Web3 Marketing & CRM, Unlocking the Secrets of Web3 CRM with Samir Addamine: A Must-Watch Crypto 101 Episode

Ever pondered the difference between traditional CRM systems like Salesforce and the emerging world of Web3 CRM? Look no further. Our very own Samir Addamine, Co-Founder and CEO of Absolute Labs, recently sat down with Crypto 101 for an in-depth conversation that is sure to answer your queries.

Web3 is more than just a trend; it’s the next phase of the internet. With the shift towards decentralization, businesses must rethink CRM practices. During the podcast, Samir shares how Absolute Labs is at the forefront of this transformation, crafting innovative strategies for meaningful brand experiences in the Web3 space.

Key highlights include the allure of NFTs for luxury brands like LVMH, showcasing the potential for brands to interact with communities in unprecedented ways. Add to that the blending of AI, and we’re witnessing a revolution in targeted marketing strategies.

The San Francisco tech scene, as Samir portrays, is brimming with promise, especially at the juncture of Web3 and AI startups. This confluence signals revolutionary tech advancements on the horizon.

For startups and budding crypto enthusiasts, Samir offers invaluable advice: the significance of focusing on one customer problem and its repeatability. A powerful reminder of the core essence of entrepreneurial success in a rapidly evolving market.

Rather than just reading about it, we recommend diving into the episode firsthand. Watch the complete episode on Youtube for an enriching understanding of CRM’s future, as Web3 and digital innovations converge.

Keen to explore more? For more on how Absolute Labs is driving change in the CRM space, ask for a demo and discover how we’re defining the future of customer relationship management.

Crypto 101 is “a podcast, YouTube channel & community of Cryptocurrency Crusaders on a mission to bring cryptocurrencies & blockchain technology to the mainstream.”

Episode 49 of the Public Key podcast is here! In this episode, we talk with two marketing tech entrepreneurs, Antony Gardez (CPTO and Co-Founder, Absolute Labs) and Samir Addamine (CEO and Co-Founder, Absolute Labs), about the web3 marketing solutions that are needed for brands in web3.

You can listen or subscribe now on Spotify, Apple, or Audible. Keep reading for a full preview of episode 49.

Public Key Episode 49 preview: Brands are using on-chain activity for marketing tactics and initiatives

Collecting emails and phone numbers for marketing initiatives seems a little outdated and CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce are unable to take advantage of the power of on-chain data and insights, which has everyone wondering, what does web3 marketing look like?

In this episode, Ian Andrews (Chief Marketing Officer, Chainalysis) looks to answer this question by sitting down with marketing tech co-founders Antony Gardez (CPTO) and Samir Addamine (CEO) of Absolute Labs to understand what Wallet Relationship Management (WRM) is and how it’s taking over web3 and crypto marketing.

They discuss how big brands like LVMH and Samsung are looking to onboard millions of their customers into web3 and what are some of the challenges with the current digital marketing platforms and CRMs in a more decentralized environment where privacy and anonymity are priorities.

Quote of the episode

Minute-by-minute episode breakdown

Related resources

Speakers on today’s episode

Still don’t have web3 growth hacking fully figured out? Chill. I have some comforting news for you: no one really does. Not even the experts who have millions of daily active users in their web3 games and experiences.

Skeptical? Watch the video above for proof.

But … that does not mean there is no hope, there are no best practices, there are no paths to follow. There are indeed some profitable paths to take on your web3 growth journey. I recently spent an hour with three luminaries in the web3 space: keep reading for their best insights.

Customers or partners?

When you’re growth hacking web3 experiences, the first thing you need to do is level-set. You are not in Kansas anymore. Things are different. And while you’re probably going to try to appeal to both web3/NFT natives as well as “normies” who haven’t drunk the crypto Kool-Aid yet, marketing web3 experiences is both historically very new and fundamentally very different than marketing mobile games, CPG, or big brands.

Of course, you very much do want to grow, be successful, create value, generate revenue, and make a profit. But the primary purpose of successfully marketing new web3 experiences is much more analogous to finding new colleagues than finding new customers.

Think of them as business partners.

Or new community members.

That’s a mind-shift for traditional marketers. And – let’s be honest – given the relative newness of the space, that’s most marketers in web3.

Web3 marketing includes web2 tactics

The next shift: you’re probably going to be using both typical web2 strategies and tactics as well as newer web3 forms of marketing.

So you’re using Telegram, you’re using Discord, you’re airdropping tokens and artifacts, you’re hitting all the conferences, you’re showing up and maybe sponsoring some of the big podcasts or shows, you’re ticking all the web3 marketing boxes. But you’re also going to be creating a presence on traditional social platforms, collecting email addresses as well as wallet connections, buying ads on the web and in mobile apps, and building relationships with key influencers on TikTok.

(Or whatever networks are aligned with your project and your goals.)

At minimum, Campbell says, doing this will automatically segment your users. You’ll know which cohorts are more likely to be web3 native and which are more likely to be new converts, simply based on where you acquired them. Naturally, like all segmentation, this won’t be 100% accurate, but directionally it can be valuable.

For PlayEmber CMO Jon Hook, it’s about who you’re targeting for your game, app, or utility.

But it’s still not easy, and there’s no defined rulebook

Even when you’ve level-set and focused on who you want to onboard, it’s not easy.

(Of course, driving adoption of something new never has been.)

Because unlike the mobile app advertising space that many web3 marketers come out of, there’s no set and standard playbook yet in web3 growth hacking, First Light Games marketing lead Dan Reynolds says. Even the most successful web3 marketers are still figuring it out … especially now that the boom is in the rear-view mirror and we’re in the sloped-down part of the hype cycle where you’re doing the hard work of building core technology to fuel another, longer-lasting, more stable ascent.

Which, if you ask Sky Mavis VP Quinn Campbell, is exactly what makes it “exciting.” If we knew all the answers, everyone could do it.

There’s at least 3 take-aways from this realization:

1. Try everything
2. Use tools like Absolute Labs’ Wallet Relationship Management platform that simplifies the task
3. Build a great product which will be a strong foundation for growth

That’s precisely where Reynolds is living right now:

“One thing that we’re focused very much on right now is to do what we know we are good at, which is creating a good game that’s gonna be enjoyable whilst using as much of the blockchain technology as possible … to use that to essentially bring in real gamers into web3 and sort of convert them into web3 gamers by having a really good game that’s built on the blockchain,” he says. “So, we’re sort of trying to strike this perfect balance between bringing in gamers, and web3 traders, and speculators, and NFT owners at the same time.”

Because every web3 project has multiple stakeholders: users, owners, members, players (in the case of games), and more.

Axie Infinity has counted no fewer than 11 individual archetypes for people who engage. Some just play: they’re there for fun. Some invest and try to make a profit. Others focus on earning Smooth Love Potion, Axie Infinity’s token. Others are core members of the governance structure.

Which of course, just makes the marketer’s job a little more challenging, because you’re not just growing a user base or a cadre of gamers: you’re potentially working to grow all the functional niches in a web3 community that form a mini-society or digital nation.

Check out how Sky Mavis, First Light Games, and PlayEmber are working through that challenge by watching (or listening to) the entire podcast.

Or just read out the full transcript below …

Full transcript: growth hacking web3

(This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

John Koetsier: Hello everybody and welcome. We’re talking web3 growth hacking. We’re talking with some very cool veterans in the space, some people who know a little bit about what they’re chatting about, and we’re gonna talk about some of the newer methods that people have used to growth hack web3.

We’re gonna talk about some of the older methods that people are using, web2 and other forms of marketing that are still working in web3, and maybe what’s on the cusp and what’s still coming.

Let’s start by giving everybody a chance to kind of introduce themselves. Dan, why don’t you kick us off?

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. Hey everyone, great to be here today. So, a little bit about me. I’ve been sort of in the industry now talking about crypto here for the last few years, deep-diving into NFTs, spending a lot more money than I definitely should be.

