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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Bringing Back Periscope, Angry Users Crash Reddit, Congress Targets the SEC

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone had a great weekend and you’re ready for a great week! Here’s a few stories I found over the last few days that I think you will find interesting:

 

Everything old is new again? It looks like Twitter is planning on bringing back both Periscope and Vine.  I think the Periscope move in particular will be embraced by livestreamers, and Elon has long been a fan of Vine, so it coming back makes sense given that. It seems like Periscope is the priority for now, with Vine being possible for a reboot later.

It’s interesting that the move to bring back Periscope in part seems to be about developing streaming video-game content similar to Twitch and YouTube Gaming. The liverstream gaming space has been trying to develop a solid competitor to Twitch for years.  Mixer bombed a few years ago, YouTube Gaming has had limited success, and the new kid on the block is Kick.  So far, Twitch is still the 800 pound gorilla in the streaming space, so we’ll see if Elon can put Twitter in a place to compete.

 

Reddit recently announced changes to the pricing of API access for developers, and it’s leading to a widespread ‘strike’ by Redditors who are ‘taking down’ some of the most popular subreddits on the site and making them private. It’s actually leading to site outages.

 

The SEC has been aggressively targeting the crypto industry recently.  Coinbase is the latest exchange in the SEC’s crosshairs, and now it seems the SEC itself is under fire, in particular SEC Chair Gary Gensler.  US Representative Warren Davidson has introduced the SEC Stabilization Act which would restructure the SEC, and in the process fire Gary Gensler. The crypto space is excited about this move and it will be interesting to see what happens here.

There’s a somewhat related and interesting political subplot developing here. The crypto space is dominated by millennials and Gen Zers; voters aged approximately 18-40. That group typically tends to vote democratic, with the more younger end of the range being more likely to vote democrat. But for the most part, so far republican lawmakers have been more receptive to crypto, while democratic lawmakers tend to be more adversarial when it comes to oversight and regulation. If this continues, we could see a shift in voting patterns, at least marginally so.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have a great week, and see you here tomorrow for my next post!

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Now I Get Why Everyone is Excited About NFTs

For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around NFTs, the Metaverse, crypto and all things web3. I decided to jump into this space because I suddenly saw that a LOT of smart people were moving toward these emerging technologies. Then I began to notice a huge talent drain; People at top positions in web 2.0 companies were leaving to join web3 startups.

All of this told me there was ‘something’ going on here that I needed to pay attention to.

So I dove in. When you start learning about web3, one of the first spaces to examine is NFTs. Honestly, it’s probably not the best entry point to learn about web3, because NFTs are so easily misunderstood. People are actually paying MILLIONS for a jpeg on their computer? How is this revolutionary?

I heard people say ‘Oh but it’s not just a file, you can get perks, you get access to a community!’ and all that sounded good, but in most cases it seemed like the NFT was mostly about the token itself. Whether that was a bored cat, a lazy dog, whatever.

And all of it looked like overhyped junk, if I’m being honest.
Then I saw this tweet from MetaFansNFT:

With Metafans, it’s not about the NFT, it’s about the experiences that unlock for you if you own a Metafans NFT. This tweet is from a Formula One race in Miami that MetaFans NFT holders were given special access to, just for owning a MetaFans NFT. MetaFans lets its NFT owners unlock special sporting experiences just for having an NFT from their collections. Sometimes they win a big discount on tickets, other times they win tickets and VIP access, all for being owners. The current calendar of events shows events in auto racing, The Preakness, and the MLB.

To me, this is a game-changer, and it shows the true potential of NFTs: As your entry point to both specialized experiences and a community of people interested in those same experiences.
And if you think about it, this could expand the concept of an NFT as your ticket to experiences to all areas of your life.

MetaFansNFT unlocks sporting experiences. But you could also have NFTs associated with:

  • Socializing/Dating
  • Work
  • School
  • Entertainment
  • Hobbies/Interests

We could, at one point in the near future, have an NFT associated with every major area of our lives. And this would allow us to have special access to not only customized experiences associated with that area, but access to a community of people who have the same interests and viewpoints as we do. And the NFT could unlock it all.

