🎯 This Week's Digest: Feb 17

Happy Friday! Welcome to the weekly Web3 Marketer, where I summarize top web3 stories across brands, loyalty, and commerce.

Today's newsletter is 1,488 words, a 6½-minute read.

Top headlines this week:

1. How not to promote web3 to mainstream in a $6.5M Super Bowl ad

2. NFT customers prioritize profit and ownership over other collectible utilities and functions

3. 62 more bite-sized stories including Reddit, Porsche, PUMA, Rihanna, Shopify, Napster, and more

If you have any questions or feedback, you can always reach me over email, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

🔝 Story This Week: How not to promote web3 to mainstream in a $6.5M Super Bowl ad

What happened: A web3 gaming startup, Limit Break, paid $6.5M for a 30 sec ad slot

• The ad for its DigiDaigaku project featured a persistent QR code to scan to claim one of 10,000 free digital collectibles

• For most viewers, the link redirected them to the startup’s CEO personal Twitter account; only 4,000 (!) fastest ones were able to claim the collectible which now resells for $700+ on secondary

Deep dive: Crypto native viewers accused the project of ‘engagement farming’

• For the lucky ones, the user flow excluded crypto newcomers and mainstream viewers

• As a Twitter campaign, the result cost 10x typical budget

• For more details check my post here.

Mainstream angle: Campaigns centered around scarcity of digital collectibles with no clear utility are bad for the ecosystem:

• Draw only speculative engagement of the crypto natives

• Fail to create meaningful bridge between the early adopters and the mainstream

The winner: A QR code located in the middle of the screen during the entire ad, similar to last year’s Coinbase Super Bowl ad.

📊 Chart of the Week

According to the fresh report from DappRadar & Alsomine, most of the NFT customers hold a very limited view on the utility of digital collectibles:

• 31% of NFT owners thought the most important benefit was making a profit

• 22% said asset ownership

• 13% responded that ticketing was the most important; this group also held the largest number of new users

What’s more, 60% of NFT consumers have never heard of ‘utility NFT’. For more takeaways, check my full my post here.

Headlines This Week

🛍 Consumer & Mainstream

• Reddit has given away 1.9M Super Bowl collectible avatars (Decrypt)

  • 💬 Users have now minted over 10M avatars since last summer, trailblazing mainstream adoption through community collections. I previously wrote here.

• Written off at launch, Porsche NFTs are now trading at a 280% higher floor price (BeInCrypto)

  • 💬 The demand for collection is surging driven by the increased effort to turn around the project, and an expectation that the brand will ‘overcompensate’ for its errors. I previously wrote here.

Other stories: Italy’s Bennet hypermarket Launches NFT loyalty. Chinese Liquor Giant Launches New NFT. Tom Brady & Celebs Sued Over NFTs. Balearic Islands Conservation NFTs. SpaceX to Carry NFT Works to the Moon.

🤖 Metaverse

• The metaverse is already here: Gamers spent nearly 50 billion hours on Roblox in 2022 (TheBlock)

  • 💬 Roblox’s popularity with younger users, coupled with the way the platform functions, serves as a model of an already working metaverse boasting 56M daily active users, and nearly $3B annual sales. The drawback: closed system, thus no consumer ownership.

• Microsoft disbands its industrial metaverse team after 4 months (CoinDesk)

  • 💬 The company is prioritizing shorter-term projects over those needing longer to generate meaningful revenue, and unfortunately industrial applications require much deeper R&D and longer sales cycles

• Paris Hilton to host metaverse dating reality show ‘Parisland’ (Deadline)

  • 💬 Jokes aside, this experiment is a bet on new hybrid genre between a game and interact TV show to capture next-gen audiences and connect them with brands

• Opinion: Whatever happened to the metaverse? (FT - paywall)

  • 💬 “(…) internet will become more immersive. But this will happen gradually and messily: we are not about to step into a suddenly formed, blockchain-powered virtual world together.” 

Other stories: Adidas Partners With a Web3 Community-owned Pro Soccer club. Dubai Develops its Own Mall of the Metaverse. First-Ever Venice Carnival in the Metaverse. Brazilian Carnival in the Metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg Spars UFC Champion in the Metaverse. Celebrity-focused Metaverse VR Store. Blackrock Sees Opportunities in Metaverse. Magic Leap Bridges the Real and the Virtual. Movies Based in Metaverse. Dating in the Metaverse. DEI in Metaverse.

💍 Fashion & Luxury Goods

• PUMA pushes boundaries with new NFT collection (NFTEvening)

  • 💬 The iconic sports brand revives its 1970s comic as a profile picture digital collectible avatar collection alongside its digital shoe project in an effort to build a web3 community and lore similar to Nike and Adidas

• GQ drops NFTs, unlocking rewards for fashion community holders (VogueBusiness - paywall)

  • 💬 GQ and its sister magazines have already been leaning into web3. This NFT drop, Condé Nast’s largest-scale to date, is indicative of the publisher’s wider Web3 strategy 

• Shiseido launches NFT loyalty program with leading Web3 creators (CosmeticsBusiness)

  • 💬 Under the nebulous term of “world first AI-powered NFT community”, the conglomerate will simply offer NFTs acting as a ticket to free samples and priority entry to events

• What the Hermès v Metabirkins verdict means for the future of Web3 fashion (VogueBusiness - paywall)

  • 💬 Same old intellectual property rules will apply in the NFT space. At the same time, the Metabirkin is a marker of the growing influence and awareness digital assets have on fashion and the mainstream public. I previously wrote here.

