Suresh and Dave chat with Chris Clarke former Group Head of Marketing at HSBC Bank

In this inaugural episode of the Web3 Marketing Association Podcast, hosts Dave Wallace and Suresh Balaji are joined by Chris Clark, former Group Head of Marketing at HSBC, to reflect on the lessons of Web1 and Web2 and explore what Web3 means for marketers.

Suresh introduces the mission of the Web3 Marketing Association: to help marketers navigate a future shaped by decentralisation, community ownership, and new models of engagement. He outlines how Web3 could upend traditional marketing tools—cookies, platform partnerships, and first-party data—while opening new opportunities for co-creation, token-enabled loyalty, and gamified brand experiences.

Chris draws parallels with past seismic shifts, comparing today’s transition to the moment humanity moved from barter to money. He recalls the early awe of Web1 (“changing a car’s colour on a Land Rover website”) and the mobile revolution of Web2, before stressing that Web3 has the potential to rebalance power away from corporations and towards communities. For him, marketers must be the bridge between customers and corporations—representing users in boardrooms and shaping rather than passively receiving the next internet era.

The conversation ranges from the role of gaming and digital ownership to the impact of Web3 on sustainability, healthcare, and education. Both Chris and Suresh emphasise the importance of doing, not just observing—encouraging marketers to experiment with wallets, NFTs, and DAOs to gain first-hand understanding.

This episode sets the tone for the series: Web3 is not just a technology shift but a cultural one. Marketers have a rare opportunity—and responsibility—to shape a more democratic, customer-centred digital future.

Transcript

Speaker 00: 0:03

From the studios of NMD+, comes the Web3 Marketing Association podcast. The latest thinking at the very cutting edge of marketing. We aim to bring you insightful and interesting discussion about Web3 and the metaverse and other emerging digital trends. And here are your hosts, Dave Wallace and Suresh Balaji.

Dave: 0:32

So welcome everybody to this, the inaugural Web3 Marketing Association podcast. And today, Suresh, who will introduce himself, and I are welcoming Chris Clark. Chris, before we get started, do you want to just introduce yourself? And then Suresh, it'd be great to understand a bit from you about who you are and why the Web3 Marketing Association was started in the first place. So Chris, let's start with you.

Chris: 1:01

Thanks. So, well, first things first, I would like to just still claim to be a bit of a nerd. So I have a degree in physics and chemistry. I play chess competitively and still read New Scientist. So I kind of think that gives me roughly nerd credentials. Did have a career in marketing, was at HSBC, looked after a lot of digital stuff, which is where I first came across Dave and Suresh. I was lucky enough to have him on my team as one of my far-sighted digital people or digitally enabled marketeer, I should probably call him. So from that basis, I think amongst my age group, because I'm the big six over this year. I'm probably just about tallest dwarf when it comes to things digital. I do enjoy what it can do. I've been an observer of its various machinations, both good and bad. And I think I got invited because I've got opinions as much as anything else, but there we go. So that's a bit about me and I'll probably leave it there.

Dave: 1:52

Fantastic. And Suresh, I mean, it'd be great if you could just give everybody a bit of an introduction to yourself, but I think also talk about why you saw the opportunity to to set up a new association.

Suresh: 2:04

Thank you, Dave. Thanks for hosting this. And Chris, it's amazing to see you again. And thank you for the kind words as well. So I'm Suresh. I'm head marketing for HSBC here in Asia. And I also manage marketing for our global insurance business here in Asia. I wear many hats. I do some charity supporting the marketing cohorts here in Asia Pacific through education, through mentorship and a few other things. And like Chris, I'm a bit of a nerd as well. I have a chemistry degree as well. So I don't know if there's time here, Dave. You're going to tell us that you have a chemistry degree and we can all talk about benzene rings. Unfortunately,

Dave: 2:41

my degree was psychology, so not a proper science.