To me, this is getting back to the true potential of the internet. To give us the ability to interact with people that we could otherwise never talk to. If web 2.0 was about bringing everyone together (centralized) then web3 is about distilling us into smaller, more purposeful groups (decentralized).
Here’s an example: Let’s say you are obsessed with exploring caves in North Carolina. Sure, you love exploring caves in general, but there’s something about the caves in North Carolina that cannot be matched for you.

If you could join an online community that was focused on exploring the outdoors, would that interest you? Maybe.

What if you could join an online community that was devoted to exploring caves? Ok that’s got your interest.

But what if you could purchase an NFT that would unlock not only access to a community of 1,000 people who are devoted to exploring caves in North Carolina, but the NFT also unlocks your ability to JOIN community members on expeditions to caves in North Carolina? Of COURSE you would jump at the chance to be involved!

So keep an eye on the evolution of NFTs as a way to unlock specialized experiences and community access. I think this will be one of the areas that will be big for NFTs in the future.

 

PS: This post originally appeared as an issue of my newsletter Backstage Pass.  Backstage Pass is where I pull back the curtain and detail how companies are using emerging technologies to deliver amazing marketing and customer experiences.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: BAYC Launches $APE, Magazine/Book NFTs Are Here, Your Grandparents Are Mobile Gamers

Happy Monday, y’all! Welcome to another edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! Every Monday I bring you 3 news stories that caught my eye, covering business, marketing and web3.  Let’s dive in:

 

Bored Ape Yacht Club, the wildly successful NFT collection, launched its $APE coin last week.  The token will help fund community initiatives as well as reward current BAYC members.  The coin debuted at a dollar and quickly shot up to over $37 before settling down and is currently trading in the $10-14 dollar range. This will likely be the first of many such token offerings associated with NFT collections that we will see this year.

 

In January, I wrote about 3 NFT categories primed for growth in 2022; Music, photography, and books.  We are beginning to see some publishers begin to dabble with books and media, as Time has offered a recent edition of its magazine as an NFT for the first time:

https://twitter.com/MarkEglinton/status/1504106432316297222

 

I knew which age group was going to be the leaders in mobile gaming before I read the article. The age group that plays mobile games the most in the US and Canada?  The age group 45 years and older. This age group accounts for 32% of all mobile gamers.  Now to be fair, 45+ is a LARGE range.  But you would be surprised how many people over the age of 40 are playing mobile games.  I’ve been actively playing them for the last few years and the majority of the players are consistently over 40 years old.  Many are over 50.  Often, these games have chat functionality, and for older gamers, they may have limited mobility, and the friends they make while playing mobile games could be a significant part of their social circle.

 

So that’s it for this week, I hope all of you have a wonderful week and enjoy the Spring weather!

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How LooksRare Used Guerilla Marketing Tactics at Launch at Instantly Compete With OpenSea

OpenSea was the 800 pound gorilla in the NFT marketplace space. On Jan 4th, the company announced a $300M funding round at a $13 Billion plus valuation. All the momentum was with OpenSea and it was poised to get a strangehold on the exploding NFT marketplace space.

But all that changed over the course of 24 hours.

Two weeks into January, OpenSea had already received over 2 billion in Ethereum from its sales and was on pace for another record sales month.

On January 10th, NFT marketplace competitor LooksRare launched. Along with the website launch, LooksRare also launched its LOOKS token.  The token would be given to users of the website to incentivize certain activities, such as buying and selling NFTs.

But LooksRare decided to do something else with the LOOKS token.  LooksRare decided to give away 120 Million of the LOOKS tokens to current OpenSea users.  LooksRare targeted OpenSea users who had bought and sold at least 3 ETH worth of NFTs from June-December on OpenSea.  That’s roughly $8,000 worth of activity as of this writing.

The more activity on OpenSea, the more LOOKS tokens you received, in a range of at least 125 tokens, all the way up to 10,000 for the biggest OpenSea users. As of this writing, the LOOKS token is trading for roughly $4 a token.  So the airdropped LOOKS tokens to OpenSea users had a value of between $500-$40,000.

