December 22, 2022

What B2B CMOs Need to Know About Web 3.0

The metaverse. Web3. Cryptocurrency. NFTs. 

These platforms may not be at top of mind for most B2B CMOs today, but maybe it’s time to start evaluating their potential. That’s why we invited futurist Shelly Palmer, CEO of The Palmer Group and co-founder of Metacademy, to speak at a CMO Huddles #BonusHuddle about the exciting possibilities of these community-building tools.

Now we’re airing the conversation on Renegade Marketers Unite. Tune in to hear about how these tools are already being used by big brands in the real world, how CMOs can get started in their Web3 education, and more!

What You’ll Learn in This Episode 

  • How marketers can take advantage of Web3 
  • Real world examples of metaverse community building 
  • How to get started 

Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 324 on YouTube 

Resources Mentioned 

Time-Stamped Highlights 

  • [3:10] Shelly Palmer’s favorite jingle to date
  • [5:13] Defining the metaverse and Web3
  • [10:30] Why marketers should be on top of Web3
  • [17:53] The future of communities
  • [22:39] “The NFT is the receipt”
  • [26:24] Macy’s vs. Tiffany & Co
  • [32:18] The birth of cryptocurrency & NFTs
  • [39:02] Authentication tools, high-end personalization, fraud prevention
  • [40:49] How to get started
  • [49:52] Shelly’s final words of wisdom

Highlighted Quotes

“I have one ideological definition for the metaverse and Web3 combined: It’s a platform that will allow both users and creators to share in the value they create.” —@shellypalmer @PalmerGroupHQ Click To Tweet

“I don't think Web3 is a community building tool. I think it is a toolset to leverage existing community.” —@shellypalmer @PalmerGroupHQ Click To Tweet

“When we think about what NFTs are going to do for us as marketers, what it's going to do is it's going to give us an ability to engage a community, and label & identify that community in a different way.” —@shellypalmer @PalmerGroupHQ Click To Tweet

Full Transcript: Drew Neisser in conversation with Shelly Palmer

 

Drew Neisser: Hello Renegade Marketers! Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, the top-rated podcast for B2B CMOs and other marketing-obsessed individuals. Alright folks, you’re about to listen to a Bonus Huddle, a specially curated huddle that we run once a month, with experts sharing their insights into the topics that are most important to our huddlers. 

The expert at this particular huddle was the esteemed Shelly Palmer, co-founder of Metacademy and CEO of The Palmer Group. He joined us to explore the world of Web3, the metaverse, NFTs, cryptocurrency, and all sorts of other interesting avenues that B2B marketers might want to start dipping their toes in. Let’s get to it! 

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade Drew Neisser.

Drew Neisser: Hello and welcome to this very special bonus huddle. Sorry for the virtual background but am actually in Washington DC today and happen to be at a building i’m told is where the Internet originated! How apprapo right? While most of the time we’re focused on providing practical guidance for your current challenges, today we’re putting on virtual headsets to imagine potential new realities, to explore the implications of emerging technologies under the label Web3.0 and how B2B marketers could be able to leverage any of this in the not too distant future. Your guide for today is the esteemed Shelly Palmer. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Shelly over the last several years, interviewing him first in 2017 and attending several of his kickoff events at CES.

In the event you don’t know him, allow me to read this short bio:  

Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, co-founder of Metacademy, and the CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and CNBC and writes a popular daily business blog. He’s the Co-Host of the award-winning podcast Techstream with Shelly Palmer & Seth Everett and his latest book, Blockchain – Cryptocurrency, NFTs & Smart Contracts: An executive guide to the world of decentralized finance, is an Amazon #1 Bestseller (which I’ve read by the way!)

So anyway, Shelly, welcome. How are you?

Shelly Palmer: Great to be here. I’m just fine. I feel excellent!

Drew Neisser: Before we get too deep into this–and I know we’re gonna get deep into this–I know that you’re also a composer and have written music for several industrial film scores, TV Shows, and ad jingles including ones for Burger King, Listerine, and perhaps most notable, “Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow” for Meow Mix.  Do you have a favorite jingle that you’ve written? 

Shelly Palmer: You know if I took the job this year, I would do the music for my 5000th television commercial. So it’s a little hard. I’m not really writing commercially anymore. I write for myself every day. I play every day. But I don’t write commercially for clients unless they bring dump trucks filled with $100 bills. And then I will consider the conversation but not necessarily take the job. I was abused by enough advertising executives over the last 40 years. Do I have a favorite? Wow. Yes, I do. It was for Hood Dairy Products and it never made it to air. But it was a bizarre little jingle about—you’ve heard about the hood on your car and you’ve heard about the hood on your raincoat. But did you ever really hear about the hood in your milk? And it was just a bizarre little jingle and to this day wish it had gone the whole way. Instead, we ended up writing this this Rock Anthem, “You can feel good about Hood.” Which I didn’t feel good about. But you know, what can you do? It’s the business that we’re in. But thank you for—yeah, I spent a lot of time in the music business, a lot of TV music, a lot of news themes. Just a ton of TV commercials directed & produced. I don’t know how many TV commercials and a lot of TV shows a lot. A lot of network shows. It was a lot of fun. And by the way, it’s still a lot of fun. It’s just the business has changed and I’m doing another thing.

Drew Neisser: Exactly. So as you were talking about the one that got away that—it’s funny—and I know a lot of CMOs are are ex agency people. And if you’re ever been in an agency, you’ve presented lots of amazing ideas that may or may not ever bought, and I have a book of ones that didn’t quite make it. So anyway, we’ve all been there.

Alright, let’s get into it.  I wanted to read a quote that I pulled rom Deloitte’s website:  “technologies like Web3 and the metaverse are poised to drive revolutionary advancement and technological breakthroughs which could shape new forms of communication, innovation, prototyping, and community formation – and new business opportunities. The metaverse and Web3 are powerful ‘winds of change’ that will likely propel us into new and challenging future ‘worlds’ that business leaders will navigate. To reap the benefits of this new internet platform, businesses should collaborate to build its foundation through metaverse and Web3 initiatives.” 