Before that, I was the CMO of a nonprofit organization. It was an international-based organization that used to pick up trash from the beaches.

And more recently, I dived into the web3 industry, working for a project called Melon, a creator NFT platform. And I’ve spent the last year working at First Light Games, delivering our game which is due to launch very soon called Blast Royale.

John Koetsier: Nice. Nice. Looking forward to seeing that. Looking forward to hearing a little bit more about what’s in that game, how it works, what the mechanics are, and how you’re gonna market that.

Quinn, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Quinn Campbell: Yeah, sure, John. Thanks. So, my name’s Quinn Campbell. I’m the VP of Growth at Sky Mavis. We are the developers of Axie Infinity, which is a larger NFT game at the time.

And so, right around that time I came across NFT gaming, I saw this idea of direct-to-community distribution, taking the middleman out of the system. And me, as a middleman, I knew that was the future and I had to be a part of it. And so, it’s all kind of rolled from there.

John Koetsier: Very cool. Axie Infinity, of course, super interesting what you guys are doing. Lots of challenges, lots of interesting stuff that you’re kind of trailblazing on.

Jon, give us a quick intro.

Jon Hook: Yeah. Thanks, John. So, similar to Quinn, I’ve spent a lot of time in web2, like mobile gaming and ad tech, and yeah, building, running companies in that space, which is kind of fun, like AdColony, Homa Games, BoomBit.

And yeah, for about the past 12 months now, I’m pretty deep into web3 having a lot of fun testing some stuff.

So it’s a lot of fun building and architecting that, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of the stuff that we’ve learned with all of you.

John Koetsier: Awesome. Why don’t we kind of start here? I kind of wanna level-set. Where are we in web3? Web3 is pretty connected to crypto, obviously, and there’s interesting things going on in that.

We’ve had a hype cycle.

Where are we now? Are we going up? It seems like people are holding their breath. There was such a run-up, and now there’s kind of like … the air’s been let out of the balloon. Where are we, what’s going on? Jon, can you kick us off there?

Jon Hook: Where are we? Well, I think it depends on who you’re asking, right? You know, if you’re a trader or maybe you’re an NFT artist, maybe things aren’t so great right now depending on which protocol and ecosystem you are into.

If you’re a web2 normie, same as usual, like, there’s bigger things going on in the world right now. And you probably …

John Koetsier: Maybe you’re celebrating.

Jon Hook: Yeah. Exactly. You know, you probably are not down massively on your NFT bag because you don’t have a bag, right? So, yeah. I think it really depends on the sort of lens you’re looking at.

But given we’re all talking about gaming, I think the two big challenges, if I’d separate them in summary, web2, you still have people playing games. The key challenge there still is around the monetization of those players, and depending on the genre, and thanks to Apple and ATT, you know, that’s still a huge challenge.

And sadly, you know, seeing a lot of studio closures at the moment because the distribution of games in web2 is pretty hard linked to monetization.

So, for me, on that web3 side it’s just pure excitement right now.

John Koetsier: Quinn, let’s bring you in and ask you kind of the same question because it does feel like there’s some actual real cool stuff happening.

And there are some people celebrating on the sidelines, “See, I told you this web3 stuff was all dumb anyways.”

But are we entering the cusp of new innovation?

Quinn Campbell: Yeah.

You know, when you’re in this absolutely crazy frenetic bull market, every morning you wake up you literally feel like you’re already behind the eight ball.

And there’s something intoxicating about that, but there’s also something that, you know, kind of is a drag on actually shipping. Whereas, I think there’s definitely a shakeout going on, but the projects that are able to really survive and build through this bear are going to be the foundation of the next decade of NFT gaming and of web3 as well, right?

And I think we’re seeing the shifts of this already because so many projects, especially during the bull market, you know, there was a new NFT gaming project almost every day. And 90% of them were basically just yield farms or DeFi protocols with a gaming wrapper around it. And that’s already starting to disappear.

Now you’re starting to see these game studios go back to their roots of creating a fun sticky core gameplay first and then just sprinkling some web3 magic on top of it.

John Koetsier: Dan, let’s bring you in. It’s funny because we have this confluence of craziness, right? So we had the web3 hype cycle and the bust, now this opportunity to build.

But we have this whole economy thing that’s going on, right? We have this whole supply chain thing that is affecting the whole world. We have inflation, we have other things. It’s all coming at once.

What are you seeing?

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. I mean, I think Quinn really hit the nail on the head with that, really. You know, so much in the real world is uncertain right now, and people are being a little bit more careful than usual.

Again, I do really think this is quite an exciting time being in web3 because really … so many of those projects that aren’t really ever going to be building anything are driving hype. And then before you know it, they’re gone and you never see them again.

And I think this really does give you an opportunity to take your time to research projects, to see what they’re actually doing and follow along the real hard journey that the developers of a game or project need to go on in order to become successful. So, you know, I think it’s a really nice time, even though you could say it’d be great if we launch right when the bull market starts, you know, so many things like this. But I think it’s a really good and exciting moment to be building something proper.

John Koetsier: Quinn, you talked about this return to sanity, of actually building something that’s a game, that’s fun, that’s enjoyable, that’s a good thing to do, and then sprinkling some web3 magic pixie dust on it.

Does this return to basic principles mean that marketing web3 experiences, web3 games can lean heavily on, let’s say, traditional mobile marketing or digital marketing techniques, or not?

Quinn Campbell: That’s a really, really interesting question. I think it’s one that we’re trying to solve for every day.

So far, what we’re seeing is the answer is kind of, like, “Yes, and…”

And if anything, I think it will kind of segment out who the users are, right? You can always still go after this degen web3 user base with kind of a higher propensity to spend.

Using the traditional channels to reach them where they’re comfortable is a big, big thing to solve for.

John Koetsier: Jon, what are your thoughts there? I mean, the traditional… What is traditional, right?

When web3 started two years ago, three years, five years, whatever it is, the traditional thing was, “Hey, I’ve got Discord, I’ve got Telegram, I’ve got a variety of other sort of new type channels, and I’ll build a list of people, and I’ll generate a lot of interest, and things will happen.” That never worked for me personally, because I … maybe I’m just an old fart, I don’t know, but those channels didn’t work for me.

They’re high noise, low signal, so busy, hard to really parse what’s actually happening. Are those losing some of their power or are we just needing to figure out different ways to use them?

Jon Hook: Again, I think it comes back to just the basics that we all know when you’re making a game is who are you targeting and what is their motivation? And I think to Quinn’s point, this is the interesting thing that we’re trying to figure out, because if you think about these what we don’t know …

It’s just, at the moment, they’ve found something really sort of new and innovating that also fits the player model that they’re looking to explore in terms of putting something into an amazing, fun ecosystem and actually getting something out, whatever that is, whether it’s financial, or more friendship, or some of the other cool stuff that Quinn is playing around with.

So, I think then when you start thinking about channels, it really depends, because there are some people that play a web3 game and they expect Discord, right? That’s their community, that’s their friendship base, that’s how they interact.

Whereas, sort of growing up in hyper-casual and seeing that evolve, it was all, you know, it’s Facebook, and then it’s no Facebook and Snap, and then it’s no Facebook or Snap, and then TikTok, and now it’s all TikTok. Like, what happens to Snap? Oh, yeah, don’t forget that Facebook is Instagram.

And kind of seeing that demographic evolution as sort of everyone goes through different platforms and grows up a little bit, depending on where they migrate to. I think that’s one of the things that I don’t know the answer to, but we’re playing around with.

Or … because the way that you manage and build a Discord channel is very different to building a TikTok channel.

So it’s kind of super fun to unpack that and then try and understand, well, how do you get people jumping between the two? Should they jump between the two? How do you track them between the two? I don’t know.

But yeah, these are all the things that we’re all trying to figure out. Fast forward a few years a bit: we’ve all worked at web2 publishing businesses, and it’s kind of like, “Look, this is just how it works. This is just where you advertise because it’s just what you do.” You know, maybe in a couple of years we’ll be sitting here at Consensus or, I don’t know, Token 2049, and we’ll have the rule book for how to do this.

