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Unleashing And Learning Web3 Wonders At The Edge Of Asia With Mask Network In All That Matters 2023!
There is no longer any question about how great the technology behind Web3 is, but that alone is not sufficient to break the threshold to mass adoption. People care more about the products and less about the underlying technology. Brands are waking up to this realization and starting to straddle the boundary between Web2 and Web3. We spoke to some during our stint at the Edge of Asia in Singapore. In this episode, we dive into how Mask Network is reshaping the Web2 experience and solving many problems in this groundbreaking decentralized social network. We then dive into learning from first mover brands in Web3 with leaders from DayAway, BBRC Studios, RiteStream, and Mighty Jaxx as we look back on valuable lessons decentralization has taught their teams working very closely with respected brands and sophisticated consumers. Tune in for more!
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Unleashing And Learning Web3 Wonders At The Edge Of Asia With Mask Network In All That Matters 2023!
We’re landing back in Singapore, where we stopped by the DeSoc Unleashed x Web3 Social House, and all that matters to get you in on more Web3 content. Here’s what is to come. First, we’ll dive into how Mask Network is reshaping Web2 experiences and solving many problems in this groundbreaking decentralized social network. Then, dive into learnings from first mover brands in Web3, where we’re on stage with leaders from DayAway,** BBRC Studios**, Ritestream, and Mighty Jaxx. As we look back on valuable lessons decentralization has taught, their team is working very closely with respected brands and sophisticated consumers. It was fantastic to get so much first-hand perspective from founders across the Web2-Web3 bridge as we wrap up our Edge of Asia series. Enjoy.
This special Edge of NFT Asia Roadshow Tour Edition is sponsored by our friends at Casper Association. They oversee the evolution of the Casper Network. A blockchain supporting innovative tech giants, as well as decentralized applications of the platform featuring both upgradable smart contracts and predictable gas fees. They also have a great new show called Casper Blockchain Podcast. You can check out on Spotify or by visiting Casper.Network and click on News.
I just got over here in Singapore from Seoul and I’m excited about this conversation. It was excellently curated as a curator myself of the show and Outer Edge. This is a special group of folks who have been doing things on the branding side for quite a long time and have a lot of experience. We’re going to jump right into the conversation.
The question I have for all of you guys from looking at your websites and getting a sense of your brands is how you’ve approached how you’re using Web3 and how front and center it is differently. I think that contrast is a healthy conversation to have. I’d love to start with this. What do you guys think is the right balance in terms of Web3 in terms of putting that out there to the world? How has your perspective on this particular decision shifted over the last six months? Who wants to start?
The experiences that we’ve had with the whole Web3 experience when we jumped into it, it was a lot about tokenization, crypto, etc. Where we have ended up is it’s about building a real business. The fundamentals of business apply to Web3 as much as to Web2. I think the people that will be successful and the brands that’ll lead the way will be the ones that hone down on, regardless of what the underlying technology is, there’s got to be a product-market fit that has got to achieve the end goal for the people that are going to be using your product.
The fundamentals of business apply to Web3 just as much as to Web2. Click To Tweet
To what extent are you marketing that your entertainment platform is Web3?
We started off with a heavy focus on we are all about Web3. Now, it’s about communicating to Web2 communities that this is something that they can leverage to succeed within the entertainment space and that we offer them that platform to do that. The end consumer, our customer does not even need to know that this is Web3 at the end of the day.
Nelson, what about you?
In the past six months or the past year, so much has changed in the NFT space or in the Web3 space. The positive thing is the space is maturing. We are, as mentioned, it’s all about sustainability and it’s about being able to monetize and create a business of it. The reason why I got into Web3 in the first place was I saw the potential and the possibilities. What I do in terms of art and culture, and combining them with tech, the possibilities and potential there is endless.