Other stories: Lamborghini NFT Collection. Balenciaga Digital Sneaker Collectibles. Nars Valentine’s Day NFTs. K-Pop girlsband, WMG Digital Capsule Collection. Takashi Murakami x Hublot ‘Phygital’ NFTs. Vivienne Tam's NYFW Metaverse Show. BCBGMaxAzria x Maeve Reilly Metaverse Runway. The First Play-to-Wear Fashion Metaverse

🎬️ Entertainment & Media

• The largest NFT marketplace took down Rihanna’s revenue-sharing music collectible (Cryptoslate)

  • 💬 Opensea, the marketplace, is cautious about dealing with high-profile NFTs that may be classified as securities by SEC in case these are “appearing to promise fractional ownership and future profit based on that ownership”

• NFT influencer donated 22 digital collectible artworks to LACMA (Coindesk); Paris’s Centre Pompidou announced a permanent exhibition represented by NFTs (CoinTelegraph)

  • 💬 Increasing donations and exhibitions highlight how major art institutions are embracing digital collectibles, and recognizing art history element

• Fox Entertainment' launches launches token-gated fan experience for its ‘Masked Singer’ show, involving live-voting polls, member-exclusive videos and online rewards (TheBlock)

  • 💬 The TV show producers are testing if a blockchain-based, gamified loyalty program will improve viewership and engagement, while strictly avoiding any web3 jargon

Other stories: Sony PlayStation NFT Rental Patent. Ex-WMG CEO joins an NFT startup board. K-Pop Fan Collectibles Platform. iHeartRadio Metaverse Concert. Bill Murray NFT Members-Only Party. Marilyn Monroe Estate NFTs

🏈 Sports

• Orlando Magic releases gamified rewards program (Loyalty360)

  • 💬 A test for web3 if “personalization and data-driven experience” can deliver more value with collectibles instead of email-based user accounts

• Australian Open using web3 to make it most accessible sporting event (LedgerInsights)

  • 💬 The AO continues to pave the way for web3 offerings in sports, this year featuring NFT with shot data, and a metaverse

Other stories: Apple Delays Mixed-Reality Headset to June. St. John's University Launches Basketball NFT. A Beijing Soccer Club Launches Virtual Stadium. LeBron James NFTs Soar. NBA’s Giannis Antetokounmpo NFT Sells for $187K. Roy Jones Jr ‘Phygital’ Boxing Match. NASCAR Releases Collectibles. ‘The Sports Metaverse Mega Mall’ (sic) Goes Live

🛠️ Web3 MarTech

• Shopify released 100+ new features, including developer tools for NFT distribution and and token-gated commerce (Shopify)

  • 💬 Big impact on mainstream adoption from three angles: third party developers, merchants, and mainstream buyers. I covered more here.

• Survey: 38% of marketers shift strategy from customer acquisition to loyalty (MarketingDive)

  • 💬 It’s driven by tectonic shifts in digital ads, and gives an opening to web3 loyalty solutions. I wrote more here.

• Web3 (…) is still long on concepts and short on implementation (MarTech)

  • 💬 The gist: “There needs to be a clear use case opportunity and a problem to solve, otherwise audiences won’t see enough value and it will live and die in the hype cycle.”

Other stories: Yelp-like Platform to Review and Discover NFTs.

💰️Deals

• Napster streaming service acquired Mint Songs, a discontinued music-focused NFT marketplace, to accelerate its web3 strategy (Coindesk)

  • 💬 The P2P music sharing pioneer purchased a distressed asset in a search for new revenue streams in a competitive streaming market. More takeovers to come - the push is “ the first in a planned series of acquisitions”

• Superplastic raised $20M Series A round from Amazon, Google and Kering to make NFT-based 'synthetic celebrities', characters, and toys (Decrypt)

  • 💬 Amazon Studios gained a “first-look deal” on any potential TV or film pitches with new class of IP that is going to be increasingly relevant with younger generations

• Vault raised $4M series A round to enable music artists to offer extra content and experiences for a fee with ‘digital music collectibles’ (TheBlock)

  • 💬 In a pivot from a ‘mobile Discord platform’, the startup now targets music super fans with non-jargon collectibles

📚️ Weekend Reads

• 100+ Photos From My Week-long Vacation in Decentraland [metaverse] (MPlankton)

• The Transition from Web2 to Web3 — What to Expect? (Medium)

• Tokens, Symbols, and Schelling Points - The next era of the internet is coming with small, niche communities using tokens for coordination and as symbols of belonging (Mirror)

• How NFTs are Solving Problems for Podcasters (Bonfire)

• What Are ‘Phygital’ NFTs, and How Do They Work? (CoinTelegraph)

🖼 Meme of the Week