Why NFTs? Feb 2022 Edition
NFTs are a trend.
Every brand is panicking and coming up with a reactionary NFT strategy. Some are even rushing projects out just so they don’t miss the moment. But spoiler alert, this moment is going to last a while. All of these rushed out projects have all the weight of a late-night fleeting tweet from a social media account manager. Having worked deeply with brands for nearly two decades, I recognize the fight or flight impulse. It happens every time brands are afraid of a shiny new thing that their customers are suddenly talking about. It’s the brand equivalent of small talk or making a throwaway cheap joke just to seem relevant and connected to culture.
These impulse reactions rarely move the needle. At most they cause cringe embarrassment. And these token gestures are almost always forgotten.
But behaving this way with NFTs is problematic, because the underlying technology is not fleeting. The space will reward those with long term vision, and not those who treat NFTs like the flavor of the week.
Look closer into the space. Participate before you hate. Look beyond the looping headlines about the environment or overnight millionaires or money laundering. Those are distractions to the real opportunity and ingenuity at play here.
You have creators like RTFKT, the upstart virtual fashion brand, playing the slow tease, long game by engaging and empowering a literal army of creators and first movers in the space to build culture with them. They’ve put out an open invitation for people to join and build with them, rather than just shilling quickly rendered JPEGs and netting an overnight profit founded on hype. This approach is a far cry from the Super Bowl-esque “dude, wanna buy a virtual beer?” cycle we’ve seen many brands fall into.
Or check out NFT pioneer NBA Top Shot, now in Season 3 of their earnest and fully licensed documenting and archiving of NBA culture on the blockchain. Imagine if there were a verifiably scarce digital record of Jordan’s greatness. Imagine if your grandfather passed you a 1 of 1 Wilt Chamberlain digital asset from the 60s. These records and digital documents are immutable, unable to be damaged and have provable ownership in an increasingly liquid and instant 24/7 marketplace. This is the future.
It’s taken the legacy of cardboard sports cards or Pokemon cards, and turned it into a technology-fueled, always on stock market that rises and falls based on the legacies and speculations around NBA players. Again, Top Shot is now in Season 3, breaking sales records, going up in financial and emotional value. If you are about sports at all, you’d be doing yourself a favor to at least check out, and maybe grab yourself a few of today’s rookies and stars, because the demand will only continue to grow as our lives become increasingly digital. Your grandkids will thank you for checking it out this early. Afterall, “Season 3” is not usually language you hear attached to passing trends or fads. We are squarely in an era now, albeit the early innings of it.
The infrastructure is still being built out in the web3 space, but when you swim around a little, you’ll find incredibly smart minds working around the clock with the intention to build these ecosystems and innovations out. To make them effortless and inevitable.
And you can see in the headlines, people are starting to jump from Silicon Valley jobs, into web3 native opportunities. The smart technology people are making the move. Again, I’m betting on the movement and influx of smart people who have seen what web2 had to offer, and are left craving and believing in something more. I’m not betting on cartoon animals. I’m standing with people with a history of culture creation and digital innovation. Because their guts and willpower are turning web3 into a revolution.
If you bristle at tech giants buying and selling your private data to the highest advertising bidder, web3 flips the table on this, by promising a future where you permanently own, control and profit from your content.
Imagine if instead of getting a little flashing heart when someone likes your content, you instead got a few cents or dollars instantly transferred to your wallet when your content resonated. What if instead of that heart feeding a soulless and profit seeking algorithm, it helped provide for your family or fund the charitable cause of your choice?
That’s what the adoption of smart contracts at scale can look like. It cuts out the middleman, like Facebook and Google, and makes all users early partners and CEOs of their own domain.
And when we turn to art, if an artist isn’t starving, how do they usually make a living? By creating commercial art of graphic design and illustration that helps brands sell their products by appearing more human and visually appealing. With web3, the artist’s own work becomes what’s on offer. They don’t have to make illustrations that end up on seasonal Starbucks cups, they can make art that people dig and buy into literally and directly. This is the Creator Economy at its finest. This is The Artist as CEO. NFTs aren’t about crypto bros getting rich. Yes, hungry investors will always get theirs. But NFTs give the economic power and buy-in to previously starving artists and offers them a platform and voice to reap financial and life-changing rewards from their purest and most personal art.
And what about gaming? Instead of paying up for items and bonuses that only result in profits for the game company, NFTs turn gamers into co-owners and partners in their gaming career. Letting them participate and enjoy profits in the re-selling of old items and creation of new items for the games they play.
In our house, we have two young daughters who live in the metaverse. This is their native state. They’re all about games like Minecraft and Roblox. And for them, every spare dollar of allowance and birthday money goes into the buying of digital goods and items they can use in the game. Cars and dresses and fairy wings, all come at a cost. Little digital flourishes that their friends don’t have yet, that drives their conversations and sets them apart. This is an entire generation. While we might laugh now at buying digital sneakers for a virtual avatar, this is their childhood. This is baseline behavior. What do you think these kids will do when they have more than a couple of dollars of allowance to spend on digital goods? With these signs, I’ve never been more bullish on the metaverse and web3 space.
And now, after working inside of the beast for several months, and being privy to the insanely smart minds and strategies that consider 10 year plus timelines, combined with the flourishing business model that is scaling fast, I know this is here to stay.
For all the curious readers and animated haters on Twitter, my DMs are always open if you want to talk this through in private. Especially if you are in charge of a brand, looking at your newly minted NFT strategy–you should probably start hiring minds and talent specifically schooled in the metaverse, because hey, your clients are. Nothing puts fear in an agency like client demands…
If you want some help dipping your toes in, hit me up. If you want to simply point and laugh at me, take a number or block me on Twitter, because that’s been happening a lot lately.
See you out there, or maybe not. Your next move, or decision not to move, is up to you.
