Augur Impresses Long List of Atlanta Companies
On March 11th, I attended the MAX Awards for Marketing at the Georgia Aquarium. The MAX Awards are given to the best marketing campaigns or strategies by entities with a presence in Georgia. Augur was named a Finalist for the crowdfunding campaign in 2015, sharing the nomination with gigantic corporations and businesses including The Coca-Cola Company, The NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, Cricket Wireless and many others. All of the Finalists (including a picture of your’s truly) were featured in a recent issue of Atlanta Business Chronicle, of which you can check out Augur’s feature here. During 2015, the Augur team had 6 individuals and the fact that we were considered in the same league as these organizations with large marketing departments is incredible (especially considering my role as Director of Marketing).
The awards were presented by Georgia State University and the Atlanta Business Chronicle, but the Finalists were decided by the Georgia State Marketing Roundtable. The Roundtable has marketers from a variety of firms, including Delta Air Lines, Chick-fil-A, UPS, SunTrust and many other Fortune 500 representatives. The amount of traditional marketers, corporate representatives and academia that was involved makes it even more shocking that a project as cutting edge, complicated and innovative as Augur would be considered, but that feeling is one that can’t be replicated.
List of Finalists
The Coca-Cola Company for ShareaCoke.com
Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club for its re-brand launch
Southwire Company for the SIMpull Reel Maneuverable Payoff System
Augur for Decentralized Prediction Market Platform
My Pooch Face for Scalable and Viral Pet Art Sales Platform
Cricket Wireless for International Long Distance & Roaming Portfolio
Navicure for Navicure
Terminus for #FlipMyFunnel Account-based Marketing
Press Coverage
The Atlanta Business Journal featured Augur and myself in a short description of our crowdfunding campaign, marketing efforts and some details on the project itself. The piece is shared down below but if you are interested in seeing Augur featured on the same page as Coca-Cola's Share A Coke and The Atlanta Hawks just go here.
My Perspective
My passion for blockchain technology (specifically Ethereum and Augur) has somehow put me in positions where I work with like-minded people on niche-technologies, yet end up in situations where I end up with traditional business people who have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when explaining what your company is. Regardless, the fact our tiny project managed to impress this group of people in the same way as mainstream Fortune 500 companies, that is a surreal and awesome feeling of accomplishment.
Hoping that 2016 continues this amazing ride!
Other Things
While the MAX Award experience was important personally, there were even bigger things happening with Augur this week as we finally launched the Augur Beta at Augur.net. Additionally, we partnered with Microsoft to offer Augur on their Blockchain as a Service platform in Azure. The fact they plugged the beta on their site is fantastic and the experience working with them exceeded any expectations.
I spent Wednesday and Thursday in New York City with Lisa Cheng of Vanbex (who was a huge help last week and I can't thank her enough) as well as Gordon Hall of Storj and my good friend Andy Goldstein, among others like Troy Kent! We went to plenty of meetings and had good conversation. Talking with Gordon was great as I learned a lot about what Storj is doing and was even more impressed than I would have ever thought. He also talked a bit about his hackerspace here in Atlanta called Counterpoint that sounds awesome, I made it a point to make a donation and I recommend you do the same at counterpointhackers.org.
