Gaming Nostalgia Meets Fashion Innovation in the Web3 Era

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Marketing Meets Web 3, a podcast that helps marketers navigate the news trends, opportunities and insights surrounding Web 3. Today's conversation is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal or investment advice.

Speaker 2: 0:23

Hello Nick, how are you doing?

Speaker 3: 0:25

Hi Alberto, I'm doing well. How are you?

Speaker 2: 0:28

I'm doing fine. It's getting cold over here and I could do myself with a fancy jacket. Well, maybe not so fancy, maybe like a good jacket, but we need to talk about fancy jackets. Specifically, we need to talk about the jackets that you may be able to receive if you are an ARC NFT holder. So this is a collaboration and we're going to be talking a lot about collaborations in this piece. It's a collaboration between ATARI, the video games studio, there is ARC, a community in Asia for people, and, of course, there is the Members Only brand, which is the one providing the design for the jacket. So the three of them are getting together and creating this experience, this reward to ARC NFT holders on the part of the collaboration between ATARI and Members Only, who, as I said, are providing the design for the jacket. Overall, I don't know if you got anything, but it's basically a lot of companies here getting together to create rewards for fans, for communities, for users. So first impressions Well, first impressions.

Speaker 3: 1:49

I think we have to rewind time for our younger listeners and talk about Members Only for a second. So if you've never seen a Members Only jacket, go to Google search Members Only and you'll see this jacket. Alberto reminded me that this jacket showed up in Stranger Things. One of the kids wore it and I remember it from my youth and when I was a kid, members Only jackets were not cool. They were jackets that only your grandpa wore. So I think it's funny to see this come back around and now we have something that wasn't cool is cool again, but that's generally how fashion and history work.

Speaker 3: 2:27

What I do think is cool is that they've paired Members Only jackets with a Members Only perk. It's a fun overlap and yeah, I mean this is. We've seen this pattern play out again and again. I think one of the original utility drops that we saw in this space was the Adidas partnership with Board Apes and bringing different kinds of merch to Board Ape holders, and then that unleashed a whole wave of people and partners and collaborations who paired NFT projects with different brands that wanted to bring some sort of physical object, whether it was a pair of shoes or a jacket, or a bag or a pudgy penguin, even into real life and make that a perk for Members. So pretty cool to see this is kind of established and now is a pattern in this space and I'm curious to see you know in the future if this will become more of a mainstream delivery mechanism for products. So today it's kind of positioned as a Members Only thing.

Speaker 3: 3:33

But I do wonder and, alberto, I know you've talked about this in the past like, will we see an Amazon marketplace where you can go and you can buy these NFTs which are then redeemable for physical products? You know that's an interesting play on the future. Maybe and you know what does that do to our supply chain as well? We think about, you know, the impact to even things like the environment, you know, and human rights when it comes to producing the things that we have in the world. Like the NFTs at some point become this sort of bridge between what we want and what we get in a tokenized fashion that doesn't have to be produced until somebody redeems that thing. Anyway, I'm going on a tangent, but yeah, I like this story.

Speaker 2: 4:17

Yeah, I don't know. I want to touch on one thing. You said so Atari has been jumping on everything blockchain for a while already. It's interesting to see one of the exceptions. We can touch on that later. But yeah, so it's been six years exploring stuff that they can try out in the blockchain.

Speaker 2: 4:39

I don't know if it's maybe making up for the fact that Atari was great, amazing, super huge 20 years ago maybe, and it's decreased its impact recently, but still wants to be a very important company in this video game ecosystem, anyway. So they've been throwing everything in here and I wonder when they were trying or they were looking for into this? They just searched for, okay, members only stuff and, of course, they came across members only jackets. Maybe that's how they, that's how they came across this brand and I just find it. I found that interesting and I also I also like what they're trying to do, using Web 3 here to expand their branding to other communities, because this ARC NFT, this ARC NFTs sorry, this community of holders of these NFTs it's one of the biggest communities in well, in Web 3 in Asia, and I wonder if you know some other brands aside from this angle that you're talking about. You know the angle of using Web 3 for delivery of special items.

Speaker 2: 5:53

I wonder if you know there's also this angle to talk about, which is the angle of okay, we have something that we want to communicate or we have a brand that we want other people to learn about or to remember that we exist because, to be honest, I have forgotten that that existed. Why don't we create something which is cool, like this members only jacket, and we offer it to this, to this community that may have forgotten that we were here? Or maybe we just want to make sure that they remember that we are still here and we're still being cool? I think that that's also, that's also an interesting part in here. And, yeah, this is this is one that we haven't seen so often these collaborations between communities. Well, we've seen it often because these are the things that Web 3 does best, but in this example, I liked it in particular because this, this and this collaboration between so many brands members only Atari, I think I think it's particularly interesting.