John Koetsier: It’s funny, because there was a rule book. You knew what to do. You put capital to work on a certain number of partners, right? Dan, you’re dropping a game pretty soon. I mean, what are you guys doing?

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. I think it’s … you know, we are at this moment where nobody really knows what the answer is. Nobody really knows whether …

John Koetsier: That’s not comforting.

Dan Reynolds: Yeah, that’s right. No, but I think, you know, we …

Quinn Campbell: I think that’s what is most exciting about this.

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah. I think you’ve got this sort of, you know, the web3 sort of speculators, traders, and you’ve got people that are playing mobile, PC, console games, that do not own a single piece of crypto or NFTs. And their challenge is, and the challenge that we face right now is to try and strike that balance between tapping into this, the world of web3 speculators, but also aiming to take the game mainstream around the world.

So, we’re rying to strike this perfect balance between bringing in gamers, and web3 traders, and speculators, and NFT owners at the same time. So, I would say it’s our biggest challenge. And I’m not gonna come up here and say we have the exact answer. We’ll tell you in a year’s time probably, but…

John Koetsier: And those people have different incentives, right? Gamers: “Let me have fun.” Speculators: “I’m here for a reason. This is work.”

And you know a little bit about that, Quinn. I mean, Axie Infinity, kind of the OG here a little bit, right? I mean, people have been farming, and working, and leasing out property or opportunity to earn in Axie Infinity for some time.

How do you see this?

Quinn Campbell: Sure. Yeah.

And, Jon, I think the last time we were on a podcast together we talked about this as well. But, you know, we have like 11 or 12 different player archetypes that we’ve identified within Axie … only about half of them actually play the game.

So that’s where it’s just a complete left turn from what I’m used to coming from web2 gaming. Within that half of those archetypes who play, there are like hardcore PVP battlers, there’s eSports people, there’s people really just playing for fun and escapism, and then there’s also, you know, scholars and SLP [Smooth Love Potion] earners.

Within that half who don’t play, we have people who are doing nothing but heavily participating in our governance discussions for this eventual decentralization of our DAO.

We have people who are just content creators, or like community tooling devs.

But, you know, it’s all just the fun of building on the frontier.

John Koetsier: You are blowing my mind here, Quinn, because I’m listening to you, and I’m saying, “Sure, there is a game. But it’s much more than a game.”

Quinn Campbell: It’s much more.

John Koetsier: It’s a community. In fact, it’s kind of a digital prototype of a society, almost, right, with different people who have different roles, doing different things based on what they’re interested in, what they care about, what they want, what they’re there for.

Quinn Campbell: What they’re passionate about. Yeah. That’s absolutely right.

We call ourselves a digital nation. I’ll do a quick plug. This book, “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan, it’s kind of my Bible right now. So I highly recommend it.

But, yeah, I think that’s absolutely true, right? And even a lot of the community side of what our team is doing is trying to think about, how can we provide welfare? You know, not just monetary welfare, but any kind of benefits to your life as a community member, as a Lunassian, basically, that we can.

So we’re even running, you know, almost like the food pyramid, right? Like exercise and diet things just like healthy mindset kinds of things. Anything that we can do to actually bring welfare to our people is a positive kind of exercise for us.

John Koetsier: Let’s talk about interconnectivity. If we talk web3, if we talk people owning certain things, there’s portability there, there’s decentralization.

What about web3 experiences that you guys are invested in, or building, or playing, is portable … is something that I can take and I can put in my “bank” quote/unquote, you know, digital bank or something like that, or I can take and maybe even use somewhere else? Is that a core piece, or is that ancillary?

Dan, how are you thinking about that with First Light Games?

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. You know, I think we are at the very early stages of actually seeing this in action. I think, looking at what we want to do long term with our game, creating this sort of the blastverse and having NFT items that people own and being able to transfer them throughout different games that we develop along the way.

But also creating avenues where people can actually port their NFT pieces into different games, or to go further than just games themselves and to be able to do even more than that, whether it’s lending, or some form of utility that’s beyond the game itself.

I think this is something that we are actively exploring. And I think this is really where, long term, this is gonna be creating an entire world of opportunity around what digital ownership actually means. And I think right now we really are just touching into … you know, even the word interoperability is getting thrown around, metaverse is getting thrown around, yet, we haven’t really …

John Koetsier: Somebody said the M-word.

Dan Reynolds: I think, you know, it’s exciting. It really is exciting. I can’t wait for it all to happen. And being part of this, you know, one of the builders in the space of web3 and tapping into that whole world of this metaverse and how it will plan out. I think that is gonna be the key driver of adoption as well, of being able to own digital collectibles and have the control over what you do with them, and where they are, and what you gain from it, and what value you derive from it.

John Koetsier: Yeah. Jon, I wanna bring you in here. Somebody just said the M-word. And you start thinking about interoperability. I can see it in our family of games. Great. You know, hey, it’s better for our studio because you can use this from that game over there. Excellent.

It’s harder for people who have come up with a scarcity mindset, or this is what we are building to say, okay, you can take it and put it in another publisher’s game or something like that. That’s more challenging as well.

But there’s some things that make some sense to do that, and some things that may not, right? If I look at a physical reality, I could take U.S. dollars and convert them to Euros or something like that. But if I have, let’s say, a Slovenian certificate of citizenship, it’s not worth anything in Croatia or something like that, right?

What’s the balance there, Jon, as you think about web3, metaverse, and portability?

Jon Hook: I think that’s like an entire panel discussion. But I’ll give you my quick two cents, so…

John Koetsier: We need the solution in like three minutes, from you. [laughs]

Jon Hook: Okay. So, quick summary. I think what you’re seeing is… I mean, Quinn touched on it. I think you’ve got web3 native companies that understand the key piece in that is what we’re actually building is, you know, we’re reimagining culture, social trends, monetary… I’m not gonna say policy, but monetary things we can do with financial vehicles.

And that gets very exciting. And I think when you get under the bonnet of what people think are web3 games … and I love that, the digital nation. That’s actually what’s being built, and that blows my mind. That’s also what’s really exciting.

That gives you the ability to own these IEPs and move them around games.

I think you’re already starting to see that. Not just in gaming, you’re seeing Google Apps play around with this as well. So, I think that’s what you’re gonna see in terms of the evolution of marketplaces. You’ll see your specific marketplaces around games. And I heard Z[edd] talking about this at Magic Eden last week in San Francisco, that you’ll also then get, like, more vertical, very specific gaming marketplaces that have got really heavy tooling and infrastructure for some of these bigger AAA games, as well as some sort of broader marketplaces like Fractal, for example, that have maybe not tailoring specific genres, but have the kind of key tools and infrastructure you need for a wider selection of games.

But that’s really how I see the initial split right now.

And again, it makes sense because at the end of the day, we will have businesses to run. And you made that earlier comment about, you know, kind of app downloads and attribution, and if you’re a traditional web2 company you’re probably publicly listed and you have a share price and you need to make money. And that’s what NFTs are, they’re another monetization tool that you can deploy. What’s really exciting here is gonna redefine, I think, generally the world that we live in now is kind of where Axie are headed and a few others, which is, hey, we just have a really interesting opportunity to actually blend together everything, and it just so happens that the vehicle we can do that through is gaming. And I think that’s just really cool.

John Koetsier: That was a great job, Jon. You’re right. That’s a full panel. I mean, that’s a couple of years of evolution in the industry to figure that out if you even get close to it. So that was a great job. And also a good segue, because I wanna turn – and, Quinn, we’ll probably bring you in first here – I want to turn to the thought of web3 marketing stack.

We’re starting to see some evolution of that. We’re starting to see some tools. We’re starting to see some things like wallet relationship management … customer relationship management for the web3 era. We’re starting to see an attribution tool that’s built specifically for web3 in Spindl. I believe that’s Anthony …

Quinn Campbell: Antonio Garcia Mendez [Martinez] or something like that?

