How NFTs could evolve for brands — now that marketers know what they actually are

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

For the most part, non-fun­gi­ble tokens (NFTs) have been a bust for the mar­ket­ing and media worlds, most­ly the ter­rain of cryp­to buffs who invest­ed a lot of coin in seem­ing­ly sim­i­lar-look­ing pieces of vir­tu­al art.

That era, or what Tyler Moe­bius calls NFT 1.0 is rapid­ly com­ing to an end, as the 2.0 era empow­ers mar­keters and their agen­cies to use the Web3 tech­nol­o­gy as next-gen­er­a­tion loy­al­ty and data gath­er­ing tools. Plen­ty of exam­ples have already popped up in recent months.

Moe­bius is the founder and CEO of a com­pa­ny called Smart­Media Tech­nolo­gies, a five-year-old firm with about 100 employ­ees that plays in exact­ly the Web3 space, fus­ing ad tech with blockchain-based tech. He’s been around since the ear­ly days of the Inter­net, hav­ing been part of the launch team at aQuan­tive (remem­ber that name?), one of the first agen­cies to pur­sue putting adver­tis­ing on the web. Along the way, he also found­ed tech-based Adco­nion (which became Amobee).

The fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion has been edit­ed for space and clar­i­ty. 

Where are you at in the process of building NFTs, and who are some of your clients?

We’ve spent the last five years build­ing an enter­prise Web3 plat­form that’s pur­pose built for agen­cies, brands, and cre­ators, with the inten­tion of mak­ing Web3 easy. Not only for brands and agen­cies to be able to lever­age Web3, but we’re real­ly mak­ing it easy for the end user. 

We pro­vide a two-tap cus­to­di­al wal­let, so that any­body with a smart­phone can have their first Web3 wal­let, be able to acquire their first NFT, and then be able to actu­al­ly start to use that in terms of either dig­i­tal coupons, or a loy­al­ty token that you picked up by vis­it­ing a retail store. We have a part­ner­ship with Accen­ture, we have part­ner­ship with Unilever. We just did an acti­va­tion for Voda­fone across Europe, where they acquired 250,000 wal­lets. And we’re over 6 mil­lion wal­lets on the plat­form at this point.

How difficult is it to get brands to engage in this form of marketing? Is there a lot of education you still need to conduct? 

Mar­keters have spent the last two decades gain­ing con­sent from con­sumers to be able to send an email to their inbox. Now they’re see­ing this as a new CRM chan­nel. They’re see­ing Web3 as a new chan­nel where they need to be focused on gain­ing the con­sent from users to be able to send pro­mo­tion­al dig­i­tal tokens and coupons or ben­e­fits or loy­al­ty coins to that user’s wal­let. It’s address­able wal­lets in the same way that they think about address­able emails in their email data­base. It’s not tak­ing as much con­vinc­ing now,They’re less focused just around one appli­ca­tion, which hap­pens to be NFT drops done in the 1.0 way, they’re now see­ing a much broad­er tech­nol­o­gy and capability.

How do you see brands using this in other ways? 

There’s a lot of dif­fer­ent use cas­es around that you could imag­ine. If you fly Delta or Unit­ed, you get life­time sta­tus. Imag­ine that life­time sta­tus becomes an NFT that I can actu­al­ly hand down to my son or my daugh­ter. Being able to have real prove­nance and own­er­ship around the ben­e­fits of of a mem­ber­ship or a loy­al­ty club. 

The sec­ond area that I think is real­ly going to sort of crack open web3 is around NFT tick­et­ing. In the future, you’ll pull out your phone, the NFT will have a QR code inside that will be scanned going into a Rolling Stones con­cert. Upon scan­ning and redeem­ing the NFT, it will imme­di­ate­ly turn into a dig­i­tal twin of that tick­et, so I’ll have that sou­venir forever. 

But not only that, it will change states and become a dig­i­tal mer­chan­dise, or a coupon for $2 off Coke at the con­ces­sion stand. And then when Mick Jagger’s onstage, he’ll sing this song and say ‘This song’s for you.’ At that moment, we will be able to mint that moment and that song will be embed­ded in all 38,000 NFT tick­ets. Only the 38,000 peo­ple who attend­ed that night will have a copy of that song that they can hold and cher­ish for­ev­er. The Stones will know it’s an authen­tic song because it was an NFT. And the Stones will be able to allow for the sec­ondary sales of those — and a per­cent­age of that will go to their favorite charity.

What other Web3 elements do you work in? 

A big part of our of our prod­uct roadmap for the plat­form this year is real­ly focused on the meta­verse ele­ment, cre­at­ing spa­tial web expe­ri­ences. We believe that the future of meta­verse envi­ron­ments is real­ly to help aug­ment retail in the buy­ing expe­ri­ence for brands. And brands aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly going to need to rely on the user base of a Decen­tra­land or Roblox to be able to bring those audi­ences. They can use paid media and their own social chan­nels. They can fill the meta­verse like with their own brand expe­ri­ence. W’re focused on being able to cre­ate those cus­tom envi­ron­ments. And the key ele­ment to that is around cre­at­ing the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty of a wal­let to where I can take the vir­tu­al tokens in from the phys­i­cal world that I picked up at a Wal­mart, and actu­al­ly bring that into a meta­verse envi­ron­ment and be able to redeem it. That bridge between the phys­i­cal and the vir­tu­al world is where we’re also focused on.

How NFTs could evolve for brands — now that mar­keters know what they actu­al­ly are

Source link

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *