I don't need to repeat that Valueplan is wasting money specifically. But I'd like to add that spending money on brand awareness is useless in general. If advertising worked, Polkadot would be in the top 10. We need to focus, and I'd like to focus on three issues:
The name Hive is not distinctive enough. I made a proposal to rebrand without having to rename every piece of infrastructure.
We need to give people a reason to remain active. In particular, we need to give people a reason to read Hive, not just to post. I hate Twitter, but it's where relevant discourse about politics and crypto takes place. Then I come here to read a boring fitness report from someone who barely leaves the house, with a photo of some random trash (to use myself as an example and avoid hurting anyone else's feelings). Making Hive worthwhile to read requires less focus on original content and more focus on sharing news and entertainment. I did a trial run of both with @newforyou and @memedump, but don't expect too much - I don't even manage to keep blogging regularly on my personal account. There's someone on dBuzz I don't want to single out who shares multiple YouTube videos every day about gaming and related technology, adding a short comment. That's the kind of posting I find useful, even when I rarely watch the videos. It's an example of useful curation (voting is not curation).
We need to onboard organizations which have a lot of content to share from a particular point of view: charities, tourist boards, e-commerce stores, lobby and activist groups, unions, religious organizations, government agencies, sports clubs, etc. There's a beautiful synergy here: they can buy attention here in a more natural way than via ads, while we receive information about social issues which might be ignored by the mainstream media. I've said this before, and did nothing about it because it would require a lot of handholding and people skills.
Finally, there's a lot of talk about the UI as an obstacle, but people will readily use a shitty interface like Amazon.com or Microsoft Excel when it's useful to them. The two top cryptocurrencies are popular despite usability horrors like a 10-minute average blocktime or your tokens not showing up in Metamask automatically. So that's one thing we should not focus on.