Speaker 3: 6:54

Yeah, and as we know, I mean, if you look at history, jackets are, have been a cornerstone of branding for a long time. You know, you think about Whether it's jackets for teams, jackets from motorcycle clubs.

Speaker 2: 7:09

They, they're, they're a pretty easy win when it comes to getting your message out there and sharing your brand and One thing I wanted to to ask you about, because it's so, as I said, atari has been Researching, trying out blockchain, and they even have their own project here at a X, which is Still in the works, let's say so, the threat that they've tried. A lot of things offered that were three offers, but they haven't gotten into the play to earn model, which so many other Give video game companies have tried out, and I wonder why you think this is and if you see some, if you can I don't know, maybe guess some kind of strategy behind the fact that they haven't gotten into this yet.

Speaker 3: 7:59

Yeah, I mean play to earn was one of the first sort of ideas in the web 3 gaming space, before web 3 was a word and before, you know, things like even NFTs within games was really a concept. It was this notion that why don't we incentivize players with some sort of reward and generally that was a token reward, incentivize players to play games by giving them these rewards. And I Think you know at the core there's an interesting kernel there and it's part of many web 3 projects. You see anything to earn projects, you know we've seen move to earn, we've seen play to earn, we read to earn, engage to earn, all of these different ways to, you know, quote-unquote, earn things. And I think at the core of that principle there's this idea that you know as as contributors and participants and systems, we should be rewarded and and and compensated for our contributions, which I think you know nothing wrong with that at the core. I think when you mix in gaming though, especially with some of the backlash that's happened from the gaming community, you know Kind of rejecting some of these web 3 gaming ideas, at least in initially. There's just a lot of sort of complexity to sort through there. And when you introduce, you know, incentives on top of games. It's a pretty good recipe for casino mentality. It's a pretty good recipe to introduce, you know, unintended consequences that come with speculation that can really kind of ruin an enjoyable experience.

Speaker 3: 9:38

And so I, atari, has been in the game for a while, the web 3 game. Anyway, they've been in the fun yeah, a little fun there. You know they've been in the web 3 game for probably five or six years. I remember seeing them at one of the original NFT NYC conferences and you know seeing them talk about some of these ideas around web 3 gaming. I think they're taking it slow. I also think that, like most big corporations, there's a lot of hesitation around the legality and the regulatory clarity that comes with some of these initiatives, and so they're probably just trying to play it safe. And you know, getting involved where it's, it's very clear that what they're doing doesn't have any sort of unintended or Negative impact to the business. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes like. Like all gaming companies, I think they're trying to find a lane for for players and for web 3 to see, you know, how this enrolls in the future, but I Don't know, we'll see. That's about as much speculation as I can offer on Atari's blockchain vision.

Speaker 2: 10:43

Fair enough, we haven't. We haven't discussed the possibility of that question in particular, so I think you did well, let's. Let's move on to the next topic, which is an opinion piece. I love these opinion pieces.

Speaker 2: 10:56

This one in particular comes from German Ramirez I'm going for for that pronunciation because of the name sounds pretty Spanish to me, so I'm gonna do it in Spanish and he wrote this piece on why brand consistency matters and how web 3 companies are failing to deliver.

Speaker 2: 11:15

German is a co-founder and chief relevance officer nice name, or nice position at the relevance house, which I guess is the explanation about for his position in this company. Anyway, in this piece, he's talking about the importance of consistent and coherent branding and how this is usually underestimated. When this is the case, it leads to missed opportunities on the part of companies. Well, he's been in branding for a while 25 years and he's been in the blockchain for a while as well, I think 10 years experience, or six or five years experience. He's observed during this time how web three companies are struggling to basically provide this consistency that he believes is very important to create a last 10 image, or at least yeah, last 10 image, I think in the minds of their audiences. He feels this is one of the main problems that the web three is struggling with. We can get into the specific details, but before I get into that I want to hear what are your first thoughts from this?

Speaker 3: 12:35

Yes, I read this piece same as you. I think what I took away from it is what he's really talking about at the core, I think, is congruence and messaging, which is important for humans. There's this natural tendency to seek congruence in our world. By that I mean when you see a message that promotes the idea of simplicity and then you have an experience that is complex, that's incongruent to the human brain, we almost automatically we experienced tension with that. We experienced an uncomfortable feeling, whether that manifests as mistrust or feeling like something is not genuine. The human brain just has this tendency to want to resolve that difference.