I put emphasis on the word POISED. Is this poised as an oak leaf will fall from a tree this autumn or poised as in that seed will be a great oak someday? 

Shelly Palmer 

Wow. Well, first of all, it’s important to understand that neither the Metaverse nor Web3 are technically defined. So when you use those words in a sentence, you’re saying nothing at all. You are literally saying nonsense. The Metaverse has an ideological—it has many—but I have one ideological definition for the Metaverse and Web3 combined, since neither is technically defined. And that is a platform that will allow both users and creators to share in the value they create. And the tools that do that are different depending on who you are.

Shelly Palmer 

If you’re a brand, the hallmark of Web3 or the Metaverse in its vernacular definitions—the ones that are just out there—you’ll always hear the word decentralized in the same sentence. That there’s this decentralized future where, you know, there’s no Facebook in your way, or there’s no central authority, there’s no Netflix, there’s no big tech overlord. Well, first of all, we could argue whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Whether anarchy is better than some level of organization hierarchical or otherwise, that’s a different philosophical conversation. But for a brand, it’s particularly important not to let that phrase go by without a giant challenge. And the reason, Drew, is that every brand is the central authority. The NBA is the central authority in basketball, the NFL is the central authority in football, the NHL is a central authority in hockey. Nike is a central authority in sports apparel, they may have competition, but they would consider themselves the epicenter of that world. And in a brand, where brand trust and brand love are something CMOs work on all day long. The idea that there’s a decentralized component to the main business of the Metaverse or Web3 is nonsense.

Shelly Palmer: There may be decentralized or decentralized finance or defy or there may be some level of decentralized toolset for transactions in a trustless environment later. But if you’re saying to me that I need the ability for a secondary market to exist, and I need the user and the creator to share in the value they create, and that secondary market. Unless that secondary market is fully trustless. Meaning it’s going out overseas somewhere and people you never heard of are going to somehow have a transaction of a thing you did and you need a royalty back from it. Unless that’s actually what you’re doing. Or you need to trade cryptocurrency on an open decentralized exchange, then the decentralization part of Web3 has no meaning in the world of brands or advertising. It may have some cost cutting rules when it comes to affidavits of performance for advertising. Did someone see this? Did this actually occur? Sure, that’s a trustless environment. We don’t need to be on the honor system. But you don’t need blockchain for that if you are the payer. If you are the central authority, you are the brand you do not need blockchain involved in this in any way. So the big question you’ll ask yourself is, why is this a blockchain project? Why am I calling it Web3? Why am I calling this the Metaverse when a good old fashioned database with a well structured database with a secure password will do and Web2 and may actually be a better solution? So I think if you think about this as business outcomes first, technology second, then everything inside that Deloitte quote is kind of meaningless in the context of Web3 and the Metaverse. It’s like, when you say “Metaverse”, do you mean virtual world? Well, wait. That’s not a Metaverse, that’s a virtual world. That has a whole set of constraints and rules and tools and techniques you need to get there. When you say Metaverse. Do you mean augmented reality where I’m going to go through a physical world and somehow data streaming data is going to enhance my experience? Do I mean mixed reality where I have a little bit of both like Pokemon Go or some better version of that? Like each one of those is a thing. Do I mean Metaverse where I have decentralized identification and/or self sovereign identification and I am using a tool like a blockchain so that every person that approaches my environment is instantly logged in without having to do anything? Okay, that’s another thing too. But what you can’t catch all phrases as Web3 and the Metaverse, it’s like, they don’t mean anything without a definitional—you really have to qualify and quantify what you mean when you bring those up in a conversaiton. Just to say them as kind of, I don’t know, word salad?

Drew Neisser: Yeah, okay. And look, they’re a consulting firm and their job is to try to get people to do new things.

Let’s bring this down though. We know things are happening that are really interesting. I know, because you write about them all the time. So CMOs have a lot on their minds right now, not the least of which is a looming recession and rising talent costs. You’ve got these two things weighing heavily on their minds. Why should they make room for whatever we want to call this future? This stuff that is starting to be applied now in their brains to be thinking about it? Why are we spending 45 minutes talking about it right here?

Shelly Palmer: I think there’s an important point that, especially for marketers more than for any other profession, if you take the ideological approach that the fundamental difference between Web2 and Web3 will be that communities are leveraged for value creation. That users and creators share in the value they create. So I am the brand, I am the creator, the bringer of creative the Bhasker and the halo of creative or content. And I’ve got a user base out there. Well, that user base is a community. In the old days, and I’ll say 3 years ago, a like was not a business outcome, a follow was not a business outcome, a conversion was a business outcome. You might have one metric on page views, but boy, if you do, you’re still living in 1988, not 1998 or 2008. I mean, it’s like these are conversions where the metric. You might have a gross impression number for brand love because you’ll have a better way to do it. You might have some working media/nonworking media ratio, some ADAs. But at the end of the day, a like was not a business outcome in a Web2 world. You had other metrics and other ways to look at path to purchase, other ways to look at your funnel, other ways—your top of funnel versus trends. Like everybody had to performance marketing. Everybody had a different way of doing that. Every business that we work with every one of the companies that we consult has a kind of a different calculus they use from top of funnel down to performance. This is different. Here, we have the ability to turn a like into a business outcome. We have the ability to turn a follow into a business outcome. You want to see who’s going to do the best with an NFT, you want to see who’s going to do the best with a decentralized offering? It’s the individual or group with the largest communities. Someone with the biggest Discord server. Someone with the largest Twitter following. The ability to get out there and make an offer to their community. It’s either a community of passion, a community of practice, or a community of interest, and you are motivating them and then giving them a participatory tool. 