We’re very early in the space building the foundations and we are moving in the right direction, going to the masses. Over the weekend, we had a toy convention that we showcased a bit like Pudgy Penguins. We showcase our IPs in a pop toy show. We got a great response from the Web2 audience. That’s how we want to onboard the Web3 audience.
Lawrence, you’re working on a big activation right now not too far from here. How have you approached the marketing side of the blockchain, Web3, and NFT components to what you all do?
There are a few things. Back in 2018, we have been producing figurines and we have been authenticating them on blockchain. We’re working together with a team of Nelson Pudgy Penguins as well. Blockchain for us is a way to make sure that these products do not get counterfeited. That was a long while ago. We’ve done some NFT projects and not bad, but I’ll leave it up to Nelson to do it better than us.
On our activation, we’re working with a lot of IPs, one of them is Stranger Things. We brought an experience to Singapore, the encounter. Essentially, you buy an NFT ticket for the experience. Our vision is that working with all these IPs, we want to offer an experience that starts before, during, and after the event. One thing that Web3 has brought to the Web2 space is the need to offer more than just a ticket and offer more than just a one-time off. That’s very valuable also for consumers who are outside of the Web3 space.
Martha, your focus is luxury membership. We’ll get into that a little bit more, but from the perspective of the demographics that you’re targeting, how has that shaped your approach to the Web3 membership experience? You can go to your website, which I encourage people to do. It’s cool. It does say to connect, but otherwise, I wouldn’t know that this is a Web3 membership club. It was that intentional. Was that always how it was done?
Yes. When we launched our platform, it was primarily almost 100% Web2 audience. We were in business for two years before we even started to explore integrating blockchain into our platform. I think what was important for us was to have the on-ramps compatible for both audiences. Our Web2 members can sign up using their credit card for a number of different tiers of membership. We then created this process for the Web3 community to have a seamless user experience as well, which is connecting their wallet and using this NFT to unlock all of these token-gated privileges. For us, what was interesting was the decision to even start integrating blockchain was very organic.
Web3: Blockchain is the best technology at our disposal to build the most user-friendly membership experience.
We went from being a public marketplace to a members-only model and we wanted to start building our loyalty program, something that every travel and hospitality membership in the world has. When we were thinking about our partners giving us these very exclusive privileges that were for a select number of people, their first question was, “How are you going to gate this? We can’t give you a discount code, people will share it. We can’t give private links. What is the solution here?” From my understanding of blockchain at the time, we can token-gate it. We could have this digital asset backing all of our memberships, sometimes without the members even realizing that would allow them to redeem all of these benefits with minimal friction. That’s been the case for us.
I want to give you credit for your boldness because you had a traditional Web2 business and you took a risk there in terms of creating this token-gated experience where a lot of companies would be intimidated by the risk of, “What if this doesn’t work?” I am curious how that onboarding process has been for Web2 versus Web3 clientele or potential clientele. Luxury doesn’t have any borders. There are people in all geographies who enjoy luxury. What has the onboarding experience been? What has the recruiting experience been like? Is it more referral-based? Is it more people find you online? Are you doing some outbound marketing? How is that varied by those two audiences?
It’s a mix of everything you described, which I think from any new startup in this environment trying to service this very digitally savvy consumer, you have to be willing to integrate new technologies that build a more sustainable platform. With the integration of blockchain, we’re not claiming we’re a Web3 company, but this was the best technology at our disposal to build the most user-friendly membership experience. Same thing with using AI to increase our product inventory. We can spin out hotel pages 500 at a time by typing in the list of hotels that we want to be on the platform and our backend will create a page for them. Again, keeping in mind servicing the end customer. If we wanted to appeal to both audiences, we had to create the user experience that they expected.
For your question about how has it been referral versus outbound marketing, are we specifically trying to engage with Web3? That all, for us, happened by accident. We were launching this membership either way. We were going to use blockchain to power it either way. When we started thinking about releasing the membership program, Web3 was very much in the background because we wanted to go to our existing database of 10,000 users who were all primarily Web2 and say, “It’s going to be backed by this token and you won’t have to keep track of discount codes or private links.” That all sounded exciting, and then OpenSea got involved. They were excited about the real-world use case that DayAway could prove out, so that’s when Hype came pitching to this Web3 audience and they got it right away.