Suresh: 2:47

Yeah, so Web3 Marketing Association, where do I start? It started off as a personal journey to learn what was going on maybe five or six months ago. And I realized that, you know, much of the marketing community is in the same boat as I was. And there's a big opportunity opportunity for a tight rise. So all boats do. So I mean, Web3, I'll not get into the details of Web3, but maybe you can touch upon Web3 briefly to say then what's the role of Web3 marketing, right? Association in many ways. The word predicted Web3 was coming. Tim Berners-Lee predicted it would come. Its genesis is from blockchain technology. And therefore at the heart of it, there is something around the philosophy of decentralized ownership. It's not one platform. It's not one program. It's not one set of services. When people talk about Web3 as the thing it's not a thing its scope is practically the entirety of the internet from basic services utilities to finance to domain names to you know how communities will be created in the future of social media so the most important part of web3 in my view is it is designed to ensure that the participants in the ecosystem won't be just reading or creating but they will own it they will opine on development roadmaps vote for the direction of travel in many ways web3 is the internet as it was originally designed, which was for the community, of the community, and by the community, right? Therefore, Web3 is going to turn into this place where many people call it the creator economy is coming. Many people call it, you know, it's the consumer's time in the internet. So it feels like, and these are not my words, someone said it feels like it's 1994 all over again. And this afternoon, I was speaking with a senior executive in the firm here, and he said he feels like he's a kid in a comic bookstore with unlimited comics to read. So I thought that was a brilliant analogy. There may be sugar-free world, you know, more comics for everyone. So essentially Web3 is going to bring a lot of data protection to consumers. Wallets will hold the key to unlocking platform services, which means platforms won't hold customer data. So in that context, if creation of community is different, if first party data becomes unavailable and many tools of the marketing trade of Web1 and Web2 are going to diminish. Imagine a world without cookies. Imagine a world without platform partnerships. Imagine a world without data partnerships. And imagine a world without even first-party data in many cases. Well, the situation is not probably that dire immediately, right here, right now. But one can see that this is the direction of travel. So what happens to marketing then? But Web3 also provides a lot of new customer opportunities. So in my view, you can truly co-create create content with customers and communities, create completely new forms of loyalty, maybe preferential access through token ownership, or even create gamified brand experiences. Many people conflate Web3 with the metaverse, and metaverse is one of the use cases of what could happen at Web3 because the whole idea of having a digital twin of yourself is interesting because the digital twin could actually have ownership of things through you and through the blockchain. This is what is differentiated now. And I think all of these provide infinite opportunities and infinite ideas for marketers. And I think marketers definitely need to arm themselves with the vernacular, with the insights, with technology, with tools of the new web order in many ways. So in this context, we created the Web3 Marketing Association. The whole idea is to help marketers navigate the world of Web3. It's not here yet. It's coming. It's here in bits and pieces. There was a provocative article by a professor we all know who's always writes provocative articles saying Web3 is not Web3 yet. It's Web 2.01. And I buy it. It's new. It's brand new. And people are still working through it. But when it arrives, we want marketers and brand owners to be able to create conversations around this. We want to be able to create content around this. We want to create communities around this. And we truly believe that if we do it together, we will go further. We are setting Web3 Marketing Association. It's an incubation stage. We are at a stage where we're in the process of gathering some volunteers. We're gathering like-minded marketing leaders. So the four of us who came together to set this up are, of course, Dave here, Carrie Tills, who runs a big chunk of a company called Frameplay based for the US. She used to be chief innovation officer for a part of WPP in North America. G-Man, who runs a big blockchain startup. And he was one of the front runners of blockchain marketing. The first time I spoke to G-Man about blockchain was perhaps in 2015, right? I was like, what is he talking about? So we've come together to sort of set this up. We have a lot of interest from brands. We have a lot of interest from people who want to be volunteers. We are working through what the principles of Web3 will be. We definitely want the principles and values to be everything that's at the heart of Web3 Marketing Association to be the same principles as Web3, right? Decentralized, transparent, driving content and creation through the community, ensuring that it's a creator economy. We're in the process of building a roadmap. Dave and I spend Monday nights talking about what the roadmap should be with G-Man and Carrie about our vision and our mission and how do we improve it and we're testing it with some brands and business owners and slowly creating a well-defined milestone. So it's early days for us at Web3 Marketing Association. It's exciting times. We really want the tide to rise. We want all the boats to rise as well. So that's Web3 in a nutshell and Web3 Marketing Association in a nutshell.