John Koetsier: Thank you. Yes, exactly. Formerly from Apple, and I believe Facebook, a couple of different places. Eric Seufert has invested in that; a lot of others as well.

Quinn, what are you seeing in the development of a web3 marketing stack? Is it super nascent right now, or is it starting to kind of emerge out of the mist?

Quinn Campbell: Maybe both at the same time. It is super nascent. But, you know, like over the last two months, I’ve started just having tons of conversations.

It just didn’t exist, and we ended up having to hack together a couple of existing web2 attribution tools as well as doing some things on our own side, just to get it working in web3. That’s amazing that people coming now can just use, you know, tools that exist.

I’m starting to see a couple too that are able to actually attach hot wallet addresses to social media accounts, which is kind of scary but also really powerful from a growth marketer’s perspective. You know, there’s a lot of like quest and soulbound token-related attribution kind of projects coming out as well. So, I think it’s really, really exciting, but it’s all very early. I would actually be really curious about what Jon and Dan are seeing on this front too, because I’m still even shaping my thoughts on it, to be honest.

John Koetsier: Love it. Dan, jump in.

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. I mean, not sure how much I can add to this one because it’s something that we are literally exploring at this stage right now. I think being able to… with wallet addresses connected to marketplaces, connected to social media accounts, I mean, this opens up an entire new realm of what you can do with sort of tracking addresses, and marketing, and whether it’s user acquisition.

And, you know, I put my hands up and say, “I think this is still quite early, or we are also…” I mean, I’m personally at the stage where I’m diving into it right now to learn as much as possible, but it is something we are discussing as to what we can do.

And I think there’s gonna be a huge opportunity here for marketing. I think really that’s the next sort of … it’s something that’s completely unique to web3, and I think this is something that once this really does open up and we start to see this in action and bringing in a lot of results as well, I think this is going to be a big driver for traditional game developers to consider exploring the web3 world a little bit more than what they currently are.

John Koetsier: Jon, jump in, and then I’ve got some follow-ups on this.

Jon Hook: So, a few thoughts. One, there’s a lot of lawyers getting really rich over this. When you think about GDPR, like, what is the web3 version of GDPR?

John Koetsier: You went exactly where I was gonna go. Web3, right? I mean, I have johnkoetsier.eth and you can see a lot about … [laughs]

Jon Hook: Yeah. But I think this is the thing I’m curious about.

So, again, think about audiences. You’ve got the web3 degens. We gotta know the whole concept of blockchain and what you can scrape and find out. What I’m interested to see is this next billion come on board and everything we’re talking about matures. How are they gonna feel about the idea that all of a sudden everything, all of the digital data or wherever it lives is now fully transparent?

Because that was one of the big challenges in web2. Obviously, if you think about the most recent thing with ATT, you now have the choice about whether to be tracked or not at a most simplistic level.

And so I’m kind of curious to see how this plays out, because that is one of the interesting things with marketers in web3 is that through wallet creation you get email address, social login, the whole wealth of data that … you know, for me, so long as you let people know what they’re opting in for, I think that is our job to bring them something really cool in web3 where they don’t actually even question that or even think, “Oh, hang on a minute, how do they know that about me? Where are they getting that from?”

Because the whole experience is so cool.

And as we were already talking about, there is that return. There’s a clear… whether it’s ownership, and that’s a big word, but there is something that they are putting in and getting a reward for it. And now, perhaps, finally, blockchain technology solves this problem that web2 we couldn’t quite figure out.

And to be able to do that successfully, your original question that we’ve gone on a tangent for is this attribution piece. And the thing I find curious is that people have got businesses to run. I still find a lot of these companies that I talk to are very focused on browser-based experiences right now in gaming, because that’s where a lot of the original eyeballs are. And it’s like, “Okay, how about mobile?” It’s like, “Oh no, no, no. We’re not touching that. We’ll leave that to AppsFlyer, Adjust, Kochava, right, you know, Singular, whoever.”

And I find that kind of interesting. I’m like, “Okay. But why are you not building cross-platform? Because that’s where it is and where it’s going.” They’re like, “Oh, well, we’ll just focus on browsers for now.” So, it’s nice to see actually a few cross-platform attribution companies now figuring this out.

John Koetsier: You hit the nail right on the head. Is that in the web3 world, I mean, people used to think crypto, hey, private money. Not really. Actually, as many people who have tried to steal some have found out, right?

The blockchain is there, and it’s public, and there’s a public record. And maybe we’re gonna need some kind of evolution in wallets, right? Because do I want everybody to be able to drop stuff on my wallet? Do I need a private part of a wallet and a public part of a wallet? Do I want to hook up my wallet to every web3 experience I come across and think, “Oh, wow, that’s interesting,” and then find out, “Oh, shoot. There was an error in the smart contract and my wallet got drained and oops, I’m screwed?”

It’s a challenging still-evolving ecosystem that isn’t necessarily completely safe for the normies, as somebody said. Any thoughts on that, Quinn?

Quinn Campbell: Yeah. The space as a whole definitely has a long way to go, you know, making it to the point where my mom is comfortable onboarding into web3.

So, of course, she’s very comfortable with email now. We’re just kind of waiting on that moment to come with web3. And it’s inevitable, you know, it absolutely will. But there’s definitely a bit of a watershed that has to happen.

John Koetsier: I think we should start to bring this to a bit of a close. And it seems, from what I’ve heard from each of you, it’s still a little bit wild wild west, still a little bit gorillas in the mist, you know, not totally clear. And, Quinn, you said that’s the most exciting thing about this world right now.

Quinn Campbell: It is. Yeah.

John Koetsier: You know, we’re inventing it, we’re building it as we come. If somebody is engaging in or thinking about engaging in marketing a web3 experience platform game… maybe I’ll ask each of you to give your three minutes of advice. And who shall I pick on first?

I think, Dan, go for it.

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. Great question. My piece of advice would be to fully immerse yourself in this space to a point where you sort of you’ve been there, done that, and you’ve experienced things such as buying NFTs, and creating wallets, and minting your first NFT, to seeing how different projects conduct their mint to the full circle of transferring crypto from wallet addresses, to exchanges, to withdrawing that back into your bank account.

[Dan had a minor connectivity problem, but Quinn continued on the same topic: starting out in web3 marketing…]

Quinn Campbell: I think one would be about being very deliberate about who you’re targeting.

So, I think that would be a major, major focus for me. And then the other two are… there are actually some really cool growth tech projects out there that can help you in the early days, which we didn’t have at Axie. These are the projects I’ve just seen in the last two months. So, I would explore those.

A project by the name of Safary, with a Y — S-A-F-A R-Y by Justin Vogel — comes to mind.

And he actually just put out a tweet like two weeks ago, where he did a diligence on all of the web3 growth tech space, and he identified like 80 different projects and everything they were doing. I think that would be a really awesome place to start as well to see what is a strong fit for the early days of actually building a community, building a project.

Maybe if I can plug one more piece. I know I’m kind of speaking a bit ad nauseam here, but one thing I like to say all the time, and Jon Hook, I know you’ve heard me say this before, but it’s so true, right?

And so, being comfortable getting concierge, getting white glove kind of service to actually find these first key community members, that is the cornerstone of what you’re building going forward.

John Koetsier: Interesting. Super interesting. Your first 10,000 co-owners. Absolutely love it. Jon, your three minutes of advice?

Jon Hook: Three minutes. So, I think the first one is just getting to the web3 mindset. I think one of the biggest challenges of moving from web2 to web3 is just this attitude of, “Oh, I’ve done it before in web2. This is just kind of how it works, and just cut and paste”… and Quinn just, you know, that analogy of your first 10,000 co-owners, well, there you go, right? Totally different mindset. So, you just prepare yourself for that. You need to just start getting involved in some projects. It doesn’t mean you have to buy the NFT, but just start hanging out in Discord and start listening and understanding some of those core differences that you just don’t get in web2. So I think that’s really crucial.

