KOL Management Bounty

It sounds fair and approachable for most cases and quarterly reports sound manageable.
We voted as maybe. So yes as long as budget conditions and reports are respected.
This should be enabled by the Zero-Based Budgeting, so that expenses should be justified in advance. Just one question: how long are these expense periods? Are they also gonna be divided into quarters like the reports?

After talking with ET about this a while ago, I'm volunteering to be the curator "knowledgeable about Polkadot Tech", and can vouch for the highest standard of ethics and transparency. For anyone willing to know me better, this PR as a seeding fellow member sums up what I did until 2022. More recently I've been working on tools such as Multix, an interface to manage multisigs.

This is basically a grift bounty continuation to only focus on the same KOL marketing and process that was the center of controversy for Bounty #33, with the same grifting agencies / names, same process, but clearly stating they are going to continue doing the same as before - with the community approval.

Who is ET Public and who will be managing this bounty?

Can we get names and experience for whomever will be managing this and the curators? In this case, experience matters, as managing budgets/spending requires extensive planning and managing. We will have the same issues if we do not learn from the past and apply solutions before proceeding.

Lesson #1: Conflicts of interest
How will this be addressed and what is your solution to avoid the same mistakes from Bounty 33?
In your proposal you state that curators will include 'content creators', which will be a direct conflict. Then the proposal's transparency section lists KOL Agencies which includes the same agencies (Evoxx, Lunar Strategy) that were not accountable with transparent reporting and the agency owners/representatives were curators that awarded child bounties to themselves.

Lesson #2: Transparent Reporting
The problem with Bounty 33 reporting was the lack of verifiable expenses, receipts, and payments. The "Easy to understand" reports is the same as before - manual reports someone made up by listing out 40-50 no-name influencers or agencies - that's it, nothing else. Impressions, engagements or click data was not consistent and did not show any detail that you would get from real ad campaigns (impressions where? - engagements with what and clicks to where??). This is not newspaper advertising from a decade or two ago - influencer marketing at the $ volume spent should have dashboards and reporting data. Reporting should be provided by the agencies that are getting paid all the DOTs - so quarterly reporting is not acceptable. Expenditure reports should include DOT distribution, including how much the agency kept vs distributed to KOLs.

Lesson #3: Contradictions in the campaign process
Search or ask any AI chatbot how get started and prep influencer marketing campaign for your brand. The 3 agencies that were paid 90+% of the bounty budgets describes their KOL marketing as writing up the creative content briefs with every possible talking point regarding DOT that they would blast out to all influencers (40-50 tier-3 influencers - maybe a handful of Tier 2 that voluntarily mentioned Polkadot in their video post) and claim credit for the influencer mentioning DOT. That is not influencer marketing or content 'creator marketing', and why they did not distribute the majority of DOT to influencers vs themselves. The bounty curators work with agencies (Lunar, Evoxx or DavidCC, and CultureDOT) who then work with agencies that work with influencers (as described or shown in all expense reports) - this is not how influencer marketing works.

Where are the contracts with KOLs and how or who is crafting the content strategy vs letting the influencers read a brief and decide on their own what to use??? And everything is done manually - the grift spin that this is new or still being worked out is all FUD. Again - simply search or ask a chatbot what tools are available for influencer marketing - voila, this bounty is full of holes or FUD.

For the amount of spending we should have had Tier 1 influencers and Polkadot buzzing everywhere, but we have had zero (positive) lift in branding or awareness and dormant price action. Controversy over the marketing bounty is really dumb to mention as credit for lifting awareness - that is not the coverage anyone would want and most likely drove away people and opportunities.

I will vote and advocate for this bounty if the conflict of interest, disassociation with bad actors, full transparency in reporting, and updating the influencer marketing process to align with current standards. Literally for the budget of one bounty top-up, we could have had a dashboard, real influencer army of Tier 2 names and channels you could visit and see the bounty work, and measurable results. All we have seen is someone's idea of what influencer marketing might be like, but with no real experience and out of date mindset. $13 million dollars and nothing to show for it - that is what this is all about...