Dave: 8:34

Fantastic. I mean, incredible. I guess we're so lucky to have Chris with us today as well. I go back to the comment you made about 1994. This feels like 1994 again. And Chris, it's fair to say that we rose through the ties last time in terms of Web 1.0 and 2.0. And I was really keen to kind of get your perspective in terms of what were the lessons that we kind of learned through that first generation of the internet. And, you know, why do you think it's important right at this moment that companies are taking stock of, you know, what is going on and then starting to think about their kind of marketing operations? So it'd be great to get your perspective if we can.

Chris: 9:19

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a sort of fantastic moment of real seismic change happening now. It should feel that way a little bit for everybody. The kind of moments in human history where some of these sorts of things have happened, you know, it feels to me, there are many things that are happening, particularly with Web 3.0, that feels like the transition that probably happened around about 5000 years ago, where someone decided from a barter economy, we're going to have this stuff called money. And actually, I was trust this bit of metal that someone's given me that I'm going to give to someone else. Hang on, wait a minute. No, no, no. You used to give me a pint of milk and I would give you a turnip. It's much easier that way, isn't it? And I kind of feel we're sitting somewhere close to that moment where people are conceptually struggling with a lot of the things, whether it's crypto, whether it's, you know, a whole bunch of other component parts here. And I'll come on and talk about those in a second though. But I kind of think that's sort of what it feels like. Maybe, probably exaggerating to make the point, but But, you know, we are going from a world where we would swap a pint of milk for a turnip to a world where there's cash. And actually all of a sudden that changes everything. And I do think there is a massive change that's going on here because it's more societal as much as it is about business. It's more around communities as much as it is around companies. I think those are the important bits. And when I think about, you know, Web 1.0, which was a sort of bit of fun, I sat there in the white heat of Web 1.0 in the United States working in an ad agency at the time. And we would have these sort of strange kids with nirvana t-shirts and baseball caps on backwards you know walking in with 20 million bucks that they've been given by an investment bank down the road so that we could spend some of it on marketing and there was this kind of awe around it all and the fact that as you could kick up your netscape browser and watch your page load it was quite funny really but it was awesome you sat there and went you serious but i can find out with just the click of this thing what's this thing called that's called the mouse you know i can find out who won the fa cup in 1934 yes you can wow you know and it's that kind of stuff that everyone felt that sort of awe about it all

Dave: 11:27

completely i remember my first netscape thing was logging on to nasa's computers to have a look at a picture of something on their computers and i was sort of like wow i'm logging in someone else's computer i remember i

Chris: 11:42

remember the first commercial website i got involved in 1996 land rover who were a client of the agency i worked for and we built this thing You choose your photograph in the dealership. What kind of house? So you want the stucco-fronted kind of house in Notting Hill? Or do you want the country house here? Or do you want the slick apartment in sort of, you know, downtown Canary Wharf? We would show you the picture. And then you could press the colour button and see a different colour car outside of each address. And everybody thought this was amazing that you could change it from red to black to whatever. And I think, you know, there was a couple of projects I remember doing at the time with, you know, Yavi, which was a joint venture. This was when I joined HSBC, so 2001. We had a JV with Yahoo and we went over there and, you know, you've got this masters of the universe kind of perspective from them all. And it was Jerry Yang's mate from college who he had as one of his key coding lieutenants who we sat down and looked at some horrible, monstrous, COBOL coded green screen computer system we had at HSBC. We said to these guys, if you had to write a sort of web front end for this, how long would it take? We were sitting there expecting two years, you know, kind of thing. Six weeks. What? And so there was this kind of weird disassociation between the people involved in technology, you know, corporate world where it was a two-year and UAT and it was a three-month feasibility study before you even did anything. It was just nuts. So I'm glad we're not there because I think it obviously morphed into sort of slightly more kind of sensible stuff. 2.0, I think, was probably the time where, you know, it properly came to life, really. You know, all of us would reflect on all of this. And I think mobile was really the ultimate. That's what's driven 2.0 for me. As a marketeer, the ability to know that I can have a conversation with a customer or I can engage with them at some point, regardless of where they are.