Two, I mean, you’ve heard a lot on this podcast already: Start doing your research about your web3 growth stack, because there are a lot of really exciting new companies out there. And yeah, I agree about Safary. I met Justin last week, and I think what they’re doing is really interesting and a great initiative. So, I think just early on, start looking and talking to as many like web3 partners as you can to analyze and make some decisions on what we do in-house? What can we build on top of, versus what do we absolutely need to partner with and build up knowledge in?

And the third thing, given that we’re all kind of in gaming, is again, make some decisions based on one and two about what it is you are building. Because I still see the future with two types of games. Like mobile-first, like amazing… There are games, first and foremost, that depending on whether it’s AAA, mid-core, RPG, hyper-casual, are gonna require a different tech stack, versus, you know, there is absolutely nothing wrong, and I feel bad because I think people are just a bit down on Gamefy, and I think that is a different beast in its own right. And it’s perfectly okay. And it’s kind of like gamers versus Gamefy, just like hitting on each other.

But I think if that’s what you’re going down, that’s great. But it’s obviously – the clue’s in the name – more DeFi-heavy and their kind of like tooling and the expectation of the people within that are clearly gonna be more finance-orientated. There’s gonna be some similarities in terms of growth stack, but some of the backends, especially if you start thinking about the wallet and the concept of staking and what that looks like, will look very different to that Gamefy audience versus maybe a more traditional gaming audience.

John Koetsier: That’s a great point, Jon. And you know what? Some nations are Switzerland, some are, you know, United States of America. Right? There are different nations for different types of people and that’s 100% fine. No worries. Dan, we kind of lost you in the ether there, you were lost in the metaverse. You came back. Thank you. Can you restart your sort of three minutes of advice for somebody who is brand new to web3 marketing and what you would suggest they do?

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. Brilliant. Thanks for allowing me back in. I thought the internet would hold up at least 5, 10 more minutes for me. But, yeah, you know, I really do think that in order to really get ahead of the game and to market in the most efficient way possible, I really do think that you need to immerse yourself in the entire realm of web3 as much as possible. I would go as far to say that it would be worth buying some NFTs, it would be worth having staked some NFTs, it’d be worth experiencing a mint and an airdrop and how all of that works from being a customer from that point of view.

And I think until you really have gone through the hardships of not knowing if your money transferred or your crypto transferred from one wallet to the next, or to actually doing it and losing money, I think until you’ve really lost some crypto or been rugged by a few NFT projects… This may sound silly, but I think until you’ve experienced that, you can’t fully relate with what your customers in the future might be thinking and might have gone through. .

No, I think, just to touch on what Jon mentioned there, I think there’s so much research that should be done. You really need to read as… I would say, read a lot of books, but there probably won’t be so many books out just yet on all of this. So, I would be watching podcasts like this to cipher as much as possible and to really go through the entire experience. Research, research, research. But on top of that, just trial and error. All of this, at the moment, I would say, is a whole lot of testing, and you’ve just gotta get your hands dirty and try it. When it fails, look back at what failed and then try something new next time.

Quinn Campbell: If I may, John. I really love that last point, Dan. You know, I think that failure is not just part of the development process in web3, but public failure is part of the development process in web3. You’ve just gotta be ready for it and you gotta lean into it. And your community is so much more forgiving because they’re your co-owners alongside you.

John Koetsier: Oh, wow. I love it. Dan is all like of the “suffer sucker” school of learning how to market the web3, and Quinn is like the masochist. [laughs] “I’m suffering, and it’s in public.” In that spirit, I have a confession to make for you guys. I told you guys I just came back from Web Summit and this is my first morning, I’m kind of on European time still, so I was up really early. I usually don’t get down into my office space here till like 8:00 am. I came in at like 7:00 am, and guess what was on my calendar? This. And I had totally forgotten. It was, like, my first day back. I hadn’t prepped, I hadn’t, you know, “I’ll ask this person that thing, and this person, that thing.” I think it kind of worked out, honestly. And I want to thank each of you guys. Jon, amazing insights. Really do appreciate it. You pulled this together as well; you pulled these guys together. Thank you for that. Quinn, so great to hear from you and Axie Infinity, what you guys are doing there. Dan, First Light Games, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you, guys, all. And maybe we’ll do this again in six months and maybe we’ll know more.

Quinn Campbell: Looking forward to it.

Dan Reynolds: Great to have been here, guys. Thank you very much.

Jon Hook: Yeah, I loved it.

Everyone in marketing knows CRM, or customer relationship management. Less well known is its new web3 variant, wallet relationship management (WRM).

In the standard web2 world, marketers and product managers measure results with technologies that capture prospect and customer activity: cookies on the web, advertising IDs like IDFA and GAID on mobile devices, and email addresses for signed-up and signed-in users. While much of that is still valuable in the world of web3, it misses a huge amount of the value that users, customers, and gamers create in web3 experiences.

Why?

Because web3 value is being measured, recorded, and even broadcasted in a very different place: on the blockchain.

“You can actually leverage on-chain data and dive into any custom audience,” says Absolute Labs co-founder and CTO Antony Gardez. “You can look into their history of NFT purchases, their portfolio values, their experience in web3 gaming. All of this is on-chain today. The blockchain is an open ledger, so you can know all of this in a very public way. It’s there.”

While all of that on-chain insight is out there and public, it’s not easy to read. Nor is it easy to aggregate and ingest into a marketing platform. And all of those are necessary precursors to making it actionable.

That’s precisely where a Wallet Relationship Management platform comes in: it provides the ability to harvest massive amounts of blockchain data, then provide the insights, segmentation and automation to leverage it.. This is important for native web3 brands, of course, whether they’re targeting gamers, developer communities, token holders, or NFT collectors and traders. But it’s increasingly important for companies and marketers that haven’t typically identified themselves as web3, too.

And that’s because wallet technology is expanding quickly.

“A crypto wallet today is going to replace many, many things that existed in web2 first,” says Samir Addamine, co-founder and CEO of Absolute Labs. “The way we connect to services online, internet services through email, and these complicated passwords and approaches we use … that as well can be replaced by a wallet.”

A crypto wallet doesn’t hold money or art or other digital artifacts and property in the same way our physical wallets might hold credit cards, identification, and cash. Instead, crypto wallets store digital keys needed to buy and prove ownership of digital products and assets. They connect to specific blockchains and display what you own: tokens, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and more. And they can also be used as a form of identity to acquire access to specific web3 experiences.

There are only about 400 million wallets today, Addamine says: less than 5% of the population.

Which means there is a lot of room for growth.

Much of that growth is likely to come from what we’ve traditionally considered web2 companies, many of which are now building blockchain-enabled or blockchain-inspired platforms for customer loyalty, customer rewards, and customer access to exclusive products, services, or experiences. For instance, Nike offers personalized stores in its Swoosh mobile apps for customers, and is adding .SWOOSH, a web3 experience that will offer NFTs and unique experiences such as being able to design your own digital wearables. Over time, that might grow to offer digital twin NFTs of physical NIKE products you buy. And, over time, wallet-to-wallet communication might enable your NIKE digital wearables to show up in Fortnite, or Meta’s Horizon Worlds, or other virtual environments.

To understand community health, uptake, and activity, you need Wallet Relationship Management to manage digital asset strategies.

“Hopefully, soon, we won’t be saying web2/web3 anymore,” says Gardez. “Think of Nike recently announcing their Swoosh platform, which is just the evolution of their global web3 strategy, which is becoming just their digital asset strategy … that’s really what Absolute Labs is helping companies do. It’s helping manage their digital assets strategy, which happens to be called web3 right now.”

Knowledge is great.

Intelligent action based on that knowledge is better.

A Wallet Relationship Management platform is central to marketing in web3: nurturing customer relationships, providing community health stats, and serving as a customer data platform (CDP) and marketing automation system.

