EUREKA!
I think I've found a way to add utility to tokens and demands for them. By adding a way for the token to be spent, we can create additional demands on any given token.
Community Advertising Bidding System
As it is right now, people can promote their post in the "promoted" tab. The choice was made probably because all we have is one community right now..People may have reacted negatively to putting the highest bidding post on the main trending page of steemit.com.
The promoted tab is far from the best situation since what advertisers wants is eyeballs...not a segregated space.
But when the community feature will be launch, many communities will grow...some with tokens attached and some not. All those communities will represent niches...and advertisers LOVES niches since it makes their job much easier.
An Ad Community Feature
So let's keep the main trending/hot section of the website ad free. But what could be done is adding an advertising option in the creation settings of a community. So advertising would be a choice of the community owner. Some communities will be ad free and some won't. Once activated, the community owner or admin could set which token would have to be spent in order to be at the top of their hot/trending section.
The price would be set based on supply and demand CPM (cost per thousand impression)
One Central Ad Hub
Let's not make it too complicated for advertisers. They shouldn't be in the business of buying and selling tokens in order to advertise. This is why we have a DEX right? It would be easy to make it all the token buying automated.
Example
So let's say I want to advertise to programmers. community has 100,000 users and
has 55,000 users. For my ad they are the communities that I want to target. Each have their own token DEV and JAVA and have the advertising features on.
The advertising hub would make me a price in STEEM or SBD per CPM but then it would make the conversion by itself to DEV and JAVA to be spent on the advertising...creating a automatic demand for that particular token. Since all ad spent end up in the account to be burned, hypothetically, DEV and JAVA would be taken out of circulation.
Conclusion
I think making it so that if you want to advertise in a community, you have to spend the token that is tied to that community. If there is no token associated with it, STEEM would be the default one to be spent. This would create a huge demand for STEEM as advertisers will now have a way to NICHE DOWN and have way better targeting they could ever have.
All that contributing to increase the price of STEEM and successful SMTs.