Dave: 13:32

So interesting what you're saying, because I agree. I mean, it's sort of like digital has moved from being, you know, as a bit of our lives to being most of our lives. And, you know, the potential is it will become more and more all our lives, to be honest with you. And I think when Suresh talked to me about the Web3 Marketing Association I got really excited because for me, it was observing my younger children, what they were up to that kind of made me think, well, there's something really fundamental in terms of behavior. So like so many young people, they spend a lot of their time on game platforms. You know, in fact, a lot of their interactions are based around game platforms. That's not to say that they don't have plenty of time offline and playing rugby and football and all the other bits and pieces, but that's where their sort of social life is. And, you know, when they make decisions, they're making decisions through a community, this platform called Discord, which, you know, they're all part of. It's all self-managed. I was like, there is something really interesting and fundamental about what's going on. Having sort of observed what happened through Web 1.0 and 2.0, where brands and marketeers had a lot to kind of get their heads around, and it took a long time to get started. Now is a time to be thinking about what's going on, this world of Web 3.0, because the pace of change is accelerating. I mean, I was talking to my sons this morning about how innovation is happening so fast at the moment that you kind of almost can't keep track of it. So, you know, making sense of what's going on, saying, look, here's some of the bets that you need to think about, which are real and true, makes a lot of sense so that people just don't invest time, effort and energy into all the wrong things is kind of critical, to be honest with you. We've had Microsoft announcing the acquisition of Activision for 70 billion, which someone pointed out was like giving every woman, man and child in the UK a thousand dollars. I mean, it's just like mind blowing. And, you know, Facebook becoming meta. This is something that has to be taken very, very seriously. But it's not just about the technology. It's about the behavior, which sort of sits behind it and how people are organising themselves.

Suresh: 15:57

When Chris was talking about the mobile, it made me chuckle a bit because between 2010 and 2015, you know, beginning of the year, I would get on a plane and go to CES or some mobile marketing association event or something and come back and tell Chris, Chris, this year is going to be the year of the mobile. And I probably said that to Chris five years or six years in a row. And I was speaking to Norm Johnston yesterday and we were laughing about it and It was the year of the mobile, year after year after year. It's going to be the year of Web3 for the next five or seven years. People will say it is here, and it is here, and it is here, and eventually it will be here. Can this be the year of the customer? Every year is the year of the customer. And Dave, you and I have been playing with Discord and trying to sort of program bots and whatever else. I think it's fascinating just the multivariate nature of how gamers think about the internet, how they think about communities. what it is. And we were talking to Carrie, our co-founder, about this. And she said, Suresh, you don't realize that official stats is the 3.1 billion gamers in the world, which is nearly half the population. And anyone who's played Snake on their Nokia all the way to serious gamers. And all of this is going to get real when ownership becomes real, when asset ownership becomes real, when immutability becomes real and smart contracts becomes real. So the token that you get, the points that you get Everything means something. And the whole idea of play to earn is probably what's changing the dynamic a little bit.