Get all the details in our conversation by watching the video above, or subscribing to the Web3 Marketing Podcast. And, don’t forget to subscribe to the Absolute Labs YouTube channel.

Full transcript: Wallet Relationship Management

(This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

John Koetsier: Welcome to the first-ever episode of the inaugural “web3 Marketing Podcast.” This is actually kind of a cool moment. I’ve spent a ton of time recently talking to people in web3, talking to people who work at Axie Infinity, talking to people who are building games or experiences in web3, and the reality is, how do you market in web3? It’s a bit of a mystery. Even the experts, even the ones who are huge, have real questions. And if you’re maybe a web2 company, or a traditional company, a big brand and enterprise, you probably have even more questions. We’re gonna try and answer those in this podcast, not just in this first episode, but in many other episodes with experts, with people who are figuring it out, have figured it out, are doing it on a daily basis.

We’re starting this one with the principles behind Absolute Labs. Absolute Labs, of course, is a company that is building something very, very interesting. It’s not CRM, it’s WRM, it’s Wallet Relationship Management. We’re gonna get into what that is, how it works, what it’s good for, what it does, all that stuff in just a moment.

First off, welcome, Samir. Welcome, Antony.

Antony Gardez: Thank you, John.

Samir Addamine: Thank you, John.

Antony Gardez: Great to be here.

John Koetsier: Hey, great to be here. Great to have you. We’ll get into Absolute Labs, and a little bit of your background, and why you’re building this in a moment. But I kinda let the cat out of the bag, Wallet Relationship Management, what is that?

Samir Addamine: All right. So, I can start here, right? We’re kind of trying to define this category here. And we realize, you know, since we started exploring web3 and its capabilities, and what does it mean, this kind of next internet, this web3 internet. And with Antony, we’ve been building marketing tech products for the past 14 years. It’s our fourth company here that we’re building together on that.

Wallets are about security, about … not yet about user experience, but that will come as well, right? And we believe wallets are very, very powerful.
There are 300 million wallets, less than 5% of the population today that are using them to trade crypto. It’s still very early, right? It’s 4% of the total population. Now, once we get to mainstream, and hopefully, we’ll get there soon, there’s still a lot of work to do here.

And by the way, you know, we removed the phrase “web3 CRM,” kind of the way people described our company and our product, because we believe web3 word itself is gonna disappear, hopefully, soon. It’s gonna be the internet, right? The new internet, the ownership internet, whatever you wanna call it. But yeah, and wallet relationship is about how we reinvent this way to acquire customers, convert them, or do some retention, you know, is marketing in this new internet. And wallet relationship marketing is combining all that.

John Koetsier: Antony, so we got the big picture. Give us some of the details, give us a couple of use cases, give us a couple of ways Wallet Relationship Management works.

Antony Gardez: Absolutely. I think what’s key here is to understand that we are looking at audiences. This is web3, this is wallets, but it’s still, at the end of the day, audiences. So, you know, we’re talking about owners of digital assets, but also players of web3 games, and users of NFT marketplaces. All these people are identified by their wallet address.

And from here, how do you, as a company, look into these audiences and understand who is your average user, average customer? What are their profiles, and how do you actually enrich these profiles? How do you bridge your, let’s say, web2 data coming from analytics on your NFT marketplace, for instance? How do you see more than just this web2 data, and how do you bridge this with on-chain activity?

For instance, let’s say I have an NFT marketplace and I want to better understand who my users are in terms of their interests, in terms of what it is that they might buy more.

Essentially, the idea is to say, “I’m used to this in web2, but web3 is different. I wanna do sort of the same thing, but adapt it to what web3 offers.” And that’s where we come in.

John Koetsier: Super, super interesting. Blockchain is out there. It’s public. It’s a ledger, you mentioned that. It’s a way of reading what’s on the ledger and giving some analytics on that, and maybe some insight. It’s much, much more than that and we’ll get into all those details.

But, Samir, let’s take a step back. You started Absolute Labs, what, a year ago? Why did you start it? What’s your background?

Samir Addamine: So, you know, we built several marketing tech companies in the past few years. As I mentioned, it’s our fourth company, actually, we’re building with Antony. And the previous one was a kind of a mobile marketing leader in its category. It was called FollowAnalytics. And we started it back in Paris in 2013, moved it to San Francisco in the U.S after Marc Benioff became our first investor, and grew the company to become one of the leaders in each category according to Gartner and the Magic Quadrant.

So, we exited the company almost two years ago, and realized that there was something very interesting here with web3 and with these wallets and this ownership internet. And then, you know, after we started the Absolute project in June 2021 and actually delivered the beta version of our product in June 2022, so four months ago, and a lot has been happening so far since then.

John Koetsier: It’s amazing and interesting to me because we’ve had some boom, we’ve had some bust in crypto, which is closely aligned, but not exactly the same as web3, obviously, and yet, the number of infrastructure companies, and marketing stack companies in web3 that are getting funding and getting out there is quite amazing.

Antony, talk about some of the capabilities here.

You mentioned already in general … let’s say I’m a web2 company, and maybe I don’t even think of myself as a web2 company, I’m just a company. I’m on the internet. I’ve got an app. I’m selling stuff. Maybe I’m doing some digital twin-type products, maybe I’m doing some NFTs as passes, maybe I’m doing something else, maybe I’ve got a loyalty program, I don’t know.

But I’m hearing about this web3 thing, and I’m thinking, “I’d like to understand it. I’d like to get into it. I’ve started building some products here.” What does Absolute do for them?

Antony Gardez: So, it’s very interesting that you’re mentioning web2 companies, and the fact that, hopefully, soon, we won’t be saying web2/web3 anymore. There’s so many brands getting in there, right?

In terms of specific examples, I mentioned audience management, right? This is the data side of things. What really matters for companies is also to be able to go beyond data.

Having great dashboards is one thing, but how do you leverage this? How do you actually improve your return on investment? How do you increase customer knowledge, which is, as we all know, actually, key to all major corporations? They build profiles, so they better know their customers, so they are better at serving them, at creating the right products for them, and marketing their products to their end users.

So, our platform basically covers these two main aspects, which are understanding the customers, but also interacting with them by leveraging this customer knowledge. So, this means marketing automation, which is, again, web3 is an evolution of web2 in a way. So you can think of HubSpot or a Salesforce marketing cloud, or Braze.

How do you transform this into, or let’s say, adopt this idea to Web 3? And so, that’s what we did.

Your audiences in web3, how do you interact with them? Well, you can send email messages and text messages from Absolute Labs, but you can also leverage Discord. You can leverage airdrops. You can directly mint NFTs to reward users for having been active on your platform or for having completed a quest in your game. So, it’s about engagement, it’s about gamification.

All of it in the context of web3, so that’s wallet addresses, that’s digital assets, and much more.

John Koetsier: Samir, I wanna bring you in here because we’re just talking about more traditional companies. But as I mentioned, off the top, I recently had a chat with three people who are deep in web3 — they’re building games, they’re building experiences, they’re marketing, they’re growth leaders in the space — and we had an hour-long conversation.

And there’s lots of ideas out there, there’s lots of technologies out there, there’s lots of things that people are doing, but there’s really no defined path or defined tech stack right now for growth marketing in web3. That seems interesting.

And one person said, “That’s why it’s exciting. We’re new. It’s young.” Your thoughts?

Samir Addamine: Yeah.

We believe there’s gonna be plenty of startups coming in this kind of web3 marketing category, right?

We have built a product that is covering these three main things that I mentioned. Acquisition. You know, web3 is a kind of a dream for marketers. Data, is now what we call on-chain analytics, is public, right? It’s all available. It’s not structured. And we built what we call a customer data platform. It’s a CDP, right? You know, a huge data warehouse with all the on-chain analytics data, and we wanna allow marketers, actually, to use these on-chain analytics and their first-party data ingested here to better target leads. And we wanna help advertisers as well on their spend, you know, leveraging this data.

So, that’s for the acquisition part. Completely reinvented here, we bring the first piece here, which is gonna be a kind of composable data warehouse.

