I Believe this challenge is 5 of 5 stars because it is aligned to achieve Cardano's mission. This is because cardano is soon to be everything a 3rd gen blockchain needs to be on a technical level! At this stage it would be wise to start marketing and educating the broader crypto masses on what we have accomplished thus far. If we don't start to do this then we may see cardano lose out on adoption and market share. Its a sad truth that everyday products which are great get bought less then products that are well marketed. We have many incredible researchers and marketers in our ecosystem that are being incubated but they will be over shadowed as big money can enhance production of marketers on other blockchains very easily!

The proposer of this challenge quoted a reference from IOG emphasizing the importance of marketing:

"""Marketing. The vastness of the area demands this category should take the biggest percent of the funding budget.“ Quote from IOG Report.*""

This is a relevant quote, however the quoted document was published in 2018 and we have to take the current context of Cardano and the priorities established by the IOG itself in the Catalyst Fund9 Challenge Setting Strategic Goals found in the Community Advisor Assessment Guide do not place marketing as a priority topic .

The challenge setting proposer placed a lot of emphasis on the 2018 Treasury Report as a reference to establish this challenge setting rationale, but it is a view that does not reflect Cardano's current reality. I like the approach chosen by the creator of the challenge, citing reports and studies is a good way to support a challenge setting, but in this case I don't think it was an effective option, for the reasons already mentioned in this assessment.

Cardano is going through a lot of development and deliveries, the blockchain is going through several updates and the developer ecosystem is growing. DApps started shipping a few months ago, so I see marketing as important but not a priority in the Cardano mission right now.

The Community Development part of the challenge was not properly described, which creates an imbalance in the challenge. If the idea is to focus on marketing, it makes more sense to have a challenge just for that theme and create another one for Community Development.

When we look at the proposal it comes in touch with 2 of the strategic goals for Fund9. It provides a way for a new group of people to come into contact with Cardano and Catalyst and by making a challenge specific for marketing we set a stage to open-source the marketing strategy for Cardano. However, reading the proposal there are a few misinformations that I feel must be corrected. It's true that there is 16 million in Fund8 but 3.2m of this is reserved for Catalyst members' contribution - Team members, CA's, vCA's, etc - so to start your budget calculations of 16 million is a wrong calculation. Next is the wrong misconception about Film & Media being the only marketing category. Scale-UP Cardano's Community Hubs is equally marketed based as Film & Media. Given this asking 4 million for this category seems wrong, even the assumption of equally splitting the catalyst budget because of categories provided in the paper is not the correct way. You have to look at the weight each category has and what place it has within Catalyst. The proposers did a splendid job in writing this proposal and researching what the best challenges would be for a Catalyst fund, but since in my opinion they made a few mistakes, I'll remain neutral on this.

The validity of using a 2018 document to justify the marketing budget over 3 years later is questionable. The marketing requirement over 3 years ago when Cardano was one of many relatively unknown fledgling cryptocurrencies is substantially different then now when Cardano is one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap. Regardless, marketing is still critical to achieving Cardano's mission and the challenge aligns with at least one Fund 9 Strategic Goal.

This challenge is about bringing participants and contributors into Cardano, an objective directly set by Fund9 Challenge Setting objectives. Moreover, since it's a consolidated challenge, it gives more freedom to the proposers and voters to decide about what's important for Cardano. According to economics literature, free markets as the most efficient way to organize human collaboration, so this challenge that gives more freedom to participants (voters and proposers) and reduces the power of the intermediary (the authors of the challenge) is a great improvement in the way the funding will be allocated.

Marketing & Community Development is a challenge that consolidates several challenges that were historically separate. The challenge set as KPIs the number of wallets, Total Value Locked (TVL), and other metrics. These metrics make complete sense, especially the Total Value Locked as it is often used by cryptocurrency investors to judge the activity of blockchains, and the growth in TVL was one of the reasons for the recent rebound in ADA price. Thus, this challenge that consolidates the budget to focus it on the initiatives that drive direct impact for the Cardano ecosystem is perfectly aligned with Fund9 Challenge Setting objectives. Moreover, the consolidation provides another layer of efficiency and creativity both for proposers and for voters.

Prior to coming across this proposal, I had already read the paper upon which this proposal was based. A hypothesis is presented in which it is argued that in order to ensure that Treasury funds are allocated efficiently and reduce the risk of not allocating funds in vital areas, it proposes creating categories and allocating a certain amount of funds to each. And yes, one of those categories recommended in Marketing. Having said that, I respectfully disagree with the assertion that Catalyst does not address the matter of Marketing. There have been challenges in Catalyst that have had the marketing component as the central objective. For example, Proposer Outreach, Catalyst Value Onboarding, regional initiatives, such as Grow Africa, Grow Cardano and all its variations around the world, Community Events, among others. Personally, I believe that all of these initiatives have an associated Marketing component, and it is necessary to add that while this paper represents a valuable contribution to the community and should be taken into account, I do not believe that everything mentioned in it should be taken literally. Upon reviewing the challenge setting, it is evident that there has been a great effort in presenting the justification for the need for this challenge. However, important aspects, such as the possible directions that may be expected from potential proposers, were not addressed. Finally, in comparing this challenge to the strategic goals we have for the next challenge, I will say that there is only an indirect alignment with the first goal that refers to preparing people to make contributions to the organization. My score in terms of alignment with Cardano's mission is 4.