Chris: 17:30

I think, you know, the Web3 Marketing Association has to have at its core being there to shape it. But also for me, there's a fundamental thing that I think is going to shift. The power of Web 1.0 was just the sheer kind of weird idea of being able to do stuff in this disassociated sort of fashion. The 2.01 has been, well, there's a mobile piece of this and an always on the real driving force in all of that was the big commercial concerns the massive organizations whether you want to go and watch the netflix documentary you know the social dilemma again or whatever else you want to do the rise of those guys is really what power 2.0 i kind of think and that's what i hope and pray for all of our kids and for the next generation the web 3.0 is going to be owned by the users and it's going to be owned by the people who populate it and it's going to be far more democratic and it's not going to be necessarily the tools of megacorps. It'll be big businesses. They'll do well. They'll get bought. They'll get merged. Things will happen. But actually, at the end of the day, the fundamental driving force has to be this rebalancing, which puts the power back in the hands of those who are present, those who are using it, those who are doing good things. And hopefully we can crush some of the bad actors along the way because they will always be there. I completely agree, Suresh. But I think those are the two fundamentals for me. One of which is, you know, if we're going to have something that works, for you guys and maybe I'll try and become a sort of associate member of the Web 3.0 Marketing Association.

Dave: 18:57

Very welcome, very welcome.

Chris: 18:59

Yeah, I'll pay me dues, whatever that

Dave: 19:01

is. Yeah, I was going to say, we've got a tuck shop as well, so. I

Chris: 19:06

do think it's that part of that, you know, it's where you sit down and you say to yourself, okay, look, actually, what's the purpose? It's to be there to shape it, not to just be there to receive it. Because actually, I think people who represent customers best in companies should be the marketing people. And, you know, I think that's very, very important and at the same time understand that actually the new boss is the customers, the people who use this stuff. That's your new boss. I think I'd written down a note beforehand just to sort of make sure I remembered a few things given my advancing years. Imagine if your users did your annual appraisal. What would they say? Rather than whether or not your corporation does your annual appraisal. If you're owning turf in this space, what would they say? What would they give you as an annual appraisal? Because I think being able to embrace that, a change in mindset in quite a lot of corporations. I'll talk about some of the things I think are important in a sec. I

Dave: 19:59

think it's a really good point. Again, having learned from the first iterations of what was there, where people just put up stuff for the sake of it, that's the wrong approach. If you misalign yourself from the consumer and the customer, you will create enormous brand damage in ways that I don't think companies really understand, to be honest with you. So that's absolutely right. The marketeers are the bridge between what customers think and believe and how a business is promoting itself or projecting itself through its brand so i think absolutely the right thing to be doing and i agree with you about kind of shaping this

Suresh: 20:39

it's quite interesting to think about how will web3 become ubiquitous when 40 of the world is not even connected to the internet so that those dichotomies exist and i think in many ways there'll be probably two or three different worlds at the same time there'll be a you know web zero world where people don't have connectivity and they're still using feature phones and you know very quickly getting onto smartphones and taking some leaps into two generations in. And then there might be a world where large corporations and large media houses still exist. While the application layer of Web3 might get decentralized, there might be a bunch of corporations running the network layer and they own the network layer and they own the protocols and network layer and everyone will have to pay their dues to the big corporations that own that. And there will be truly some categories where DAOs will become real, the decentralized autonomous organizations will run the way they will run and they will create value and they'll unlock new stores of preciousness and value, right? Things might happen in different beats, but the general philosophical mood music is moving towards power to the consumer, as you say, much more around evolution of business models to ensure that businesses which focus on what's right for the consumers will be businesses that will thrive. And I think that's partly be nudged by Web3, partly be nudged by various forces and various other trends like, you know, how are we solving for a sustainable, prosperous planet in the future. And the next generation is sort of paving the way for all of these things. Interesting conversation that Dave and I had on LinkedIn with somebody about climate tokens. What's a climate token? And is there a way for organizations to sort of buy into climate tokens? What's the intersection of Web3 and ESG? People talk about how cryptocurrency mining is quite harmful for the planet. It's not really sustainable. And then all of these things need to come together to say, what does the next generation of businesses look like? And I agree with you, Chris. I think that movement has started and that movement, perhaps there will be a bell curve of some sort, but I think we will get through it and we will know in a few years from now when we hear this podcast, five years from now, we'll probably laugh saying, oh yeah, we did get some things right. We didn't get some things right. As you mentioned, Suresh,