And we’re gonna make it available for many of our startups, by the way, in the coming months, right? But they can leverage. We invested a lot here.

Second piece here is the conversion … and when we talk about conversion, we talk about segmentation, you know? Think about tools that exist in web2 like Segment, for example, that have a CDP and other products, right?

But also, you know, Marketing Automation Platform, MAP, right, Braze, that Antony mentioned, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So, this conversion is made here on web3. So, on web2, it’s made through email, right, mostly, and some push notifications, some SMS, social media, and all of that.

You have, you know, wallets have these amazing capabilities to allow advertisers, actually, and companies to airdrop tokens or NFTs directly to a wallet. But you have to do that in a way that is automated, respectful of privacy, opt-in, etc., right? So that’s why we needed a tool, and we built it for that. You know, you wanna be able to do all these things.

And then you have the retention phase here, how are you gonna be able to reactivate these dormant, potential customers?

Here, there are wallet customers. And we incentivize them with rewards, with tokens, and NFTs.

And that’s these three things, you know, acquisition, conversion, and retention. That’s the future marketing stack, web3 marketing stack that needs to be built. We believe we’re bringing our piece here and are doing our part of the job.

But this is the very beginning here. We believe there’s gonna be a lot of companies. We’re already seeing many of them and partnering with many of them building connectivity. You know, web3 is also composable, right? Platforms are like open, and, you know, you collaborate with all the technologies, and everyone is adding his piece of innovation here to better serve the end user, right? There’s this community thing in web3 that is very powerful.

John Koetsier: It’s interesting that you mentioned segmentation, and when you were talking about retention, that word came back to me. Because, guess what, you also wanna know what they are using? What are they using of my services right now? What are they most interested in? What’s the best methodology to get in touch with them, not just to get in touch with, but what’s the best message to deliver that’s gonna be most impactful, correct?

Samir Addamine: Yes, it’s exactly that. This is the same, you know, marketers, we cannot say web2, web3 marketers. I mean, they’re the same people. And web3 marketers are coming from web2, right? But they’re just, like, embracing it and discovering the capabilities of wallet, you know, and its utility as a customer ID, and discovering the capabilities of on-chain analytics, right, which is huge here.

You know, before that, we had to do things. When web2 marketers come to web3, and you see many, many of them now that are transitioning to that, once they discover the capabilities here, they’re quite amazed actually.

And, plus, it’s more beneficial to the end user and the consumers. We don’t need to know them. We don’t need to have their names, their demographics, you know? A wallet is enough. We learn a lot about them already. We keep their privacy and security here safe, right?

John Koetsier: And knowing is really actually important, just to stick on the segmentation thing for a moment. I was talking to Quinn Campbell, VP of Marketing for Sky Mavis, which makes Axie Infinity.

And he said, “We actually have 11 or 12 different personas in the game, different types of people, and only half of them actually play the game.” Now, that’s in gaming, but this is gonna be the case for any web3 experience because some people, their point is to engage in the experience. If it’s a game, playing the game, if it’s an activity or utility, using that. Some of the people might be investors, some people might be just kind of the glue that brings the community together. They’re invested in different ways for different reasons, and if you treat them all identically, you’re really gonna fail.

Samir Addamine: That’s completely right.

That’s one of the things that is very important here in web3. Your customers are holders, investors, developers. You know, there’s different kinds of levels, stakeholders right here, and they can have different roles, they can vote in the governance in your DAO. They have different levels of interaction, right, with your dApp, or your tokens. And here, that’s where, again, the web3 marketing platform is gonna be different. Before that, it was an email, one person now, right, but that’s not working in web3.

John Koetsier: Yep. Antony, let’s bring you back here. You talked about some cool capabilities and a new space. Who are you working with right now? What are you doing that is helping them?

Antony Gardez: Yeah, I think it’s very relevant to what we’re just discussing in terms of approaches to different personas. If you think of companies like The Sandbox, they’re a huge metaverse, they’re actually bringing a lot of corporations to web3 as well. They’re doing a huge part in, you know, working on mass adoption, future mass adoption, this big theme in web3.

The Sandbox, as you mentioned, they have people buying land because it’s an investment. There are people investing in the token. The token itself is actually a currency in a virtual world. The virtual world, there’s players, there’s just exploring, others are here to actually build as well. And that’s interesting because it’s part of their objective. There’s multiple objectives. There is getting people to play, getting people usually to buy assets, because that’s revenue for the company, but, overall, they want people to build experiences as well. That’s what creates the engagement in the game.

It’s both, right? And you need to be able to do both to be relevant because if you only look at what people invest in, you’re missing the whole part of what they do in game. Do they actually play the game? Do they build in the game? And only if you get the full picture, can you actually be relevant. So, you create the segments, you import the data. And from here, you get to actually being relevant as a brand, and that’s what marketing is about. I mean, it’s been decades that marketing is about being actually relevant, and trying to get to the one-to-one relationship with your customers so they really feel nurtured and feel like they’re precious and unique for your brand.

John Koetsier: Mm-hmm. Interesting. What’s the vision for the future, Antony? What kind of capabilities are you going to be building?

Antony Gardez: There’s three, four different aspects. One is data, of course. And this is a key thing we have, and this is a huge expertise we have as well. As Samir said, our background is in mobile marketing. In terms of big data, in terms of managing this amount of data, this is really our expertise, and there’s a lot more we can do compared to what we are currently doing.

We’re just getting started, right? The company’s very young.

So, if someone is about to leave, as a holder, as a person in my community, what can I do to try and keep them around? Maybe I can airdrop something, some tokens, or more of a, not necessarily an asset with specific value, but something that makes my customers feel, you know, valued, in a way. So that’s one aspect.

Another one is expanding the marketing capabilities in terms of data collection.

Of course, if you wanna be able to communicate with your users, there’s airdrops, there’s Discord, but there’s email as well, and there’s other channels that you wanna be able to leverage. To do so, you need to be able to collect some of this data. And this is pretty traditional marketing. That’s what marketers call “landing pages.” You spin up a page or you launch a marketing campaign where the main objective is to collect email addresses and to be able to then, in the future, get back to the users and be relevant on the type of communication you have. So that’s a second topic.

There’s a third one, which is becoming basically the hub of web3 in a way. So, we mentioned this marketing stack of web3, how, as a company, can you be relevant and be embracing all aspects of web3? For instance, there’s a hot topic, I would say recently, which would be wallet-to-wallet communication, right? There’s companies out there such as Push Protocol, which is formerly known as EPNS. There’s protocols like XMTP and other amazing ideas and amazing companies working on trying to find how to do web3 communication right.

We want to be also the hub that companies can use to leverage these technologies without having to pick which one is going to be the one they will use. They can just create their customer experiences and leverage the best technology there through our network of partners and technologies offered.

I could go for a long time on innovation ideas, but these are some of the main themes. Maybe, Samir, you have things to add here.

Samir Addamine: You know, John, to summarize, we’re adding more intelligence, more recommendation, more machine learning. And, obviously, we are delivering new features every month on this platform. There’s a huge team actually working with Antony, and we invested a lot here. And fortunately, we did it at the right time, because the reality is that this crypto winter, and these crises and crashes that we’ve been seeing since June now has been in some way accelerating the need for companies to do more marketing and get closer to their customers.

John Koetsier: Let’s hit on that because I was recently talking to Jon Hook, who’s the CMO of PlayEmber, they’re building a web3 experience right now. And I asked him, “What do you think about the current environment?” He said, “It’s a beautiful moment of a bear market. A beautiful moment of a bear market.” Expand on that a little bit, Samir. Why is now the right time?

Samir Addamine: Look, we had probably like five big crashes, right, since crypto exists, like, since Bitcoin, right? The first one was probably in 2011, the second one in 2013. I’m not going to go through them, but the third one in 2015. We had another one in 2015, and then, you know, we’re in 2022, and we probably had like from, you know …

But this industry is very resilient. They keep learning from these mistakes and adapting to it. And this is an amazing ecosystem of very smart people, that’s what we discovered in the past like two years, and it’s quite amazing to see this.