There’s a member of my team who helped build out the American Express Black Card program. He constantly says that Web3 addresses real gaps in the rewards gamification loyalty space that were not accessible beforehand. You can do a lot more. I appreciate your decision there. I think that’s interesting for other Web2 companies that are trying to maximize engagement. Nelson, you’re also intersecting with the luxury space. Have you had the same experience that luxury and Web3 go together well? Do you think that Web3 is appropriate for the broader market too? I’m curious why or why not.
I’ll bring an example. Let’s say some community like Pudgy Penguins, I would say considerably in the Web3 space or in the NFT space, at least their floor price is considered premium. What Luca is doing is they’re building real-world products in Web2. They’re going for mass adoption. I think that’s the right channel. In terms of Web3, whether it’s premium or accessible, it depends on what the brand is trying to achieve. When Web3 came, it attracted such a wide audience.
Whether you’re in for collecting art or you’re your trader. I think Web3 offers a wide audience, but it’s very important to be able to communicate the vision of what you are trying to do and attract the right audience into your community so that you don’t get distracted by people who are opinionated or people who are motivated by different things. As founders, that’s what we need to communicate constantly and be very consistent with that message.
Web3: It’s very important to be able to communicate the vision of what you are trying to do and attract the right audience into your community so that you don’t get distracted by who are motivated by different things.
If you go to the Pudgy Penguins website, which I encourage everyone to do, you don’t see the word “Web3” or “blockchain” anywhere. Every word is precisely around this brand that they’ve created. The Instagram page is also very funny. There was recently a comic about someone who took a power nap, woke up, and realized it was 2:00 AM. I was like, “That’s me.” They’re definitely trying to relate to the broad market.
Speaking of that type of entertainment content, you’re building something fascinating in the entertainment space. I think that’s a space that has evolved and become more global. I was in Seoul as I mentioned. We all know about Parasite and how that impacted the global entertainment market. Netflix has given me a lot of choices of foreign content now that were not there a few years ago. How has the globalization of entertainment impacted the potential of using Web3 within the entertainment realm?
Globalization of entertainment, I have a couple of businesses in Web2 as well. What we have seen is now Korean content travels worldwide. Very soon language will not be a barrier because, with AI technology, dubbing, subtitling, and all of that is going to become a breeze. I think the content will travel even more than ever before and the monetization opportunities increase exponentially. What we are doing in Web3 is building a platform that empowers creators because the industry has been controlled by a handful of people for generations. Creativity cannot be truly unleashed. It’s only a chosen few that get that opportunity to bring the ideas to life.
The opportunity that Web3 offers is literally the ability for anyone to say, “I’ve got this amazing concept and I can bring this to life through the community and give ownership to that community as well.” So that everybody participates in the success of a film or TV project and say the next Star Wars that’s conceptualized-created belongs to the people.
Let’s dig a little deeper there. What are some of the mechanisms that can be used without triggering the regulatory flags and whatnot that you’re able to do with Web3?
There are definitely regulatory challenges. What is a security or what is not? There are different mechanisms by which we can reward people for ownership through staking, for example. The way we envisage it is that by NFTs you’d have ownership of a particular piece of IP and that would give you staking rewards which are indirectly connected to the benefits from the success of that film or TV show. Plus also, access as well. Behind the scenes, access, meet and greets, and all other rewards that you wouldn’t get otherwise. The concept is to create this powerful ecosystem whereby the creators and the community participate equally and the success of creative projects. We decentralize that whole process, which is so heavily in the hands of five studios today.
