How much of a strategic marketing budget should we allocate currently?

Part of the raised treasury was intended to be used for non-franchise financing/acquisition purposes, with marketing being one of them. A marketing budget allows us to:

1. Expand the community by bringing in interest from various demographics, including from the franchising industry. This may help increase our pool of operators, owners, and business development initiatives whether directly or indirectly, ideally strengthened by holding FRIES.
2. Increase awareness of friesDAO financed franchising opportunities by generating inbound leads. Keep friesDAO consistently on the radar of the general crypto community in order to build brand recognition and reputation, which can be leveraged in the future as potential defi partnerships and/or DAO revenue sources.
3. To achieve these objectives, this proposal requests between 150,000 and 500,000 USDC of our treasury funds to be used over the course of 4 months as we ramp into a potential store acquisition. This budget will be used for the following measures:

-Hire social media marketers -Fund contests, airdrops, and various participation initiatives -Google Adwords advertising to target aspiring franchisees -Contractors to develop SEO content and landing pages as well as graphics/artwork -Paid partnerships and endorsements with other projects -Tactical acquisition of discounted FRIES tokens from Uniswap

Pertaining to the last bulletpoint above (acquiring discounted FRIES):

An undisclosed amount of FRIES tokens will be purchased using these marketing funds whenever there are substantial discounts (from the original treasury contribution price) available on Uniswap, over the course of 4 months. This allows us to build a small token treasury, as well as to pseudo-restore the perceived peg of the contribution value towards marketing use, to be used in parallel with the USDC funds for the above measures without introducing dilution from our existing FRIES treasury reserves. These discount acquired FRIES will be used strategically as part of our marketing incentives.

Because of approximately 1 to 1 ratio of current FRIES to treasury USDC raised, sellers of FRIES via Uniswap are effectively "donating" value temporarily to the treasury through this proposed initiative (since circulating supply is being reduced and contributions can be potentially refunded later proportionally between available users' FRIES and treasury USDC).

Note that there may be some risks/down sides to this initiative. First, a portion of our USDC treasury, which could be used to acquire franchises or USDC only operations, will be converted into FRIES despite the treasury already having "locked" FRIES. Second, some FRIES holders may continue to sell beyond this allocated budget, thereby using the USDC as exit liquidity (which is why the undisclosed randomness method has to be used to minimize this).

To deter abusive behavior such as frontrunning, all purchase of FRIES in this manner will be done at the discretion of the multi-sig treasury holders at unannounced and unpredictable times, in good faith using best efforts. To do this, USDC will be first run through a mixer to various "buckets" of undisclosed hot wallets with various amounts. Once any discounted FRIES token is purchased with one of these wallets, the transaction will be posted publicly after the action. All marketing related expenditures will also be posted, within reasonable timeframe, to the DAO or to member(s) delegated by the community as an authorized "accounting representative." Should not all funds be used by June 30, 2022, a new proposal will be issued to determine whether they will all be returned to the treasury or to extend this initiative.

Voting Options:

Approve $150,000 USDC from the treasury for this proposal Approve $300,000 USDC from the treasury for this proposal Approve $500,000 USDC from the treasury for this proposal Do not approve this proposal