions (people seeing promotional materials for the release of our videos). A full breakdown of which Telegram groups were used, which materials we paid to have posted, and how many impressions our posts attain would be provided as part of our comprehensive launch review submitted as a Milestone 3 deliverable.

37 Laines Team

P.S. If our grant is approved, we would embark to immediately give a full presentation of our strategy to ZF ( ) and ECC’s marketing folks to ensure alignment on our approach and to help support their goals as well.

[37L]

Hi All,

We realize our proposal is very long, so for anyone who doesn’t want to read it in it’s entirety, here are some of the relevant figures for how we broke down the budget for each milestone:

37 Laines Team

[anon35140610]

@37L

In his experience, $10,000 spent on sponsored posts over the course of ~one month across ~10-100 large cryptocurrency-specific Telegram channels can ensure ~1-2 million impressions (people seeing promotional materials for the release of our videos).

Ah I see. So for the stated budget of $10,000 for Telegram, and given the fact that a lot of those groups charge around $500 per sponsored post (the bigger the group the greater the cost will be), you’d be looking at about 20 posts spread across ~ 20 Telegram groups.

Thank you for the explanation!

[dontbeevil]

This is on top of 240k of funding ???

[dontbeevil]

I’m still reading & processing the pdf, digging into the details. My main request: please be considerate on the cost. Think long term. Retroactive funding (based on the impact - like follower gain, video views, sentiment etc)

[GGuy]

Thanks @37L,

I can’t comment on budget but I’m very impressed with the proposal. We have a tremendous opportunity to change the wider tide and sentiment for Zcash. Personally I think worst case scenario would be for us to squander this opportunity and be left thinking “what if”. So I’m definitely in favour of this.

I didn’t see any specific mention of coingecko (or coinmarketcap) and am not aware of the effectiveness of any marketing in that space. But given one target market is crypto investors i was surprised it wasn’t mentioned. Was it something that was explored? I can’t comment if it’s common but I personal have discovered and bought an ERC20 token after discovering it through top banner on their site (before they had a mobile app).

I also imagine there is a meaningful chance we see some price movement around the launch of any media so maybe we should make sure we have a presence on these types of sites to funnel users to the media. Maybe this is something ECC and/or Zfnd can help with?

At the very least someone needs to fix the outdated content/warning on coingecko. Screenshot from Android app after clicking on warning at top.

[anon35140610]

I reached out to them to remove the alert. Might be a couple days but should be removed in the next week-ish.

[GGuy]

Thanks. It might also be worth someone rewriting the description of Zcash on the info tab and update the education link.

[anon35140610]

Warning has been removed. (I’ll arrange to update text later today).

[Angst01]

Well said @GGuy, right now we have a great opportunity to evangelize for Zcash alongside some exciting new developments. We could have the coolest videos in the world ready to go, but only with the right fanfare and promotion can we get them the mass exposure they need to make a real difference.

To my knowledge the original proposal didn’t include plans for distribution/promotion - and the broader the better. Price tag seems pretty reasonable, at least to me, given the amount of labor and number of platforms targeted.

I have to say that there is one thing that gives me pause - I haven’t seen any of the actual content! Nor have I heard directly from anyone else who’s seen it themselves. Hard to gauge exactly how worthy of aggressive promotion it is without that. Maybe some kind of community preview is in order?

[aquietinvestor]

@Angst01

I have to say that there is one thing that gives me pause - I haven’t seen any of the actual content!

37L produces very high-quality content. Take a look at Slide 7 of their February 2022 Transparency Report, which contains links to five rough cuts of video content.

Zcash Media 2022 Transparency Report.pdf

[Angst01]

OK, now I feel like a dope - can’t believe I missed that.

Looks fantastic! I can’t wait to see the finished product(s).

[covfefe]

Fully in favor of this proposal, we’ve been crying out for years for high quality educational content and marketing campaigns to spread information and cut though the noise.

If this is successful it’s a small price to pay. This campaign could also potentially be used to evaluate if this is something that should be continued longer term.

I’d be interested in the longer term vision for Zcash Media, and how much funding that may require on a longer term basis (if that is the intent moving forward)…

Also, I see that a review is planned at the end, are there any target metrics/goals that could be identified in advance. i.e. how do we determine that this has been successful vs just releasing the videos on YouTube with organic distribution by the community?..

I’ve been really impressed with 37L since they came into the Zcash ecosystem, they seem to be here for the mission. We need a louder voice if we are going to empower everyone with economic freedom, I think 37L can help us find our voice.

[David_Heisenberg]

Hi @dontbeevil,

We realize our grants are on the larger side of things, and we are incredibly grateful to the community, Zcash Community Grants, and the dev fund to be able to support our work. We’ve made the original funding we received for making our two initial videos go as far as we could, and are really excited by the footage we were able to collect. It will not only be used to make the first two videos, but also can be used for much additional content down the line. We were thinking of the long-term from the start.

Also, one of the main reasons we were attracted to Zcash and to apply to work with Zcash was the mentality of “paying the devs” established via the dev fund. Although we are not devs, we apply that same mentality to ourselves so that we and the people we work with are paid a competitive rate for their services. Otherwise, they could just as easily go work on something else that is not as beneficial for humanity as Zcash is. (And in fact, many of our budget items from our initial grants were discounted 50-75% from what certain people could be making if they were working on commercials instead of Zcash. We took the risk because we believe in Zcash and our long term potential as part of the community.)

As for retroactive funding, I think it is great to reward people for things they were going to do or have done anyway, due to their own interest, goals, etc. But retroactive funding is not a viable way to attract people to work on a project when they are in high demand to do similar work on other projects with funding guaranteed up front.

[David_Heisenberg]

Hi @covfefe,

Thank you for supporting the proposal! It’s really nice to hear we have the chance to help a long-standing desire in the community

Our plan is definitely to use the next two months as a test period, where we can demonstrate our ability to market content to a wide audience. This is similar to the approach we took with the content creation side of things where we wanted to show Zcash stakeholders we were capable of producing high-quality education content. (I know we haven’t been able to share our work with everyone yet, but the feedback we have gotten has been really positive!).

If we were to pull off the marketing/distribution portion of our plan with equally positive results, we would then craft a long-term plan to continue making and distributing Zcash educational content as consistently and sustainably as possible. By that point, we will have done the content creation, marketing, and distribution for our project, and we can use that experience to make a well-founded long-term proposal to fund Zcash Media.

As for the metrics to be used in our review, because we’re starting from zero (albeit with a lot of support), and because we don’t have any benchmarks to compare against other than industry ones, we’re trying to keep our evaluation terms for this campaign on the qualitative side rather than the quantitative side. Nonetheless, we will report all metrics available, even if they do not have a strong point of reference to compare against.

We attach some of the metrics we can report here, for your reference (somehow, there’s more figures than what we put in the written proposal!). Keep in mind that because these are early metrics that start at day 0, we don’t have any true benchmarks for comparison, so we’ll be using metrics from other, similar industry digital channels to measure our success in the short term. Also, for this proposal we would be relying heavily on sentiment to measure success for now, as our internal goal is to be respectful of members of the community first. As time goes on, specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be developed for Zcash Media’s efforts in the context of Zcash as a whole, in collaboration with ECC/ZF.