General comment around events
Having done events for the community since 2017 (past 8 years), events helped place the lesser known ETHLend at the center of the Ethereum community and propelled increased exposure to the Aave brand across the whole web3 space and beyond.
Events are quite clearly a strategic way to increase brand awareness through various activations from hackathons (i.e. ETHGlobal), educational initiatives (i.e. SheFi) and rAAVEs, including merch. It’s clear that every team or DAO that understands the value of market share seeks to protect and expand it with various initiatives and events. It’s a no brainer.
Today, there is a lot of competition on events, especially during the busy weeks of EthCC and DevCon, where the existing Ethereum (and beyond) community and newcomers to the space gather. Most of the smartest teams (inc. DAOs) have understood these types of events as a prime opportunity to strengthen awareness and reach, and even ensure visibility to newcomers from developers, users, partners and institutions.
Some of these event activations by other project teams are quite poorly organized; the merch is done poorly (mainly because teams are trying to save costs, lack of know-how and experience, or want to maximize their quantity over quality). These kinds of events won’t gain long-lasting brand retention and the merch is most likely used only once.
We see countless posts on social media, where Aave merch from events years ago (gifted at rAAVE or hackathons) is still being used. Even ACI employees wear Aave merch. The reason is simply, we’ve been able to produce apparel that is high-quality and well-designed (fully in-house) unless there has been a shortage of suppliers (where in DevConnect everyone had to use the same supplier in Istanbul as recommended by EthGlobal). This is how Ronnie, the Aave ghost (which @marczeller favoured in the Aave Visual Identity discussion), was born from rAAVEs by in-house design.
This can be attributed to strong execution that is a result of the learnings and know-how we have obtained that we have passed to the next activation and of course, being sufficiently funded by the DAO to produce strong activations. Great execution also includes understanding strategically (based on previous learnings) which events have a high potential (for example, a small sponsorship at EthCC won’t take the brand far and in fact, it can even be counterintuitive to see Aave as a brand next to smaller brands; hence its far more productive to create higher ROI with side events such as rAAVE and Open Finance Day, that everyone wants to come to.
The most counterproductive argument I’ve seen so far is that an event should equal a BD deal or additional TVL. It’s not how brands work, and it is also the reason why people who think this way usually fail on brand awareness. Similarly, thinking that rAAVEs or any activation is so-called ”bull market luxury” is faulty. Brand work is an on-going activation and the more there is competition, the more efforts are needed for brading to stand out. Also, I bet more people will be talking about rAAVEs than some sort of small booth activation directly at the EthCC.
When events have had value for the past 8 years, and given how much there is built upon the brand and especially the new Aave Visual identity accepted by the Aave DAO, it makes sense to continue building the brand and stay in competition with other smart teams out there. Not only the DAO needs to stay in competition, but actually double down given people go after the brand new thing. There is a reason why big brands do huge rebranding every once in a while. We already see a lot of brand competition from Morpho and also Maker in connection with their brand updates. We should expect them to double down on events and in fact, the Spark hackathon booth was 20 meters away from Aave’s during DevConnect Istanbul.
Accountability
Each event or activation that I’ve been part of has had full accountability, ensuring maximum ROI including negotiating all costs and tracking. After 8 years of events, the accountability practices are upholding high standards. Sharing breakdown of event costs would definitely allow any competition to understand event costs strategy (direct data for all DeFi projects that compete on mindshare, and especially those protocols mentioned above). However, given we are operating in a DAO-environment, a headline breakdown per city on events might be helpful for the DAO even if it leaks to competition.
Regarding the comment around Aave and Lens, the proposal is about Aave events exclusively. This has nothing to do with Lens. We have never spent Aave funds on any work on Lens or any other product.
Budget
From what I see there is not a general objection to events as an activation. It’s more of a question of budget for the rest of the year. Not doing any events, having limited budget, cutting corners on design, quality, and audience would stagnate the Aave brand work done so far. Let’s be smart about what we need to do to move forward, not how we kneecap ourselves. The events budget is simply a spectrum of reach. Lower budget would mean fewer events and/or smaller events for the rest of the year. However, I do not recommend that for Aave. As – the leading brand in the whole space, Aave should do more than the bare minimum in a highly competitive brand landscape. However it’s up to the DAO to decide on the final budget.