Yikes!

Here’s the brilliant part: In order to ‘activate’ the LOOKS tokens, the OpenSea user has to go to the LooksRare website and list an NFT for sale. So the move not only encourages OpenSea users to check out LooksRare, but it makes receiving the LOOKS tokens dependent on actually listing an NFT on the platform.

As you might expect, listing volume on LooksRare immediately spiked, and after a week LooksRare was realizing trading volume of two to three times what OpenSea was seeing!

Another brilliant move LooksRare made is by taking an actual sale on OpenSea, and then calculating how much money the seller would have made if the same NFT had been listed and sold on LooksRare:

To be honest, LooksRare should be doing these comparison tweets every day.  It’s a great way to clearly demonstrate the price difference in selling on LooksRare versus OpenSea.

How would this apply to an ‘average’ business?

Let’s revisit what LooksRare did in airdropping LOOKS tokens to OpenSea users.  What LooksRare did was send LOOKS tokens directly to the wallets that OpenSea users were using.  The buyer history was available on the blockchain, so LooksRare had access to sales history and could easily identify the wallets that had generated the sales that met their criteria.

How could this work in the more mainstream business world? Here’s an example: Your fast food brand decides to launch a mobile app where you connect your digital wallet to the app and pay through the app.  That means the sales history of your wallet (your digital identity) would be trackable on the blockchain.

Let’s say a competitor fast food chain launches their own mobile app, which is also setup as your mobile app is, so you connect your wallet. When someone signs up for your competitor’s app, they receive 10 free FOOD tokens, that can be used to buy food via your app. Think of FOOD tokens as rewards points that many current fast food apps such as Chick Fil A use today.

What your competitor could also do is airdrop FOOD tokens directly into the wallets of YOUR customers who are using YOUR mobile app! And they could set the same qualifications on the FOOD tokens as LooksRare did on its LOOKS tokens; Your customers would have to go to your competitor’s app to redeem the FOOD tokens.  This is also called a ‘vampire attack’, in marketing terms, because the intent is to suck the best users away from your app, and into the competitor’s app.

Be aware of how web3 technologies are impacting marketing

Now is a wonderful time to watch how companies and even individuals are leveraging and experimenting with emerging web3 technologies in their marketing and branding efforts. As these technologies emerge and develop, they will create new and exciting opportunities for companies to market themselves, and deliver better experiences to customers.

 

Note: Thank you to the brilliant Adel de Meyer for giving me assistance explaining the technical aspects of how the web3 technologies in this article would work. Please follow Adel on Twitter, she’s my go-to expert on crypto, NFTs and web3.

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Walmart Signals a Move Into Web3, Metaverse

So it looks like one of the biggest brands in the world is preparing to dip its toes in the Web3 waters.  Walmart has filed a series of trademarks that seem to signal its desire to create a brand cryptocurrency as well as possibly sell virtual goods:

The big-box retailer filed several new trademarks late last month that indicate its intent to make and sell virtual goods, including electronics, home decorations, toys, sporting goods and personal care products. In a separate filing, Walmart said it would offer users a virtual currency, as well as NFTs.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Walmart filed the applications on Dec. 30.

Recently, I wrote about how brands could leverage NFTs and cryptocurrency to incentivize customers to engage in certain activities. I suspect that many brands will to tie these emerging technologies to existing business processes, as much as possible.

For instance, if Walmart launched its own cryptocurrency, customers could be paid tokens based on activity, and then those tokens could be spent for items the store sells.  For instance, make three visits to Walmart in one week? Get 5 tokens of its cryptocurrency. Maybe spending $100 gets you 10 tokens. This could be very similar to a loyalty program in that Walmart could use its new cryptocurrency to reward customers for engaging in desired activities.

In general, brands testing the Web3 waters will likely gravitate toward using these emerging technologies to solve today’s business problems rather than address tomorrow’s business possibilities. As the space matures and becomes more understood, we will no doubt see more progressive Web3 initiatives launched by brands.