Dave: 22:50

I have been looking a lot at particularly the financial services industry and how that will be impacted by an issue like climate change. And you can see within WebPoint that there are opportunities to kind of make climate change a reality to individuals through the way they spend their money and what they do with their money. And things like the metaverse provides opportunities for companies to really bring that to life for customers. Because to your point, Chris, you've got cows versus fields of oats. And for many people, they can make that leap in terms of, yeah, I can see how this is good, but there are lots of people who can't make that leap. So it's really fascinating how actually there is a lot of what's going on in the world of ESG that I think will help drive what's going on from a kind of Web3 and metaverse perspective. So I guess going back to what can marketers do now? I mean, one of the things that I think is of real value is to kind of go and observe people, you know, go and have a look, do research with young people in terms of what are they up to just as companies do it yourselves rather than outsourcing and you know reading Forrester stuff there's no substitute for just going and chatting to people and sort of seeing what's going on in their heads because there is a fundamental change and as you say we can't quite get our heads around what that change is but it's only by observing I think you get there so I mean that would be a big big sort of piece of advice for me if you got any things that you kind of want to finish with it would be fantastic any final words gents

Chris: 24:30

couple of final words I think I would pray that Web 3.0 solves for two issues that I hope are going to be really important. And that's healthcare and education. How do you start to think about those two fundamentals when you start to understand what this could do? And I think the universal democratization of healthcare and education would do the kind of what will be soon 10 billion people on this planet in 30 years time, the world of good. That for me would be my fundamental and then I'm going to take it right the way back to the marketing people and I am going to say to Dave's point about customers but actually I would say try and change two things about how you think which is about what I would call being metric centric and not metric slavish and what that means is going behind things and looking for what I would call management information versus data the kind of obsession with drinking from the fire hose and never really ever quenching your thirst is insane. And therefore, as marketeers, our job will be to ultimately start to answer questions about people do what and why. Because why becomes really, really important. So I'm going to go for those two. I'm going to go, please can we solve for healthcare and education? That's the easy bit. And then the hard bit, which is how we can get a much more, what I would call metric-centric versus metric-slavish kind of world, where marketeers own the voice of these people who control this environment, who build who are the custodians of it. And you represent them well, whether that's in the boardroom or whether that's somewhere else. So I'll leave it at that.

Suresh: 26:08

Fabulous. Thank you. My two points today would be, one is I constantly tell my team that marketing is about the market. We forget that in large organizations, small organizations, we just miss the point. And we're not in the market. We are doing meetings. We are meeting suppliers, doing stuff, administrating all of that. And I think this is the biggest change in the market. And for marketers who are true to being the evangelists of customer centricity, evangelists of their brand's purpose, the need to be in the market, you know, feeling, and Chris, your point's very valid, shaping how marketing works in the Web3 world. My second point would be, I agree with you, day one, observing, I would push it one step forward and doing. I think the penny dropped for me when I minted my first NFT. And just going through it, saying, oh, wow, this is how you mint an NFT, or this is what it means to set up a wallet. Oh, yeah, this is what it means to set a value for it. This is what it means to set provenance. This is what it will mean to try and promote it and try and create a community around it, setting up a Discord server. So I think whether it be senior CMOs, brand managers, people in the ecosystem helping partner with brands, I think everyone should do it. And it's all easily available. Almost all of it is freely available, costs nearly nothing to do, but get your hands dirty on Web3 and then you'll be able to progress marketing in the world of Web3, I think.

Dave: 27:29

Brilliant advice. So thank you you so much, both of you. It's been a really, really fabulous conversation.

Suresh: 27:34

Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Rosh.

Speaker 00: 27:42

You have been listening to W3MA, an NMD Plus production.