Speaker 3: 13:26

What I took from this piece is that he's looking at the web three space and saying look, if you have a simple product and a complicated message, that's not a congruent message, which is going to reflect poorly on your brand, and inversely, if you have a complex product and a simple message, that's going to confuse people as well. And so when I look at this, I think that the red thread for me is web three. Companies need to be mindful of a message that matches the promise of their product, which takes me to my perspective on this, which is I actually think that the brokenness in web three, branding is less about the message and more about the promise. Branding at the core of things is it's about a promise to a consumer. You are promising not just a product, not just a value proposition, but you are promising some aspect of the relationship with that consumer, and that comes through in the way that you deliver the value through the product, through the message, through the community. And I think there are web three projects, and this isn't just web three.

Speaker 3: 14:35

A lot of this is just a general problem with branding, but I think we see it often in web three is that these projects aren't delivering enough value, enough tangible value, and so, instead of digging into the value that can be delivered, we see things like messaging to cover up for that lack of value.

Speaker 3: 14:56

And so and that messaging generally goes in one of two ways Either let's talk about complicated, technical, fancy sounding things that could impress an investor to cover up a lack of, maybe meaningful core value, or maybe the value that we see is so buried in complexity that we think, by painting it with a very simple message, that a consumer's gonna walk up and have some sort of aha moment and be like, oh, of course, I see the value you're delivering when, in reality, it's not actually there or it's buried underneath too much technical complexity. So for me, I look at this and I don't disagree with what the author is saying, but I also think there's an aspect of the promise that needs to be addressed when you're thinking about how do you create a clear brand message and a strong brand relationship in web three.

Speaker 2: 15:47

We'll be right back after the award from our sponsor.

Speaker 1: 15:51

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Speaker 2: 16:23

It's cool because, I mean, I do agree with what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's the same thing that the author here, herman, wanted to convey, because I think one of the important messages in his piece is the emotional part. And so I get what you're saying and it's totally true, but the emotional part goes beyond the fact that you can actually promise something and deliver it, which is a very important part, of course. But the emotional part, I think, is a different thing altogether and I believe I mean and this is me creating hypothesis but I believe that the problem, or the problem that Herman sees here the author, is that when you look at everything that has been created in Web3 for the past three, four years, it's, it's an amalgamation of things that create in the audience different emotional responses. And it's not clear to him that either the industry, or both industries and companies within Web3, are not clear on the kind of emotion that they want to provide, because Web3 could be about the future and inspire hope, but at the same time, that's one thing that they provide or one of the messages that they try to send, but they also provide this emotional sentiment in the users of an opportunity to become rich or an opportunity to make it big and quick, and I think it also inspires in the audience the emotional sentiment of being part of something very special, which is totally different.

Speaker 2: 18:18

I remember here the way they tried to sell the Ethereum idea when it first came out, when they talked about Ethereum as the infinite machine, the infinite computer.

Speaker 2: 18:33

This, I think, gave the idea of hope. We have now this thing that is going to be an infinite computer. It's going to allow us to create as many things as we want, so it gives us this emotional aspiration, which I think is what AI is doing these days. It's giving that aspirational and hope in the users and it's giving this emotion, I think, throughout, whereas in the case of Web3, it may be started with this hope, but then it became out of things, as I said, becoming rich, becoming part of something, being modern, being innovative, and I think this is the issue that Hermann is seeing here. Maybe not, but I wanted to touch on the emotional part because I think it's important. I agree with him that when you look at Web3, you see a lot of different emotional messages that I think compete between each other, and probably what we need is just time to see which one is the one that works best. I don't know, maybe.

Speaker 3: 19:42

Yeah, no, it's a great distinction. I think you're right. That was a big piece of the article or is a big piece of the article, and my take was inconsistency. But your perspective on emotional resonance, I think, is important. Yeah, probably, maybe, yeah, no, I think it is both.

Speaker 3: 20:05

But any sort of innovation, any technology like technology, is not inherently emotional, and so when we try to make technology emotional, that's strictly humans trying to assign meaning to something. And you're right, in the space there have been a lot of mixed messages and whether that's positive, negative, it is. This Web3 has become this sort of cesspool of emotions that now, from a branding perspective, you have companies and products that are trying to tug on different aspects of that sort of emotional melting pot, and so it's also, I think, one of the most confusing things for consumers. To your point, you roll up to a crypto product and you're like, well, is this about getting rich? Is this about freeing the world from intermediaries? Like, what are we doing here?