Like imagine the most insanely empowered loyalty program you could ever imagine. Like with every bell and whistle ever, assuming you had perfect knowledge of the community. That’s sort of what happens if someone is willing to take an airdrop from you and you know what wallet it is. And now a lot of the things about advertising change and marketing change. Because where in a Web2 world, I’m trying to get an enriched profile of my customer, I’m trying to go really deeper, either a single view of the customer or a single source of truth. And I’m working hard to enrich everybody’s profile so I can calculate propensity. So I’m going to try and regress as many lines through these propensities as possible and get a fairly decent understanding of the causality versus correlation in my marketing. Now I’ve got a wallet address and I know what the wallets doing.  And I really don’t care who you are, I care what the wallets doing. Now, you might say that’s just another component. I only understand the wallet, I don’t understand the person. But the wallet actually is the digital persona of the entity that now lives in the quote, “Metaverse” or now lives in “Web3”. We’ve never had that before. You do a single sign on with Google, they don’t really share that with you past the point. You do an SSO with Facebook or Auth0, you have some understanding of where people go. But with the end of third party & cookies coming—if it ever does end—and Google says it will. And you’ll look at Apple tracking transparency, which has taken a witness stake through the heart of Facebook to the tune of 10s of billions of dollars. So I’m a brand and I really want to understand my customers journey through this new space. There are some tools coming. What are the tools? Self sovereign identification or decentralized identification. The buzzword right now there’s a white paper published  in May, about soul bound tokens. Stealing soul bound from Worlds of Warcraft. But the idea of a non transferable immutable NFT at no cost that would have for example, your college diploma or your driver’s license. It only belongs to you it can’t be transferred. You can do the same thing with a non transferable NFT contract. Smart contract with a non transferbal configuration to it. But one way or the other, this idea that this entity travels through the Metaverse and Web3, and you can really get a handle on what that is. And then for a marketer, the reasons that this is so important is that the script is flipped, where I was going one to many, where I’ve always been out there sort of telling my story. Now they can be part of my story, because I know where the digital entity is in a way I could never know where the person is. And I know what the wallet is doing in a way I could never know what the person is doing.

And so it’s a really different way to think about marketing. It’s a different way to think about ROAS. It’s a different way to think about communities of passion, interest, or practice. As a marketer, which do I have? Community has never been more important. We always say it’s important, but here I can make it actionable. And so if there is a Web3, if there is a Metaverse, one of the attributes it will have is this ability to collect and leverage data in a way that at the moment, privacy laws prevent us from doing. But there just as you post on Facebook publicly, “Hi, I’m going to the beach. I just got an airdrop of an NFT.” The wallet can’t hide. It’s on the blockchain. It’s there for us to see. So one minute of blockchain analysis and I know who’s got this AirDrop. That’s a meaningful piece of data I literally couldn’t get into Web2 world. How many people went into Walmart and bought a thing? Okay, Walmart, could you tell me I need share a basket. And now that 3 weeks from now I’m going to get what I need out of this. Here, I am one pythonscript away from knowing what went down this afternoon. Very different way to activate a community. So if you’re in the activation business, if you’re in the understand what the consumer is going to do, as they float through the world, there was a Pew Research survey that came out earlier this week was 54% of teenagers say they cannot—13-17 year olds—say they have a lot of trouble putting down their smartphone. And 46% say they’re almost constantly online. That’s up from 24%, it’s double from 8 years ago. So here we have this sort of research backing up these kids are online full time, Gen Z full time, wow! So as they start to get up into the demo, whatever this is, is going to kind of evolve. As a marketer, I want to be on this. And I don’t quite know what that means right now. But there’s a bunch of places where I can start to play to get enough knowledge so that when it does go down, I’ll at least understand how to bridge my world. Maybe we’ll never get to Web3, I’ll be a Web2.5ish when Web 3.0 hits. And that will put me in a better place than my competitors. I think marketers need to be just on top of this hard for those reasons and some others, we haven’t gotten to yet.

Drew Neisser: A lot to unpack there, and I can’t possibly get all of it. You mentioned the demos, I’ll come back to that. We did have a question about who this is going to mean something to today versus tomorrow. And you’ve just answered that. You got to get in there today in order to be this does your customer tomorrow.

I want to go back to communities because I know that every CMO here that’s listening to us live or listening to us later. Wants community. They want to build community, they want to support community and they have communities of passion, they have communities of practice and interest, they have all of those. And this is really important to them. And by the way, it will be more important if we go into a recession, because hanging on to your customers and nurturing them and upsell/cross sell all those things really, really matter. That’s what will sustain you in a downturn.

So if we were going to play and we wanted to play in community right now, link those dots. Help these folks get where you are, because there’s a lot in your head and what’s this look like? What do we do?

Shelly Palmer: So I don’t think Web3 is a community building tool. I think it is a tool set to leverage existing community. And that is a non trivial distinction. It is a distinction with a profound difference. People have come to me over the last 12 months, 14 months. You know, this has been the year of NFTs. Everybody’s all over this idea of an NFT.

Every day we get 3 to 5 inbounds, “Oh, my uncle is the World’s Greatest underwater photographer and he has the largest collection of the best underwater coral reef pictures renowned by divers worldwide. We want to make them NFTs.” And the first question I have is how many Twitter followers does your uncle have?

He has 160.

That’s lovely. I bet they’re all wonderful people. How about his Facebook collection?

Oh, about 60.

Great and tell me about his Discord server?

Oh, he doesn’t have a Discord server.

Like you’re not selling any of these no matter what.

Whereas a music artist or a recording artist or a film/movie star will have 4 million or 5 million Twitter followers, have 350,000-400,000 people in a Discord server. And basically they decide to launch a tequila and they’re already 20,000 cases into it and they haven’t distilled one drop of tequila yet they want to do an NFT airdrop of some kind to hold the lottery for 10,000 custom unique personally signed vinyls of this new album release, and it costs you 25 bucks to get in the lottery, they’ll only be 10,000 knobs that you could spend 1000 bucks for. That’s $6 million that the recorded music company never gets the artists gets directly.