The author of this challenge envisions it as a consolidation of all growth- and community-outreach-focused challenges. Naturally, marketing and community-outreach activities are necessary to grow the Cardano ecosystem, and, thus, are perfectly aligned with the Fund9 Challenge Setting objectives. The author asks for $4M budget for this challenge and cites IOG's paper "A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling Better Collaborative Intelligence". Overall, the arguments that marketing activities are important for the growth of Cardano's ecosystem are persuasive. The only thing that seemed confusing is that the author was saying that "Catalyst has several diverse challenges to develop Cardano but lacks a Marketing Challenge". However, both Fund 6 and Fund 7 do have Marketing challenges in the form of "Grow Region X, Grow Cardano" challenges, which cumulatively received a substantial amount of funding. Another opportunity for improvement is that the proposal could have more clearly differentiated between activities focused on promoting the Cardano ecosystem overall and promoting specific projects (solution to certain use cases) on the other hand. In my humble opinion, as a person who've spent more than a decade building and promoting digital products, promoting specific digital products is better to budget on the project level. That's because project promotion is often much more relevant and efficient if done by the project team itself. So, focusing this challenge on promoting the Cardano ecosystem overall would bring a higher return on intention, in my opinion.

I gave this section a 5 of 5 for the key metrics of this challenge covering the gammet of a successful marketing campaign for cardano. It mentions press coverage as well as influencer growth and ada dollar value growth. It also mentions growth in proposals for catalyst challenges and marketing of cardano at a novice level and advanced level could defentitly bring in more talented devs as well as more ideas to catalyst that could have huge impact on cardano! please consider voting for this challenge as it was to early to pass a marketing challenge in previous funds IMO but now is the perfect time to do this and if we don't start doing this we may lose out on adoption as well as market share !

The success statement written by the proposers gives a clear indication of what the challenge is about. The challenge is all about how we can grow Cardano into a full-scale blockchain through marketing and community outreach. The key metrics provided are in my honest opinion not well defined. They could've been better described to give a more precise view of what success looks like. Wallet growth, Number of new wallets created through marketing Social buzz, Number of influencers engaged in the ecosystem You could also consider some metrics from the following list: What is the ROI of a proposal What are your reach and engagement levels? The % of people attracted to Cardano For lack of well-defined key metrics, I am rating verifiability a 4.

In general, the defined metrics are vague. Some metrics mentioned do not seem appropriate to be used as outputs of a challenge aimed at marketing and community development, such as: -ADA TVL(what is the liquidity relationship in smart contracts with marketing? How to make an objective causal association?) -Social Buzz( What is social buzz and how to measure this metric?) -ADA market price (why should market value be a metric in this case?)

Metrics that could more easily isolate improvements as a result of this challenge of unrelated improvements could help make the indication of success more intuitive and effective. Improvements in the items mentioned in the definition of success are interesting ways to measure the challenge (Conventions, Marketing, Influencer Growth, Hubs & Community Outreach)

The suggested metrics are very diverse with some of the metrics only tangentially at best related to the challenge, for instance ADA Market Price. Overall the metrics can sufficiently measure progress towards the defined success criteria.

Which metrics are proposed? Wallet Growth, ADA TVL, Social Buzz, etc. Can these metrics track progress in addressing the challenge? Definitely! What can be improved? To track that the growth is sustainable rather a one-time due to marketing activities. For example, track active wallets, etc.

This challenge names Wallet Growth and ADA Total Value Locked as its primary metrics. These metrics without a doubt allow us to track progress in addressing the challenge - the growth of the Cardano ecosystem.

The author mentiones a number of KPIs, and, in my opinon, the growth of ADA wallets and ADA market price are especially relevant for a challenge focused on growing the ecosystem overall. Moreover, the author provides additional KPIs, such as press mentions, and "Staked ADA" helping potential projects better imaging more relevant KPIs. It would be great, however, if the proposal spent some time discussing one of the biggest problems of measuring the impact of any marketing project - the problem of the incremental impact. The problem of measuring the incremental impact concerns itself with proving that the observed growth in let's say "number of ADA wallets" was driven primarly by marketing activities in this challenge, and not due to the natural growth or investments in product development. In my opinion, without a discussion of this topic, the impact of this challenge can only be partially verified.

I would like to congratulate the team on the good job they did in terms of Verifiability; most of the metrics are relevant to the objective of this challenge and are good guidelines to be taken into account by the proposers as they prepare their proposals for submission. In order to make a recommendation, I suggest that future challenges be divided into those that seek to measure the performance of the challenge itself, and those that seek to serve as a reference for proposal writers. From the point of view of verifiability I rate it a 5.