Speaker 3: 21:02

And oftentimes I'm even guilty of this. You know, when I'm explaining Web3 to a friend or a family member, I'll start going down these rabbit holes, because to me that's the exciting thing about Web3 is we do get to blend a lot of these things together, but I think to people that aren't familiar with the space, it's also one of the most intimidating things, because you go from talking about, you know, freeing up financial rails from traditional financial institutions to using Web3 as a new community building superpower, and you know people's eyes just start glazing over and they're like what in the world are you talking about? So, from a branding perspective, I think there's a lot of merit to what the author is talking about here in terms of needing to separate facts from emotion and making sure that, when you do blend those things together, that there is consistency.

Speaker 2: 21:55

Yeah, well, I liked in particular that he that's the observation of it, right, because I mean, we're here looking at this every day and I hadn't had that observation, I hadn't thought about it. So, yeah, I have to give him a praise for that. And I also have to praise the company that we're going to be talking about now, because this is one company that has done the emotional branding perfectly over the years and still continues to deliver the same emotional response on people. We're talking of Gucci, of course, which is a high fashion company that has recently unveiled Cosmos Land, which is an experience, a metaverse, experience within or inside the sandbox metaverse. We have to talk a bit about what Gucci has been doing these days using Web3 and what is offering its audience and its clients and users.

Speaker 2: 22:59

But let me just complete my argument there by using one piece of trivia I think I learned the other day, which is about models from high end, high fashion companies. If you remember, or if you think about it, you probably haven't ever seen a model from Gucci or from Louis Vuitton ever smiling in an ad or in a poster, because they never smile. They never smile because if they smiled, they would seem very approachable. They don't want to be approachable, they want to be exclusive and they want to be hard to get close to. That's why they never smile. This is just to argue about the consistency in what they're doing and the emotional response that they cause in the audience that they want to reach. Well done, gucci. You're doing perfectly this game. Let's talk, maybe, about the metaverse experience.

Speaker 3: 24:04

Yeah. So let's see. I think the headline here is that they are unveiling Cosmos Land, which is this new experience in the sandbox metaverse. If you've been paying attention to metaverse for a little while, you should be familiar with sandbox. If not, definitely go see what they're about. But sandbox is this big sort of metaverse experience that is extendable. You can build experiences in it. A lot of brands have created experiences in the sandbox. Snoop Dogg, for instance, has, I think he has a mansion there and he's had a few activations there. So we've seen a lot of brands experimenting in the sandbox Great name, by the way. And so what Gucci's done is they have this exhibition called Cosmos Land, which is basically a tour of their history, and so there's an actual exhibition in London which offers this immersive exploration of their heritage and kind of walking through the history of their designs, and they're transplanting that experience to the digital realm and launching this within the sandbox. And so this is something I think has the potential to be very interesting when we think about brands and where they go with the metaverse.

Speaker 3: 25:22

When I think about brands, one of the interesting things is that we all have a personal relationship and a personal history with the brand.

Speaker 3: 25:29

So the way that you remember Atari is not the way that I remember Atari, but inevitably we could create a journey through our experience with a brand that is sort of unique, and there may be other people out there who have similar memories or experiences with that brand, and that could be for a bunch of reasons.

Speaker 3: 25:50

Right, it could be because we're similar ages, it could be regional, it could be socioeconomic, like a lot of different things that glue us together when it comes to brands. And what's interesting about a virtual exploration of a brand's history is this idea that I can not only experience that, but because we're in the world of Web 3, where everything is possible, what about a place, where or a future where I could curate that experience and then I could tokenize that experience and share that experience? So will it be possible for me in the future to walk through Gucci Cosmos in the sandbox and to handpick my journey and then to create an NFT that represents that journey and I might be able to share that with somebody so they can walk that same experience and have the journey with a brand that I've had, and so I'll be able to share that, and maybe that's a way to actually find community within community of people who feel the same way or have had the same experience with the brand as me.