But if you don’t have a community to leverage, you’re not building a community with these tools. So don’t even think for a second that this is some magical thing that you go, “okay, boom, I’m gonna do this and all of a sudden everybody’s gonna love me and I’m gonna build this big community.” The Crypto millionaires are all crypto thousandaires right now. If you bought any cryptocurrency or any NFTs, from 2020 to today, you are somewhere between 50 and 95%, down from where you started. So what I like to say to people is, “You want to make a million dollars in crypto? Start with 5 million about 6 months ago.” This is not going to build a community. What’s going to happen though, is that if you have a community, what you can do is involve them in a way you never could before, assuming you’re good at it. And I’m sure everybody here is familiar with board API club. Because it’s the most famous of the collections of digital collectibles. There are two things I want to go over first. One we’re going to talk about what an NFT actually is and what an NFT actually isn’t. And we’re going to do that in one second. I may use the term/initialism NFT incorrectly for a moment. I’m going to say that you bought an NFT. You don’t buy an NFT. You buy a digital asset, a digital collectible and asset and the NFT represents it. But we’re going to talk about that in just one second.

As a marketer, I want you to go into what Yuga labs did. And I want you to think about a deeply. Then I want you to go over to Top Shot and have a look at NBA Top Shot and look at the entire arc of that story. And I want you to think about it as a storyteller, and a marketer, not as a consumer. This is a new storytelling platform. Storytelling is as old as people. But the board ape story is compelling. And it had celebrity, it had intrigue, it had hacking, it had places to go that were secret, it was a story. And people bought the story and believed the story. It’s a new storytelling tool. If you want to understand communities of passion and NFTs go look at NBA Top Shot. That’s $970 million of people wanting to wear their clothes, but also wear their car, wear their beer, wear their music and wear their favorite team. So this is a story about a community of passion around a thing. And it’s a way to go from beginning, middle, ending—rising, action, climax, falling, action on a new platform and it’s incumbent upon you as a marketer and a storyteller to learn to tell those stories. You write music that way, you write prose that way, you write films that way, you will write the digital NFT path that way.

What I meant to say about NFTs—and if you take nothing out today at all, nothing out of today at all I want you to just take this one little bit of knowledge and you can use it with or without attribution—you go into a grocery store and you purchase a bag of groceries and the cashier gives you a receipt. You walk to the door of the grocery store and the guard stops you and says, “Person, prove you own what’s in the bag.” You take out the receipt and the guard looks at the receipt looks in the bag. The guard does not care what’s in the bag at all. Other than that it matches the receipt. When what’s in the bag matches the receipt to the guard satisfaction, they put the receipt back in the bag and sends you on your way. The stuff in the bag is the digital collectible, the digital asset, the bored ape, the $590,000 GIF file you just bought. The NFT is the receipt. And the receipt is publicly viewable. Now, all NFTs… ALL 100% of NFTs are smart contracts, meaning that they’re exactly like regular contracts. There’s a receipt, right? Here’s the receipt for your contract. Sign. Sign. You own this, there’s title to your thing that you bought. Whether it’s a bored ape or house. It doesn’t matter, the NFT can represent anything. What makes it a smart contract is that when the terms and conditions are met, it is programmed as such, it will execute automatically. You can think of it like a vending machine. You go up to a vending machine, and you put in a nickel, and this thing says $1.50. Well, it’s not going to give you your chips when you put in the $1.50, you get your chips. Now imagine that a house elf walks over to a big block of granite and carves in stone, the transaction you just did. The block of stone is the blockchain. It’s immutable, it will last forever, you can tell if it’s been altered instantly, and it doesn’t care what you write on. It doesn’t make it true just means everybody agrees that this transaction as written is now going to be across all 11,000 nodes of the blockchain. That’s done. And the smart contract, the NFT, is the transaction itself. What does it represent? Anything. So when you think I bought a picture for $500,000, that’s the right way to think about it. I bought an NFT for $500,000. That’s nonsense. You bought the picture. The NFT simply is your receipt and it’s publicly viewable. The spreadsheet that says this transaction happened is just on a blockchain that anyone can go to Etherscan.io and go scan the blockchain. See every transaction that’s ever happened on the Ethereum mainnet Every transaction that’s ever happened on the polygon main net. It doesn’t matter. Bitcoin Explorer will show you every Bitcoin transaction ever in the history of Bitcoin. It’s all in plain sight. So do not confuse NFT with the thing. You bought the thing, the NFT is a smart contract that may, for example, say that you own a bored ape, including the intellectual property rights to create something with this bored ape—which not every NFT does empower you to do—and maybe it says that if you sell it to somebody, the original creator, Yugo Labs gets 10%. You can’t actually sell that bored ape legitimately, without them getting 10% in cryptocurrency, because it happens automatically. That’s the whole purpose. And when I said users and creators sharing the value they create, imagine if Picasso could get—or his estate could get 10% every time a Picasso got sold at auction. Wow! The user gets something. Imagine if every time somebody bought a piece of music, instead of the recorded music company and the performance royalty companies like ASCAP and CSAC and BMI instead of everybody having their hand in there, the recording artists directly got paid in cryptocurrency by the users. Creating a really wonderful relationship between the creator and the community marketer. So as a marketer, as a CMO, you are the creator, and they’re your community. How would you use this very interesting new platform to create value for both of you at the same time? That’s the trick, that’s the drill, that’s what we’re all exploring and everything else is noise right now.

Drew Neisser: Okay. You’ve written about the Tiffany NFT. And you’ve written about the Macy’s NFT, and they are contrastabble. And I’m hoping that by you talking about those two and why one of them was dabbling, and one of them was really interesting. Help folks understand these two programs.