I would draw some attention from the audience too. Fox’s new project, Krapopolis, the writer Dan Harmon, is launching in September. If you own the chicken, you get special access to content, but your chicken also can lay eggs and those eggs can be used to buy redeemable merchandise. You have a major studio based in Hollywood that’s using blockchain in a revolutionary way that sounds like you’re empowering others to do as well.
We’ll talk a little bit more about that, but let’s also hit on the merchandising side. Since we’ve covered collectibles, ticketing, and luxury membership, I think merchandising is something that’s inherently part of the conversation with all IPs. Lawrence, you’re doing that in some creative ways. You showed me one particular activation on how you’re doing that. I’d love to understand what Web3 brings to the table in terms of activations and collectibles, and to what degree it’s attracting Web3 folks or Web2, and how you look at that moving forward.
For us, it’s not so much even about Web3 or Web2, to be fair. Our event is clearly targeted on major audience. Our collectibles are targeted towards the collectors. Those collectors might not always be interested in the Web3 space. Merchandising, that’s the core of what we do. For us, to offer that experience that goes beyond that one purchase moment and go to that event being able to offer additional merchandise.
As you mentioned, additional experiences behind the scenes and things that we’re considering as well. We have a lengthy process before one of our items comes to life. There are a lot of people involved within Mighty Jaxx with the artists themselves. To get the people involved with that process is something we’re looking into as well. Definitely, Web3 can give you that early access and can give you that extra look into it.
This is a broader question for all of you. I’m curious, what have you learned what your audiences like and dislike? How has that approach to engagement been adjusted over time? Let’s get into some nitty-gritty of lessons learned here because these broader conversations are fun, but some things don’t work. They don’t stick. What hasn’t stuck and what have you done differently?
People don’t always like Web3. Our collectors don’t always like Web3. Sometimes we think that, but by doing it in our case, we are narrowing down the audience even to a smaller amount. For us, it doesn’t become commercially viable again, so we have to bring it a bit more to the background.
Our holders like high floor prices. That’s a reality.
I don’t think there’s anyone that doesn’t like the high floor price in blockchain.
Seriously, because we’ve been in this space for two years, the holders that are still with us now, we definitely know what they are in for. When we started, my background was in fashion retail. I’ve been doing it for 18 years. When we got into the space, we thought of what value we can bring into Web3 which is leaning into our strengths in fashion, brick-and-mortar, and distribution channels in the form of apparel. When we launched our first NFTs, it all came with physical jackets. Our goal is to be able to create avatars.
When I came into the space, I didn’t think of doing avatars or making them interoperable. I wanted it to be able to create garments that you can relate to. A lot of NFTs were like animals or things, but there wasn’t a relatable connection that you could personalize. I think for us, it is focusing on that. After a year, people who are still around want it. They are asking, “What are we releasing next? What’s the next collection are you releasing?” Our brand promise at the very start is keeping it true to that. That’s something our holders beyond the speculation, beyond the floor price and trading, whoever is still left, focus on that. That’s our original mission.
I spoke with Frank DeGods. He said he learned that longer timelines that are more ambitious and may slip don’t work as well for his audience as shorter smaller bites of the apple. Do you feel the same way in terms of how you’re communicating expectations to your audience?
Yes. Typically, what we find is that the Web3 community wants things like that. They’re often less worried about what’s happening with the business. They’re focused more on the token price and other elements. I think what we have had to learn is to say, “Let’s not worry about all of those things. We’re going to build a real product and we’ll communicate the real product to our community,” which is what we have been doing. Doing it in shorter gaps is very important because you can’t be silent with these guys. They expect movement all the time.
Any other thoughts?
Nelson.
Martha.
For us, you can go to MyDayAway.com.
Check out RightStream.io
For us, it’s MightyJaxx.com. To plug a bit more, 1st of October, we’re stopping with the Stranger Things event, so go to Bugis, 30% discount. Please go by. Thanks.
It’s been over almost ten years now.
Tell us a little bit more about RARA.
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