There’s like hundreds of teams all over the world working on the next innovation, adding to the existing…it’s an open-source industry, so they add all to the existing, you know, building here that we are … and as an example, with this kind of disaster that everyone has been reading about for the past few days …

John Koetsier: FTX.

Samir Addamine: … and this big crash, FTX. You know, the exchanges have launched with CZ first, with Binance first, but the others were doing it before, a few of them. Proof of reserve, right? It’s a new … it’s collateral. It’s transparency. And, you know, and this industry, and the way it’s resilient, it’s learning, it’s coming with new ideas, and smart people come in with… And proof of reserve, as an example, we had a meeting this morning with one of our partners to be able to provide this kind of metric to our customers in our own dashboards, having, you know, because using absolute segmentation features allow us to look at users and what kind of exchanges they’re training with.

You’re gonna have this kind of view as well. I mean, this is very important, and we believe what we can bring is that data is about transparency, right? You know, you can trust the data, actually, when it’s structured and presented in a way that is actually very clear. And this is very important for us, to be able to have this transparency. So, you know, I believe we have our role to play here as well.

John Koetsier: It’s super interesting because the thought that came to my mind as you were speaking there is that whatever company I am, whether I’m web3 native, whether I’m a brand, an enterprise, and I create something that is web3 that offers tokenization, that offers ownership as well as participation, that offers maybe portability of assets, or something like that, I need to have some data on what’s the health of my community.

What’s your participation in my community, right? How many wallets do I have? What’s the contents of those wallets, in aggregate, right? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Where’s the activity moving to? What are the parts and components that are most interesting?

Samir Addamine: That’s exactly the point, John. This existing marketing technology, you know, they’re not working in web3. And that’s actually, it’s interesting, we see some web3 companies’ customers starting implementing them with the idea that they would help them with that. But they cannot use them. web2 marketing platforms are secondary here. We actually believe they’re commodities. You know, email marketing is a commodity. SMS/push is a commodity, right? We integrate it in our own platform, but they’re not the primary channel here.

And another reason why these existing marketing technologies won’t work for web3 is because they’re not managing the wallet as the customer ID. And it’s much more complex than a crypto key, right, than a private key here to manage. It’s much more complicated than that. Anyhow, it’s very interesting. I think web3 companies or web2 companies operating in web3, they need to get closer and better understand the stakeholders here. As you just said, who are my holders, who are investors, who are my dApp users and gamers if I’m game? What is the activity in my Discord, etc., right? All of these questions are here.

John Koetsier: Antony, if we think web3, crypto is important in web3, but it’s not synonymous. Can you tease out those two realms?

Antony Gardez: Yeah, I think it’s quite interesting you … I was actually thinking about that because you mentioned, you know, this bear market is a bit different, right? And I think a reason for this is that there is now an actual distinction between crypto and web3. Web3 is a space in which people build, in which companies are coming as well, and crypto is, you know, a way to define crypto is cryptocurrencies and prices of assets, and looking at Bitcoin going up and down, and this is not impactful.

If you look at what’s been happening in 2022 so far, there’s been a couple pretty sizable crashes when it comes to asset prices and liquidity exiting the market, and so on, from Terra, to FTX, and other smaller-size crises. But at the same time, companies have never been filing that many patents as this year when it comes to web3 as a whole. The old major companies, you know, the Metas, Googles, all these companies, they keep on innovating in web3 as well. If you look at all the big retailers, everybody’s coming, everybody’s very active despite the current market activity, globally, there’s a lot of investment going into web3 as well, as you mentioned, in terms of infrastructure, and so on.

This is not stopping. Prices are going down. Investors are sad at times because of this, but it’s different from web3, right?

They’re here. And so, for builders, it’s actually not a bear market. It’s actually extremely exciting.

John Koetsier: Samir, let’s bring it to a close here. There’s two key audiences, two key markets that you’re developing this technology for. There’s, of course, the web3 space, and there is also the traditional brand and enterprise, which we could call web2, if we choose. Let’s start with web3. What’s their biggest challenge, and how do you fix it?

Samir Addamine: So this, yeah, so this is very interesting because web3 companies, the native companies, they were in this since actually, I would say, the beginning of this year, they were in this kind of bull market where everyone was buying tokens. There were not even tokens in NFT platforms for everyone, right? That was quite amazing. And they moved from this situation to a kind of a crash, and, you know, and then plenty of other web3 NFT projects that were like starting, and a lot more, and maybe not enough yet users. And it was really fast, right, you know, and it’s just a question of a few months. So they have to adapt to that.

So then, again, we’ve been very, very fortunate that we built during this bull market, and now in this bear market we are actually selling a lot because they all need that kind of product, right? They all need that kind of… And, again, these existing marketing technologies, we call it web2 marketing platform, they don’t work for web3.

But now, some of them have been desperately going after these tools, you know, these web2 marketing tools, hoping they would help them with emails, etc., but they don’t know how to tie an email to a wallet address. I mean, all of this is not working that much, right? Not very well, actually.

So, web3 companies now have been hiring a lot of marketers and CRM marketers, reacting, because they need to increase their level of marketing automation and CRM capabilities inside their companies. So they have been working hard in the past few months, and we are working with many great teams on that.

John Koetsier: So, what’s interesting there is that I was talking to First Light Games, building a web3 game, and their excitement around this current market is that in the bull phase, everybody’s winning, everybody’s going, you know what, whether the game is good or not, whether the experience is good or not, because you sell the tokens, and everybody’s happy, rich and happy, and maybe not so smart.

Now, there’s an opportunity to differentiate. So, that’s the web3 side. What about the web2 side, the brand, the enterprise side? What’s their biggest challenge?

Samir Addamine: So, this is very interesting as well because these companies, and we know them very well, right, we come from this world, we used to work with these companies and they are like established businesses. They don’t really have tokens, they’re looking for the long-term.

The first interesting thing that we see with them is that these days, right, they continue to invest massively. They’re thinking about 10 years from now, they’re not thinking about like, 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. We’re quite impressed with a few of the teams we’re working with on this, large web2 companies. And there’s a lot of retail, luxury, entertainment, right, even media as well, investing in web3 business, whether it’s NFT, metaverse, but they don’t see web3 just as, hey, I’m gonna launch an NFT collection or buy a LAND. They see it as, how can I create products or connect my product and services to web3 and add also some innovation here and create things?

And what is interesting, and maybe one of the challenges we have with their teams is they’re also, they’re the opposite of the web3 companies, they need to be evangelized on the web3 marketing capabilities, right? We need to help them. So we put in place a kind of a customer success team with some kind of experts on web3 marketing that have experienced launching an NFT collection and doing this kind of stuff, or partnering, or doing some business development in the metaverse, etc. And they need that today because they already have their marketing stack. And that’s another challenge here, which is, they’re using the existing marketing platform. They don’t wanna remove that, they don’t wanna displace them, right? So we had to work as well on connectivity and integration to leverage their existing email marketing and CRMs so they can continue leveraging our platform, you know, the wallet relationship, but then also have this journey, you know, this flow that is gonna continue on an email for their existing platform.

So, this is what is challenging with web2 companies, they wanna go there, they’re investing a lot, they have to leverage their existing assets as well. So, it’s a kind of a different approach here, but we’re adapting with them.

John Koetsier: Excellent. I think we’ll call it there. This has been exciting, it’s been informative, it’s been interesting, it’s been enlightening. And this is just the beginning. This is the first episode. There’s going to be so many more.

We’re gonna talk to experts. We’re gonna talk to people in the trenches. We’re gonna talk to people who are implementing. We’re gonna talk to thinkers and strategists and others in the web3 space, in the marketing space, in the web3 marketing space, and more about this Wallet Relationship Management — what it does, how it works, how to use it, other things like that.

Stay tuned, subscribe, and see you next time.