The 5th annual Brandweek Summit, presented by Adweek came back to Miami this September, and with a well-timed special offering, Brandweek Presents: Web3 & The Metaverse. Metagood Evangelist Mike Chavez dropped in to hear what brand and marketing industry leaders had to say on the power, promise and potential of the new internet. The consensus? The metaverse economy is a massive opportunity for brands and everyone is moving in!
The Landscape of Marketing in the Age of Web3
The Brandweek Summit is always a unique experience, offering insight and ideas on the realities and possibilities of how businesses interact and create offerings for their audiences. But when it comes to the rise of Web3, marketing teams and consumer experience execs have been handed an entirely new toolset to engage and connect with their consumers.
The series of panels, focused talks, 1:1 meetings and networking events with industry-leading brands set the stage to spark creativity to build new experiences for customers, establish confidence in the space and offer a glimpse into what might be possible for brands in the future. The way consumers connect to brands and businesses is rapidly changing and while a few years ago, the concept of Web3 may have been optional for brands, we’re now at a more urgent stage of adoption – get on the ship now or let it leave without you!
Metagood sat in to take notes from Marc Matheiu of Salesforce, who explained the current state of Web3 and the challenges the ad industry is facing.
In Marc’s view, Web3 marketers operate in a “zero data” environment. This is due to the fact that data on most blockchains are public. Importantly, he named a big challenge of the Web3 movement: a loss of trust in institutions, and that includes brands. To help build back that relationship, he believes that there’s an opportunity to change incentive structures in the economy because this new paradigm makes customers a “co-owner, co-creator, co-innovator, and co-citizen”. Marc posed a simple but interesting question during his presentation: ‘What is marketing?’ He asked, “Is it about saying more stuff to people, or is it about helping people find who they are and who they can be? To me, it is not about self-service, but about self-sovereignty: finding new aspects of their identity in Web3.” Marc also outlined the concept of a DaMo (decentralized marketing operations team), which reflects the evolution of how marketing occurs in Web3: the brand’s community can act as a distributed marketing agency.
This concept is familiar to us at Metagood & OnChainMonkey as we’ve built OCM alongside our bright and passionate community since OCM Genesis was launched in September 2021. Building in this fashion is in the DNA of our team and something we champion as we continue to build toward a more decentralised world in the Web3 space.
Community in the NFT Space
Our team is also no stranger to the power of NFTs and we heard from interesting voices in the space, including Lin Dai of OneOf NFT and Avery Akkineni of Vayner3, who shared how Miami is artfully being built into the central hub of all things NFT. From listening to the many great speakers present at Brandweek’s Metaverse Day it was clear the next wave of NFTs is going to be a lot different because of the presence of more capital being deployed by big brands and the highly-skilled teams that will enter the space.
We understand that community sits at the core of the value proposition for any NFT product/service. NFTs as a technology enable trustless transactions using blockchains, but it is the communities that have formed around NFT products and services in the current profile picture (PFP) wave of adoption that are transforming the ways brands will interact with their customers. We believe that the key to success in this new business environment is to build genuine communities where ethos and mission are aligned and collective action is rewarded through a flexible and scalable incentives framework. At Metagood, we have spent our first year building a talented and passionate community centered around our !RISE values (Respect Integrity Sustainability Experimentation), our “Off-Chain” Bananas (OnChainMonkey’s in-ecosystem utility token), OnChainMonkey DAO, and our latest feature which is called Missions, our incentive system that will enable us to organize and harness the power of a very large & globally distributed community.
When it comes to how communities interact with brands on a larger level, like swaying the direction of an NFT collection or social cause contribution, as we do with OnChainMonkey, Lin Dai offered insight we all need to be paying attention to as Web3 goes mainstream. If we want to democratize NFTs, he said, we have to “remove knowledge of the tech as a requirement to use and benefit from NFTs.” No brainer, but a big step for many brands, though most of us are familiar with the way this concept can thrive. For example, Dai offered, “understanding the OSI model of the internet is not a pre-requisite to use the internet.”
Mainstream Metaverse
With the spread of COVID-19 and the worldwide lockdowns that ensued, the world economy moved swiftly to a remote-work model using virtual environments at a scale not seen before. This accelerated the adoption of applications like Zoom, Slack, Discord, and also the adoption of NFTs as membership tokens to online clubs or communities.
Andrew McKechnie of Verizon spoke of how the wireless career company created a virtual environment to participate in the Super Bowl during pandemic closures. As one of the most anticipated and physically attended sporting events of the year, it was a massive feat to create a worthwhile experience for the masses sitting in their living rooms, who had hearts set on sitting in the stadium. McKechnie quoted a few jaw-dropping statistics that remind us how far along the adoption curve the world already is: 40 million people visited their virtual stadium, 5 million people viewed the live stream for the event and the unique approach to the event bridged fans from two distinct and very large industries: professional sports and gaming. This is a great case-study. It reveals the importance of understanding that when communities are built using virtual environments they are bound to overlap and that value-creation potential for this overlap is massive.
Though brand building is certainly going to change a lot over the next several years, we believe that authenticity and integrity will be foundational to the most successful brands. We created Metagood and OnChainMonkey because we believe in the power of communities to bring positive social impact to fruition when they are focused and incentivized to do so. We believe communities are powerful, because people working together is powerful!
!RISE
Respect
Integrity
Sustainability
Experimentation
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If you’re interested in joining us, check out OCM NFTs available for sale on OpenSea, Mintable, and Nifty Gateway. Our holders receive access to our banana economy, voting rights in our DAO, and exclusive rewards including invites to IRL and online events like ACTAI Barbados where members meet other impact-minded technologists, investors, celebrities and more. Join our Discord today. Monkeys are always happy to welcome newcomers!