Speaker 2: 26:49

Yeah, what you just suggested reminds me to the golf ball. Remember from the golf tournament that I created these NFT balls and that, depending on how the tournament went, the different balls had different designs depending on what happened to the shots. Please remember that golf is not really my strong 40 here or my 40 here, but anyway it reminds me to that example, the fact that the way in which you explore this may create an experience that in itself may be NFT-iced and then creates this particular recollection in the NFT form for you and I like also from this piece, that this Cosmos land that Gucci has created is an open land. I don't remember how they call this in video games. I think it's open world exploration and that basically you can go anywhere. And I remember when this was a thing in games, oh, it's open world, and I said, oh, amazing, I can now go anywhere, and this was huge, I think 10, 15 years ago, and now it's basically everywhere. Like Gucci is creating an open world.

Speaker 3: 28:14

I think Mist was one of the first open world experiences. That was truly mind boggling. You could just walk anywhere and it seemed like the game would never run out?

Speaker 2: 28:27

Was it longer away? When was this?

Speaker 3: 28:33

This was hundreds of years ago. There was only video game, an early open world video game called Mist, and Mist was basically you were a solo player and you would just walk around this island. It was kind of a precursor to Tomb Raider, those style of games where you're going around and you're trying to solve puzzles and unlock your path through this open world, and so it was just a completely different take on video gaming and I remember it being a very unique experience.

Speaker 2: 29:03

Yeah, so it's crazy that Gucci now is doing this and to add more fun to it, I guess you can actually parkour your way through this Cosmos land, which is something I haven't seen before in these metaverses.

Speaker 3: 29:19

Parkour, like I can do a flip from a handbag to a handbag? Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2: 29:26

That's cool. Yes, like I mean, what can we do? I remember playing the metaverse, the penguins metaverse, and it's funny how the penguins work. I guess Gucci was looking at this and thinking, well, what can we do to make it more cool? Why don't you parkour your way through the metaverse? Yes, I don't know, it's funny and I think it's one of the examples of the things that are to come, Because, yeah, as you said, innovation here has no limits and yeah, so it's just one different wrap for a product, In this case, the history of Gucci that now comes, served in a metaverse that you can parkour through. It's crazy, but I think it's the beginning of something that we're starting to see more often and that eventually will be very big and, I don't know, very original, I guess, because these things totally mind blowing some of them. So, anything you want to take away from today's episode.

Speaker 3: 30:34

Well as usual. I'm pleasantly surprised by the continued innovation in the space, I think, when it comes to brands engaging Web 3, as this editorial piece by Hermann points out. I think it's really important that we think about that. We're very intentional about the moves that we make in Web 3, and that, as a brand, as a company, as a product, as an individual even, that we have a perspective on where we want things to go and we bring that perspective to the table in an authentic way so that we can have a clear message that resonates with an audience in an emotional way but is also consistent and doesn't create any sort of emotional or intellectual incongruence.

Speaker 3: 31:17

I think that brands like Gucci and Atari are leaning into some of the patterns that we've seen play out in the past two years as people continue to explore the possibilities of things like collaboration between brands and between communities. And also, what does it look like when we free up our imaginations from the physical world and give ourselves the freedom to explore ideas in a virtual space, whether you're in a parkour from a handbag to a handbag, or create your own sort of path through a brand's history and share that with the world? It just the takeaway for me is that every time I see these stories, I'm inspired and re-inspired that so many people are looking at Web 3 as this big sort of open opportunity and playground sandbox, if you will where we can explore our ideas, discover what it means to connect with other people and also create connections with things like products and brands.

Speaker 2: 32:18

Yeah, I would just add one thing to that, which is we get together every week and we discuss these things and we see that the smaller steps that are happening, because if you look at it from high above, you may see or you may think that this is not really evolving that much, or you may think that, well, it's not evolving as quickly as you would hope.

Speaker 2: 32:42

But, yeah, we get together here every week and every week we see something else, something different. I mean, I hadn't seen collaborations between three or four projects or three or four companies, as we've seen with the Atari example, and, well, we can now parkour our way something that is new. And also another thing that I think goes alongside this is the fact that two of these pieces of news that we touched on today use the sandbox as the base. Atari also uses the sandbox for his Web3 experience and it's interesting I think, joining this to what I was saying before because, well, the sandbox has been around for a while and it may seem also that, well, there's not much happening in there, but the stuff happening is just that. Well, I think most people want everything to be very cool and very usable and very valuable from day one, and of course these things take a bit of time.

Speaker 3: 33:44

Yeah, absolutely. Well, why don't we leave it there? Always glad to chat. Hope you enjoy the rest of your day, Yep. See you next time.

Speaker 1: 33:54

Thanks for listening to Marketing Needs Web3. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe in your favorite podcast app and I'll see you next time. Bye, bye.