the future of big brand marketing
the future of big brand marketing
GM.
Today is the first day of December the month where (allegedly) we will see the Coinbase NFT marketplace rolled out.
It’s an exciting time for us, especially considering that December is peak “consumer season” too. People are racking up credit card debt, so what’s another few ETH to buy an NFT on this cool new marketplace all the kids are talking about, huh boomer?
“I heard about NFTs from my nephew who made a lot of money trading them! I’ll give it a try!” - Your Cool, But Always Drunk Uncle as he buys a bunch of worthless NFTs probably
NBA Top Shot helped us walk (right out the door), OpenSea helped us run (into a brick wall) but the hopes are that Coinbase NFT will clear us for takeoff (Paul Pierce picture of the rocket emoji).
However, if the NFT world has shown me anything so far, it’s to expect the opposite.
Sure, we may have a whole mess of newbies entering the space, but that doesn’t mean that NFT you love and have done your own research on will be going up in value anytime soon. As we know, new money is often times dumb money. There will be no rhyme or reason to what spikes for a while; NFTs are chaos energy remember. Some will buy an NFT, get burned and never buy again. They’ll churn right out of the ecosystem.
It’s important to expect the best, but prepare for the worst. Use the knowledge you’ve gathered over the last few months. Review your mistakes as the newbies are likely to make the same ones you did. Recognize patterns and above all, take profits!
ALPHA
After buying land in the Sandbox last week, Adidas committed even further to the Metaverse over the weekend by announcing a mysterious partnership with 3 NFT brands - BAYC, Pixel Vault and the tastemaker GMoney.
Details are still unknown outside of the cryptic tweets, but they do appear on 3D mock-ups implying some kind of real world AND metaverse application.
In all likelihood, it’s probably just IRL merch plus an Adidas “skin” for your avatar, but either way it’s an exciting taste of what could come for owners of “blue-chip” NFTs. Soon after the news broke, everyone asked the next logical question: “wen Nike?”
That’s because in order for sportswear and streetwear brands to remain “cool”, they will continue to need partnerships such as these. NFT brands are what’s “in” right now with the important demographics. And let’s not forget that some of the biggest releases from brands over the past few years have been collabs. Whether it’s Travis Scott’s Nikes, J Balvin’s McDonald’s meal, or Post Malone’s Crocs, these companies need stolen clout more than ever to continue building the brand.
The next logical progression is collabs with NFTs.
Also, the hype surrounding those aforementioned releases lead to frothy secondary markets. Now, because of the blockchain, big brands can get a cut of the royalties that they would normally loss out on - another big indicator that this could be the future of marketing.
My guy DanielGotHits put it much better than I can on what this future might look like for blue-chip NFT communities here:
BETA
Counter to Adidas we have Budweiser :/
They were seemingly ahead of the curve a few months ago (when they bought beer.eth back in August for 30 ETH). It came days after Visa bought a CryptoPunk and since those purchases the NFT world has been wondering what their play into the space would be.
Well, on Monday Budweiser struck first as we saw them become the first major brand to put a .eth ENS domain as their Twitter name. Yay! Unfortunately? They decided to have a horrific launch of their own NFT - Budverse Cans.
Run on Shopify and using something called a “fixed fee gas” price, they sold out quickly despite a crashed site. As with many brands and influencers before them, Budweiser found out that entering the NFT community is easier said than done when all the degens flood your site with traffic.
The secondary market on the Budverse Cans is holding well enough, so it remains to be seen how this will play out in the long-term. A lot comes down to what Bud does to add utility and build community. Will owning a Budverse cans give any real-world benefits for beer lovers like me? It’s promised in the description of the NFT that there will be something at some point. Buying beer.eth was so savvy that I’m inclined to believe there will be follow-through from their team and they do actually care about Web3.
However, it’s hard to totally trust big brands like this when their marketing teams seem to always be chasing trends. If NFTs fall out of favor, will we be left holding an overpriced collector’s item? It’s becoming apparent to me that big brands should enter the community like Adidas. Instead of trying to do it on your own, why not latch onto a community who knows what they’re doing first and evolve as we do?
DELTA
I have to shoutout my Cool Cats who last week launched their Beta for Cool Pets. If you see “Beetah” and a hedgehog with chainsaw around Twitter, this what the community is lovingly referring to. Pets will be part of a future P2E game and will introduce new members to the Cool Cats ecosystem through 4 elemental pets - water, fire, grass and air. Go check out their updated website. It’s amazing.
@jack (aka Jack Dorsey) left Twitter both as a boardmember and as CEO on Monday, leaving a lot to speculate on the platform’s future - in particular if Twitter will move away from Jack’s Bitcoin maxi stance and into the world of Ethereum. So far, so good. On Tuesday (the day after Jack’s departure), Twitter began testing ETH tipping. There’s a whole mess of issues to still deal with for new CEO Parag Agrawal, but the crypto community does seem to be a focus of the new regime, so we will see how it all plays out now. But wen PFP verification?
