The core of an economic framework is establishing a framework between commercial entities and the community's customers. If we look at the biggest blocker to an entrepreneurial startup, it is not getting the word out to the people.

It wasn’t New York Times Square advertising that made me realize this; it was Tokyo, where I discovered how to build a proper advertising network. In the picture above, and I wrote an article on this, I realized these buildings are designed to saturate a market with a cultural connection to the marketplace.

You can look at this set of buildings and be drawn into the advertisement. One thing I want you to notice about ads in Asia is that they use big eyes in these anime displays because the eyes are the first thing you notice.

Even in the hood, for example, we can create buildings that host oversized ads created with generative AI to market local businesses and digital businesses based in our communities. That means we can now transform our community into a level of advertising and economic cultivation we have never seen before.  

These buildings can be hollowed out – it does not matter because the digital displays will deliver the good revenue per square feet from the advertisements. This is a building I covered on Madison and Pulaski in Chicago that is for sale for $450K; it doesn’t need tenants – the bottom floor can be a digital showroom, and the top floors can host servers with a huge digital billboard promoting local business and show news and information. $450K will quickly pay for itself from the advertising revenue, and someone can set up hotel rooms or a co-working space.

This is just an illustration that we are in a new paradigm, and things are not the same. Many of you who have been reading Dream and Hustle for over a decade may remember an article on creating AR-based advertising in our communities. That was the start of our journey to this point with MochaStar. This creation did not show up overnight.

The new direction is straightforward: Saturate the city centre with advertising and incorporate advertising everywhere, anywhere, to promote local businesses and startups using digital-first technology.

The New Paradigm

We are going to discuss the new opportunities and paradigms to help you understand the world we are in with MochaStar advertising platform. The only thing I want to make a note of is Ed Dunn built all of this with laptops he got from pawn shops while these cornballs at Blavity AfroTech be thirsty begging VCs for funding to talk about their fake valuation numbers to other goofy cats that don’t matter.

Overall, the goal is to get advertising everywhere like in Japan. We can observe other Asian metropolis and see the same pattern—a saturation of ads on big buildings and small spaces. Then you realize it's not just ads; it’s a culture and a statement about an economic engine in the works. We should have always been advertising-first in whatever solution we created for economic empowerment.

The biggest paradigm to me is what I keep telling you guys—you don’t have to be here in America to run this operation. You can set up the business in America, but you can work overseas as a digital nomad for your own digital firm. Become cloud-native with digital mirrors, and you can work in Bali or Dubai or Thailand or Mexico, get away from all this nonsense, and hire a nice team.

My suggestion is that you guys focus on new markets in Africa and Latin America and build strong advertising city centers there. Build new economic frameworks in these markets and become a true global mogul of a digital advertising empire—you can do it!

MochaStar

MochaStar is an ad exchange that uses our DBEXX matching engine to match advertisers with ad network partners. Just want to make a note, MochaStar is our first DBEXX launch as DBEXX has several matching engines we use for in-house and will be licensing to other operations either cloud-native or on-premise licensing. Yeah, another revenue stream for the empire, yep.

Scenario: Funding Your Startup with Advertising

The same way a content operation would look for advertisers to sponsor their programming, you can do the same thing for your startup. In fact, I would think it is unwise to start any business without sponsorship or advertising embedded in your firm. This is based on my experience with retailing in Japan.

Instead of using loans and begging customers to support you, an advertiser can create touchpoints using MochaStar and sell ad spaces for matching advertisers to run ads on their launch date. Advertisers will look first at your location, your business and see if they are a perfect fit to pay for advertising. This creates a stream of revenue to have cash reserves in case you need more time getting your business up and running.

Scenario: Create Naming Rights

The same way a stadium can offer naming rights for a sponsor, you should consider doing the same thing for your business. I have mentioned this is a global trend going on. The best example is the Capital One Café where the café is ran by a coffee shop brand and Capital One establish a space to offer deals on their financial products.

In my example when I discussed the modern barbershop, a barbershop, a sneaker shop can sponsor a co-brand agreement to have naming rights of the barbershop, put physical and digital displays and videos of sports highlights with certain sneaks on -all of this is negotiated content to pay for the barbershop initial operating costs and create cross-branding for the local community to know both the sneaker shop and the barbershop.

Scenario: Grid-Based Advertising

Over a decade ago, a travel blogger created a unique proposition. They created a web page that had spaces of pixels for anybody on the web to buy a pixel to place an ad. He wanted to raise money to be able to travel, and the novel web page was filled with ads, and he was successful in his goal.

You can create a grid-based digital display using the masonry image script available in HTML5. There are videos on YouTube on how to create one. You can place these grid displays on a 65-inch or greater LCD screen, and advertisers can use MochaStar to be on a grid in the display.

MochaStar uses a playlist and streaming media to deliver ads to the touchpoint. Instead of a rotating ad, a grid display takes every ad on the playlist and inserts it into a grid simultaneously. This is a great way to have a vivid display of multiple ads, all paid for on one screen.

Scenario: Streaming Informercials

MochaStar is using streaming technology to stream video and audio to a touchpoint. That means long-running infomercials or paid programming can be played on a video screen. Yes, we created the ability to run the same infomercial programming these television stations play in the early AM hours.

However, I want to inform you of Japan's infomercials – some of them are not boring American infomercials. They run infomercials supporting co-op businesses and other local businesses. Some of them are lifestyle game shows. Others are relationship and topic interviews, and these are run by social media influencers looking for an audience – they are doing next-level stuff over in Japan with their infomercials; I think we can bring them back here, and MochaStar was engineered in Japan, so we can support features like this.

Scenario: Digital Stores Everywhere

An advertisement is a display with a possible clickthrough link. For example, we can create a cover page of an article from this blog with the marketing pitch and QR code to link to the article. We advertise this link on screens as our advertisement display. We can offer a pay-to-view of an article and this is a PZR009 feature for contributors for better monetization streams where we target content to physical locations based on matching context.

So what I just described is how you can create a QR code store that was a fad last decade. People can scan a QR code of an e-book or a podcast media and stream it to them after paying for it. Or someone can set up ads for services in local areas to reserve a table, create a salon appointment, consult with an accident attorney, and create a digital store display with QR code links.

This model falls in with the grid display but have QR codes. The example you may have seen or remembered is the NFT displays where today, you can create AI prompt artwork like the cover image and sell it as a digital image to download as wallpaper or get it as a framed print.

MochaStar is a Game-Changer

This is self-explanatory—we made it easier to create digitalized economic frameworks through advertising in urban areas. We also made it possible and easier for businesses to get the word out, one of the biggest pain points I received as feedback in my research for startups.

But Japan changed everything. I saw how advertising worked there, and it was all-encompassing, which is how advertising should have been all along. This is why local businesses and local spots are thriving in Japan, and you have to see it to believe it. I recommend you visit Japan before starting anything with what I’m doing so you can understand where all this is coming from.

But we created new paradigms of ventures and opportunities for those who want to create ad-based solutions. People can create agencies to place ads using prompts and matching. Shop owners can supplement their income using ad displays to drive initial revenue as the customer base build up. People can invest in real estate with the sole purpose to display advertising to a large audience.

MochaStar was designed to deliver this new paradigm, and we will launch the network very soon.