Shelly Palmer: Sure. Okay. So let’s start with—since everybody knows what an NFT is now and every understands that it’s simply a representation, a receipt, a representation of something you’re buying. So Macy’s wanted to get into the NFT thing. And they hired a company called Sweet. Fantastic NFT company. We love them a lot. Full disclosure, we’re working with them on our National Hockey League project. They did the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And what they did was they took a bunch of balloons, vintage balloons, because Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is famous for its floats and balloons. The balloons were made into NFTs, and then they made them available for not a lot of money. I think the most expensive one was like 25 bucks, and they thought they’d build the thing.

If you go there now you’ll see a relatively abandoned website with a relatively abandoned marketplace. This would be the equivalent of going to a World Series game and getting like the commemorative towel or something and then going home and it ends up in the closet for the next 15 years. And as it slowly fades, the 1986 World Series sort of goes, gets washed off the towel, as it gets used over the years. That’s that equivalent.

Was that a good idea or a bad idea? I don’t know the answer to that. We’ll let others be the judge of whether it was a good idea or bad idea. But it was a one off, they may revisit it for next year. But they have not been able to do anything really interesting with it. Why? They didn’t create questing, they didn’t create a story, they didn’t continue the story, they didn’t build a story arc, they didn’t engage the community, they basically exploited a moment in time, which happens once a year and they left it there. I don’t see about how I’m building panels of the balloon or how I’m getting patterns or how I can be part of where the balloon is going to be in the parade. None of the things that you would do to activate this group are being done. It’s just sitting there. And I’m not passing judgment, it’s just that’s a thing that happened. And maybe they’ll sort of pump some air into it. No pun intended. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.

Drew the other thing you brought up was TIFs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The NFTiffs is what they call them. NFT i f f, little fs. So what they did there was fascinating to me, and I don’t know that it will be successful or not, it sold out immediately. So it’s that level is successful.

For those who who are unfamiliar, crypto punks are a series of 10,000 generative NFTs. Generative meaning that they were created by computer. They’re very low resolution, 8-bit images, and they are no longer available for sale on the primary market. They’ve all been sold. There’s a secondary market. The cheapest crypto punk you’re likely to find—I don’t know I could go look it up right now—probably 100 and a quarter, maybe 125,000 bucks. I’ve seen them as high as a million dollars. There’s 10,000 of them out there. And there is a robust secondary market and they’re traded pretty well.

Tiffany’s decided they wanted to do something. So they decided that they were going to make a limited number. I think it was 50. It might have been 250. Let me look that up. So I don’t give you the wrong information. But while I’m looking that up, what they did was they did a jeweled version of a crypto punk—Yeah they are 250. Yeah, they’re limited to 250 items—So if you had a crypto punk, you could spend $50,000 And you could buy a pendant that was—because it’s so low resolution they could do it with semi precious and precious stones. So you go look of crypto punks and then you could look up NFTiffs. And you’ll see that they’ve made these pendants that are crypto punks made out of jewels that you wear around your neck. And that comes in a little Tiffany turquoise box and it’s all Tiffing it out. That has a digital twin. You’re now a very exclusive 250 person at a 10,000 club. Now anybody that’s got $125,000 Crypto punk probably is going to think that long and hard about $50,000 jewel necklace to show it off. And if you got a million dollar version of it, it’s definitely worth it. Anyway, it must have been because it’s sold out immediately.

Tiffany thought this through really hard. They decided their brand is a high end luxury brand. They went for one of the higher NFT projects, they understood the story, they understood the market. And they went at this exactly the way you’d expect Tiffany to do it. Before they put them on the market. When I learned about it, I was like man is going to sell out one day. And you didn’t need to be a genius to know that. You just needed to understand that this was as an on brand project as I’ve ever seen. In the context of taking one of the oldest, most venerable, most—I’m gonna say—least cutting edge jewelry stores in the world and making it feel like it was on the knife edge of the front of the marketing world. One day changed my perception of Tiffany and for me that’s like, you go there and you get people like retirement gifts. Oh, we’ll get them a thing for the desk on the second floor. I mean, all of a sudden, like, “Whoa, Tiffany’s! Way to think this through.”

So yeah, we’ll see what they do with it. They don’t need to do much at this point. There’s a digital twin for each of the crypto punk NFTiffs. Digital twin, meaning that you now have a crypto punk that tells everybody you own the pendant to. You can sell the pendant independently of the crypto punk, but why would you? Now they can all go together and they’re fully authenticated. It is a perfect, perfect use of what this is. And look it’s early days. Is this going to be like I don’t know if that’s material selling 250 $50,000 bills to Tiffany’s. Does that really make a difference in the Tiffany world? Probably not. But wow. I don’t own a crypto punk. If I did, it wouldn’t take me one second to go after that. So I love it. I just love the idea that they understand digital twinning, and that there’s a story they’re going to tell and they made your very big crypto investment, even a bigger crypto investment that feels right, and ties it back to the Tiffany brand. Gotta love it.

Drew Neisser: So I want to remind the audience that now is the time if ask Shelly a question, that would be awesome. Let’s see, I’m trying to wrap my mind around use cases. Forgive me for trying to pitch in all three into 2.0 boxes, but are use cases personalization, high end personalization, self identification for first party 2.0 identification? That’s a question from our audience.

Shelly Palmer: I don’t think it’s clear what the killer app is for any of this. I don’t think it’s clear. It would probably be helpful for everybody here to understand what this comes from. All of this comes from a white paper in 2008 by an entity known as Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows if that’s a person or a group of people. It’s a pseudonym, for sure. And the person has not yet been identified. But the white paper is identified. You can go online just search Bitcoin white paper or Satoshi Nakamoto White Paper. It’s phonetically spelled Satoshi Nakamoto. Even if you are not a technical person, this is not a technical paper, you’ll be able to easily understand the abstract. And this is like the Martha Stewart version of technology. It’s extraordinary use of ordinary technology. Everything in this paper existed in the past, but they put it together in such a unique and interesting way. You kind of went, “Wow, I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that.” It’s so obvious when you see it, and yet no one had thought of it previously. And it describes Bitcoin, which is the grandparent of all cryptocurrency. This came out of the 2008 real estate explosion where the economy and the financial system almost collapsed. And Satoshi Nakamoto’s point is, we need a currency that’s not ever going to be tied to the man. Here, I built a deflationary currency Bitcoin. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins online—and you read the paper and you say to yourself, “Wow, this is a different way to create a currency.” And there it was a method of account, a method of exchange, and a store of value. The three main things that make something a currency. So everything here starts there.

