Future of Your Customer

This year at DMEXCO 2022 there were a lot of useful sessions aboutr Web3. Here is a recap of some of the sessions I atteneded and wanted to do a quick recap for you what has been discussed.

✅ The Metaverse Forces a New Brand Management Paradigm

✅ The State of Web3

✅ Real Web3 Brand Cases

✅ Decoding the web3 community on Twitter

✅ New opportunities for brands in web3

✅ Customer Engagement 3.0 — How web3 and metaverse will disrupt the way brands manage customer relationships

✅ Pioneering web3 with a Mercedes-Benz-G-Wagon

✅ Launching a successful fashion project in the web3 space

✅ Key lessons learned from 4 years in web3

✅ Legal setup in web3

A session with VW Group Manger Tim Walther on Metaverse.

Here is some of the key insights and advices for brands from Tim Walther who leads Metaverse & Web3 projects of Volkswagen Group:

• This is a time we all experience and learn what is working and what is not working.
• Be very very mindful on what you are doing with your brand. There are risks when playing with new ideas and concepts and you have to be careful. If you are dropping a 10K NFT collection and you don’t have a plan, it is going to backfire! Do your homework and plan plan plan.

“When you are looking at brand NFTs, you can analyze them (because blockchains are open data). What were the wallets maintaining brand NFTS? Are those experienced wallets? Have they done mints before? Or is this their first mint?”

• Starbucks was very smart to use other terms except NFT because they are aiming for another audience, a 30 million audience size loyalty program. You can not bring these people on board if you use technical terms like NFT /Web3 etc.

So what is happening with Web3 and Metaverse these days? Here are some examples from different verticals:

🕹 Gaming:

• Axie Infinity they generated with play to earn model 360 million dollar per month.
• Blankos: Fortnite is coming with a nft marketplace where you can basically own the asset you play with.

🎸Celebrities:

Eminem & Snoop Dogg are very active in the nft space. They launched their music video where they showcased their bored ape pfp within the clip so the nft is integrated in the music video.

To watch the official music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrA-slMoZ4

🎸 Music concerts

• Travis Scott performed at Fortnite already.22 million people watched the concert. He was able to bring great audience.
• Justin Bieber was one of them too. One of the leading faces of web3 as well.

👗 Digital Fashion:

• RTFKT acquired by Nike — combining virtual fashion with real physical fashion.
• Adidas minted NFT, you can buy it and then claim some hoodies.
• Tiffany produced bracelets in the form of crypto punks nft. They offered every crypto punk holder exclusive bracelets. They are holding a new audience with a lot of money. Tiffany & Co.

• Puma: Jumped into that space a few weeks ago they are reading a meta verse experience to showcase their products.
• Gucci: They are doing a lot of stuff. Now you can buy a lot of products with Ape coin tokens.

🏣 Other Institutions:

Ethereum is getting a major upgrade. It will be scalable , cheaper and energy efficient. The new upgrade will reduce the worldwide energy consumption by 0.2%. That is HUGE! 0.2% worldwide energy consumption. Vitalik Pokynchereda

Senken — they are offering a marketplace for carbon credits and integrated with blockchain protocols.

Starbucks Odyssey: They participate without knowing they never talk about nuts. You can trade them too. 0 gas fees.

META integrating nuts in to instagram and Facebook digital collectibles will be used within multiple feeds.

NOTE: Meta just launched its Pro glasses :) I was a little late giving you this leak therefore it is only fair not to consider it as a leak anymore.

Fantium: you can invest your favorite athlete!

⺟ SOME OTHER KEY BRAND INSIGHTS:

• NFTs reached zeitgeist. There is a global awareness about NFTs. All the major publications (from Nytimes to Rolling Stones) covered it! It reached certainly a broad awareness but what about understanding?

“People see headlines, million dollar pitch of monkeys and especially in this economy — given these enormous budgets- they may even hate it. But NFTs are far beyond it. So, we have a long way to understanding and a longer way to many active users.”

• There are certainly community expectations when you are building a web3 project. For the community web3 project is the product in which they have invested their money, their time and loyalty. Below is a chart summarizing what users expect and what they reject in web3 space.

• The secrets behind Adidas web3 success is about building exciting communities, looking to build infrastructure not only engagement and embrace technology.
• Adidas made the choice to bring it to crypto natives community vs global fans who are web3 illiterate. However Starbucks made the choice to go after the late comers. These are two different approaches and they are both successful. Brands must choose their paths depending on their identity and objectives.

• AUDI CASE

AUDI produced NFTs for a good cause. They donated the revenue from their NFT drop to UN Refugee Aid. They have worked with a studio that makes AI Driven art to produce assets.

Here are the results:

• NFTs are just not collectibles. Behind NFT is a person who opted in to that shared belief. What is your NFT or collection you created stand for?
• Customer engagement 1.0 was physical interaction people were connected to strokes in their neighborhood. So this was hard to scale. Then customer 2.0 began it involved a lot of loyalty with customers. NOW WITH CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT 3.0 , the customers will OWN the experience, they would want to be the collaborators.

“Visitors > customers > loyal customers > influencers > collaborator”

By decentralizing ownership and giving ownership to them ,we create a whole new opportunities for customers. Another beautiful aspect is programmability. A token can be utility and value and customers can use that to access to brands.

- There is a term called money grab. Major brands web3 entering the space because you are a money grabber. Not to look like a Money grabber, Before we begin our journey to web3 to create an authentic story that comes with a brand DNA.

👮 LEGAL INSIGHTS

There are 3 different layers in each project

1- Token : which is scribbled in the blockchain that is the piece that identifies the ownership

2- The digital asset jpeg

3- The right that you have for the second layer. These are three different things you can slice whatever grant you wanna give by making clear in the terms and conditions and in the communication of your project.

If you want your project to be access token, nft connected to a wallet through a gated community , you don’t need to give commercial license rights for example.

You can give away NFT who wants to identify with it or testimonial with it you can certainly grant them as many right them as they can have with the commercial agreement.

You can do everything from everything to non exclusive licenses or exclusive rights or transfer the entire IP. This is something you define before hand and it will be part of project.