The Moojo Manifesto
Aligning interests of users, advertisers, and society
Misalignment of Interests
There exists a fundamental alignment of interests between advertising brands and their prospective customers. Simply put, the right products want to find the right customers, and vice-versa. Ad platforms as mediating matching engines strive to maximize impressions and clicks: this objective may or may not be aligned with brands and customers’ interests. We believe that it is increasingly not: ads platforms have fostered an environment where user attention is the primary commodity, often at the expense of societal well-being. They prioritize engagement over thought complexity, controversy over quality, and surveillance over privacy, creating an ecosystem that thrives on polarization and outrage. The interests of society, brands and consumers are misaligned with those of big ads platforms.
Disproportionate Market Power
Big tech companies have fortified their dominance by constructing insurmountable data moats, leveraging their vast reservoirs of user information to create barriers to entry that stifle competition. They created a powerful flywheel between Attention and Data, further strengthened by regulation such as GDPR, which undermined 3rd party data under the pretext of defending consumer privacy. This monopolistic hold stifles innovation, weakens consumer choice, concentrates market power and confiscates any extra value created by brands in the hands of a few.
The Surveillance Economy
In the current model, user data is exploited without adequate consent. Users feel they are constantly tracked whatever they do online (and increasingly, offline) for boosting the profits of big tech companies. We assert that privacy and anonymity are fundamental human rights that must be preserved and respected, by shifting away from the pervasive surveillance economy to a model that honors individual autonomy and exchanges user data not only with convenience, but with financial value.
Depressed Economic Growth
We recognize that currently, the only way offered by technology to protect user privacy is by making advertising less relevant and more spammy, transferring the costs involved in protecting this onto brands in the form of soaring Customer Acquisition Costs, which are in turn rolled onto consumer prices. In the absence of brand awareness, the smaller the businesses are, the more they relatively carry these costs.
MOOJO
Moojo builds a decentralized open ad network that incentivizes business entities and consumers to directly and anonymously exchange data for value.
Brands can identify and activate customer audiences by predicting their customer lifetime value, and offer them acquisition, resurrection or loyalty offers tied to this value. Customer unit economics can be optimized while preserving their privacy, and yet independently verify the return on investment of every dollar spent.
Predictive customer lifetime value is derived from data contributed to the network by entities such as other brands, partners, or even by the consumers themselves. The more the data is useful for predicting customer’s behavior across their customer journey, the more its providers are rewarded economically.
By redistributing the value created by data to the entities that create it, Moojo aligns interests of consumers, advertisers and society.
Guiding Principles
Those principles are aspirational: we believe that we need to steer towards them relentlessly if we want to shape the future ecommerce landscape, and in the long run, of all economic value exchange.
Power decentralization: No single player in the ecosystem should be able to achieve dominance because of data or attention network effects, or disproportionate governance rights. Instead, brands should compete on consumers' purchasing power by building better, cheaper products or stronger branding.
Openness: The network shall be accessible by any entity in a permissionless manner, provided that they speak the network protocol language and abide by the rules defined by the network governance.
Privacy: To build a long lasting protocol, consumer privacy needs to be built-in the mechanics of the platform, rather than an afterthought.
Headwinds
We face headwinds in the form of entrenched interests of powerful incumbents and the inertia of existing consumer habits. More critically, advertising brands are stifled with rising CAC, which puts them in urgent need of solutions for increasing sales and cLTV today. Long term solutions that require high scale collaboration will face insurmountable go-to-market challenges if they’re unable to offer immediate benefits with measurable business impact.
Tailwinds
Yet, there are strong tailwinds that signal a shift towards a more equitable paradigm. Commoditization of advanced AI offers unprecedented opportunities for personalization and efficiency of ads units and offers, making it possible for an open platform to attract developers competing on relevance and performance while keeping the privacy rails intact. Global regulatory movements are beginning to check the excesses of big tech, leveling the playing field. Finally, the tech ecosystem that can help decentralize the business logic (blockchains, L2s, wallets etc) is going through a cambrian explosion.
We chose to take on the giants not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Because it’s actually so daunting that we need a crazy bunch of people to make this bet. Because we are now at a critical juncture that will define how the future looks: either like an ancient empire where all of humanity works for the benefit of a few seigneurs; or like a true democracy, where freedom and equality can thrive.
Raphael Cohen, Founder, Moojo