Everything that’s not bitcoin is called an altcoin. And the most popular altcoin is eth, or ether, which is the utility token of the Ethereum main net. Which is the second largest by market cap. After that, it just goes downhill stuff is much smaller. You can go to coin market cap and just see all the coins laid out. And it’s crypto winter, so everything is about half of where it was a year ago.

This spawned an industry called decentralized finance. And it is exactly a mirror of the financial industry we have in the real world, but with zero regulation. Somewhere around 2017, an improvement protocol for Ethereum called ERC 721 was penned. And this was a standardization of the API’s required to build a smart contract. And from that came non fungible tokens. There are two protocols. They’re open source, ERC 721 and ERC 1155. 1155 is for multiple NFTs and 721s are for single NFTs to this day. This started an industry based on an industry. So cryptocurrency was the underlying method of exchange and that was fungible. My bitcoin, your Bitcoin. My eth, your eth. My maddox, your maddox. Same thing like cash, I can move them back and forth. But my shirt and Drew’s shirt, yes, they’re both shirts, but they’re non fungible. They can’t be exchange. My house and your house, that can’t just be exchanged. So this idea of a non fungible token involves all of the insanity of the you know, 60 million for this and 300,000 for that, and a million dollars for that. I’m buying an NFT comes from this idea that we have a non fungible asset, or is what is believed to be non fungible, or an original digital asset. That digital asset is protected now, or I should say, claimed to be and now written as the original. May not be the original.

So for example, if I look at a bored ape—just type “bored ape” into Google right now—and one will come up. You right click it and save it to your hard drive. You have it! What you don’t have are the intellectual property rights that were given with the sale, nor do you have the right to sell it on an exchange as an NFT. Nobody, you can’t generate a receipt for that, because that is known to belong to whoever is on the blockchain, owning that. So there is a real way to own something digital, which there hadn’t been before. Because it’s easy to right click.

Now, you could also own—you can put a title to a house in there put a title to a car and there wouldn’t matter. So when we think about like, what’s this gonna do for us as marketers? What it’s going to do is it’s going to give us an ability to engage a community label and identify that community in a different way than we’re used to, we’re not dropping a cookie, we don’t need to drop a cookie. We don’t need to do anything to their hard drive at all. We don’t need to touch them. There is no GDPR. There’s no New York shield law, there’s no CCPA. There’s none of that. I don’t care about Apple’s ATT, I don’t care about Google and their third party cookies, there is a wallet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, big long number in that wallet is something I put there that they wanted. And they agreed to take it because they gave me their wallet number. I know this is in their wallet because I can see it. The profile is of the wallet. The wallet is anonymous, but not what the wallet has done. Think about that for a minute. I was hacked in December, I Metamask wallet for $400—which is all I would ever keep in my hot wallets. It was a hot wallet. I know exactly where that $400 of eth is. I don’t know who owns that wallet. Nobody does. All the other people that he/she stole money from you can see it. You know where it went, you know how it got there. I don’t know that person is. The FBI hopefully does, but I don’t.

And so imagine if you’ve got 2 million consumers that were excited about an airdrop, the your best consumers are your best customers. And you gave them something of value that they valued enough to either take from you or pay for. And now you know that wallet has that. Well, let’s follow that wallet for the next forever. I don’t need a cookie and I’m not invading their privacy. That wallet is public. That’s as public as me saying, “I’m going to the beach,” on my Facebook wall. It’s a very different way to think about marketing. And we’re just not we’re not there yet. But it’s happening very, very quickly. Very quickly! We’ve got some sports teams, sports leagues, where I’ve got fans that have 10/15/20 NFTs in their wallet. And so I know exactly who their favorite players are, I know when they speculate, I know what their fantasy players probably look like. I don’t know who they. I don’t care who they are.

Deidre Hudson: So thank you, that makes a lot of sense. Because I tried to take these things and I put them into the category of, you know, there’s something I should think about this week, this month, this year. Right? So taking this entire traditional B2B marketing and where does it fit and how do I need to devote attention to it? So I think it is those use cases by the self identification, it’s something to think about. High end personalization, something to think about.

Shelly Palmer: And fraud prevention

Deidre Hudson: And fraud prevention. Okay.

Shelly Palmer: If you’ve got any kind of aftermarket third party market or you’ve got a counterfeit issue like the LVMH people have, what you can do is you can get an NFC chip and either sew it into the product or they are self destructive of fixable NFC chips. Those can be encoded with a hashed identifier that can be on the blockchain as represented in an NFT and as it changes hand it’s authenticated to the blockchain.

Now the utility of the blockchain for that fraud prevention is that it’s like having Carfax for an item that doesn’t have a vehicle identification number. Like it’s giving a VIN number to things that generally don’t have VIN number. So is this an authentic speed cube? Well, I’ll find out if it’s an authentic speed cube by looking at the serial number that it has on the blockchain. This is going to be there or it isn’t. So there’s a immense opportunity to create value for consumers. If you’ve got a limited edition 20 cases of incredible champagne or Pappy Van Winkle. Is this a real bottle of Pappy as opposed to a fake bottle of Pappy? The only way to know is if you bought it, it’s sealed and it’s got the real NFT on it. Or has the serial number on it, you can check it on the blockchain. Fraud prevention is a very big use case.

And then cost cutting and auditing for any kind of media that you might buy or sell. And also the authentication. We’re going to see this soon. We’re not seeing it yet. But I expect to see it. Content on the internet. Digital content on the internet. Drew writes a story I write a story. Forgetting the misinformation is this the actual story in its original form? Is this the actual original version of this story as opposed to somebody copying it, copying a URL, republishing it, or saying this is originally a blank? No, this is the original. And you know, it is so bunch of authentication tools that all come out of this.

Drew Neisser: I want to—because we’re going to run out of time quickly. And obviously, this is a vast world. It’s a metaverse, it’s unimaginably diverse, it’s gigantic. It’s huge. Okay, so we talked about earlier about 2.5 and the baby steps and preparing yourself so you’re not ignorant, so suddenly, it’s not, “Oh, my God, there’s this internet thing?” It’s 2000. You seen the crash of 2000 and you go, “Yeah, that’s never gonna happen. I’m gonna ignore that at your peril.” Right? So what are examples of—other than just educating oneself—how do you get started? I mean, in again, a lot of these folks are software service companies that are listening.

Shelly Palmer: Yeah, I got it.

Drew Neisser: Let’s dabble.

Shelly Palmer: Two things. Completely shameless plug. Metacademy.com M E T A C A D M Y .com. Met and the word Academy. It’s free, and it’s risk free. And what do I mean by that? Free, meaning it doesn’t cost any money. Anyone can go to metacademy.com and use it. There’s no advertising on it. There’s no sales pitch on it. There’s no strings attached to it in any way. It will teach you what cryptocurrency is, how to install a Metamask wallet, fill it with test currency. So it is risk free, you’re not playing with money you’re playing with completely absolutely test currency. We’ll teach you all about every kind of coin, altcoins, stable coins, CBDCs, all the different shit coins, meme coins, everything is in there. Then we teach you to mint your first NFT you’re earning badges along the way for an engaged earn education. So you’ll understand what play to earn engaged earn how those tools work. And then we teach you to read metadata. And we teach you to build a generative NFT. And then you get a certificate of completion, which is also an NFT. And the goal here is to give you a good understanding of the models. Engaged to earn—which is one of the greatest models ever—we really need to talk about that for a second, Drew. Forgetting about the shameless plug. So metacademy.com It’s free go there, you’ll learn.

We didn’t talk about engaged earning. For marketers, this is critical. We built Met Academy on this engaged to earn model where every time you complete a section, you get a badge. If you look at the Web3, the nascent Web3, there’s a company called Audience AUD a US audience is Spotify. In a Web3 world, you give them a little bit of your hard drive a little bit of your bandwidth, and then a little bit of your attention. So the bandwidth is your actual bandwidth in your house. The hard drive is your actual CPU cycles and capability and your your attention and you get audience tokens. So you are being paid to be part of this expansive, fully decentralized version of Spotify theta is the same thing. It’s YouTube, in an engaged earn, you watched videos, you give a little bit of your hard drive a little bit of your bandwidth, a little bit of your brain power, and as your attention and you get theta tokens you’re earning while you watch x infinity is a play to earn model there are people making between 515 $100 A week playing x infinity. It’s a terrible game. But it’s a really good way to earn money, you steak with axes, you get three axes. Now, I think they’re about $125 to get the three years about 250 $300 I actually was staking players because it was actually throwing a profit to have these people playing 1218 hours a day. And they were making $304 a day and I was staking players who didn’t have the buy in to buy enough axes. There was a whole business that formed around staking these players engaged earn, the more you play, the more you earn, these models are in their infancy, but engaged to earn is critically important to understand as a marketer because there are what eight major streaming services right now Walmart is going to do something with Paramount plus to put Walmart plus together Amazon’s got Amazon Prime, then we’re How is this all going to pan out at the end of the day when we’re having fast either free advertising supported TV over the public Internet, or we’re going to have streaming services at a premium. Is there a place to play where you’re subsidizing where your loyalty program need needs this level of engaged to earn are there marketing programs you can put together that are engaged earn play to earn learn to earn just you’re doing something audience and I’m giving you some value back. So we teach that inside of meta Academy. And I think that’s an important use case too besides just identity for marketers, now how you get into it today, take 100 bucks and go buy some crypto and then go buy some NFTs, you can all afford to lose $100 Play with live ammo do med Academy first. Because if you don’t that $100 is like you’re just putting it on red or black at a roulette table. And it may not work out for you. But after you’ve gone through med Academy, which will take you through the things you might and might not encounter, go over to Coinbase, go to FTX, drop your $100 Go over to open sea. Just feel this, I don’t think this can live in the real consumer world. And I think you’ll come up to the same conclusion, no one’s doing a Metamask wallet, no one’s gonna like go through the brain damage of do and the risk profile of being their own security guard their own investment committee and their own, you know, safe, like I just don’t think people are going to unmask are going to do this. But like the stuff we’re doing at the NHL, you just put down a credit card and the wallet, you don’t know that it’s an NFT, you just know that you have a digital collectible. And there’s an experience and there’s a quest that goes from here to there to there. And when this launches in October, it’s good for every fan because it doesn’t require any knowledge of cryptocurrency or any knowledge of NFTs simply a desire and a passion for hockey. And this is a way to enhance their experience. And I think Topshop did a wonderful job with that at the NBA as well. And there are other places where you see this when it’s really well done, you see that from so I think we’re going to end up in a credit card world where no one really knows that there in a blockchain world because I just don’t see people getting digital wallets. But you won’t know this until you go through it. So the first thing you do, whether you do it at Med Academy some other way, get some risk free training, there are some other places you can do that too, then take 100 bucks or 500 bucks if you can afford it and go play with live ammo. And if you stop at $50 into and you say well, I can’t do this, then imagine your consumers are they going to do it, you won’t do it, you need to do it, or they’re going to do it. And if you get super deep into them, oh my god, this is amazing. Whatever your outcome is, it’s a win for you. So get into it now. So you can understand where it is. Now, it will also give you a tremendously good baseline for where this is going. Because you’ll see where you might be able to add value as a brand. And this is the thing that I’ve been doing with my clients, for the last two years that I’ve been been the most rewarding is that once everybody gets a solid baseline understanding of what this is, all of a sudden, like you know, we could do and that’s the most interesting, the you know, part is the best part of those combos because what comes next is some incredible idea that maybe is completely ridiculous. But that’s where innovation comes from.

Drew Neisser: There was a quick question about how long the Meta Academy takes to complete?

Shelly Palmer: Depends how smart you are. You know a couple hours. It’s a lot of readings, it’s about 20 to 30,000 words of reading and a few little quizes at the bottom. It’s like the driver’s license test. You know, if you sat through the class, you could probably get an ace on the test. There’s 4 or 5 questions in that box which means you have 14,000 words in the first 14 sections. It won’t take you that long.

Drew Neisser: Well, and you know, if we really dive in, and we don’t have time anymore, but just the play to earn thing as a mindset for a marketer to say, I’m spending all the time trying to get a prospect to read my stuff. To read the stuff that they actually want to read anyway. And we have universities, even for our customers to get them to learn to get certified and so forth. Well, you know, there’s this combo of gamifying and maybe giving some more values so that they’re more connected to it, that I see. It’s funny, my son is in the gaming business. And he hates axiom and he hates the fact that this thing exists. That is such a bad gaming experience. But the fact is because of this other aspect of earning money, it’s out there, it’s doing it.

Shelly Palmer: Look Animoca brands has done a good job with their portfolio. I’d go analyze what they own. Yat Siu is the CEO there. And Jeffrey Zirlin is one of the cofounders of Axie Infinity. And you know go look at the model, play it, get into it. Like, do it! Just do it! It’s not that hard. Like kids can do it, you can do it. Just go get into it and decide if this is something that makes any sense. I have found it very rewarding and I have found my inner 14 year old. For someone my age, that’s pretty awesome. These last two years have been nothing but innovation every day and inventing the future every day it has been absolutely a gift.

Drew Neisser: Well, and again, I think for CMOs as they fight for relevance. This is one of those areas, it’s gonna happen, things are going to happen, there are going to be things. We talk a lot about keeping some money aside for experiments. So part one is getting educated. And then part two is figuring out some routes in.

Shelly Palmer: Look, you guys are the architects of the future you want to live in. And this is an opportunity. We’ve gone through data driven analysis, we’ve gone through data driven decision making, we have AI partners and human machine partnerships, we’ve gotten to a really interesting point. You’ve got to go look at the cover of Cosmo this month, you’ve got an AI created Dali to created cover with a little bit of human interaction. We’re getting to the point now where the text that the artists used to describe that image was the human part. And everything else was—the craft was done by the computer. Here, you have a chance to leverage platforms that are emerging in a way that you put your stamp on it. Everyone’s going to have the same technology, it’s open source. You can go online and get the code for an ERC 721 NFT contract for free from anywhere. That code is just the code, what you do with it, the story you tell, the business, you build the model you create. That’s the future that you’re inventing. And the only way to be good at that, from my perspective, is to get in and play with it now. You’ll have a better understanding than your competitors or your friends. So that you can leverage this in a more interesting way. You bring your unique qualities to this technology, the playing field gets more level every day. But we still have our own creativity. And we still have our own abilities to tell stories in our own way. So I would encourage you to become proficient in this technology. Because within a few years, this will be as ubiquitous as email, as spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks. These are going to be filters that kids press buttons and get on Tik Tok. And at that point, if you don’t understand it, you will not be able to catch up. So go forth unafraid and I’d get into it right this minute. Whatever it is, you’ll be your own guide through the journey.

Drew Neisser: All right, any last thoughts Shelly? One minute to wrap up. Maybe 2 do’s and a don’t for the CMOs in the audience when it comes to this world.

Shelly Palmer: Look, you guys are the architects of the future you want to live in. And this is an opportunity. We’ve gone through data driven analysis, we’ve gone through data driven decision making, we have AI partners and human machine partnerships, we’ve gotten to a really interesting point. You’ve got to go look at the cover of Cosmo this month, you’ve got an AI created Dali to created cover with a little bit of human interaction. We’re getting to the point now where the text that the artists used to describe that image was the human part. And everything else was—the craft was done by the computer. Here, you have a chance to leverage platforms that are emerging in a way that you put your stamp on it. Everyone’s going to have the same technology, it’s open source. You can go online and get the code for an ERC 721 NFT contract for free from anywhere. That code is just the code, what you do with it, the story you tell, the business, you build the model you create. That’s the future that you’re inventing. And the only way to be good at that, from my perspective, is to get in and play with it now. You’ll have a better understanding than your competitors or your friends. So that you can leverage this in a more interesting way. You bring your unique qualities to this technology, the playing field gets more level every day. But we still have our own creativity. And we still have our own abilities to tell stories in our own way. So I would encourage you to become proficient in this technology. Because within a few years, this will be as ubiquitous as email, as spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks. These are going to be filters that kids press buttons and get on Tik Tok. And at that point, if you don’t understand it, you will not be able to catch up. So go forth unafraid and I’d get into it right this minute. Whatever it is, you’ll be your own guide through the journey.

Drew Neisser: Shelly Palmer, @ShellyPalmer on all platforms, ShellyPalmer.com. I highly encourage you to follow his newsletter. Shelly, thank you so much for spending time with us today. This was really a treat. And thank you to the CMOs for joining us. And that’s the story. Peace out.

If you’re a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at CMOHuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me. Audio production is by Sam Beck. Show notes are written by Melissa Caffrey. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and intro voiceover is Linda Cornelius.

To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about my new book and Renegade visit renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade Thinking Caps on and strong.