In the fourth of his series of blog posts for the Hard Numbers website, MD and Co-founder Darryl Sparey talks openly about our approach to marketing for Pandimensional Trading Company, an NFT project. Darryl shares the challenges, opportunities and lessons learned from marketing a product he knew nothing about two months ago. This week, he looks at two high profile NFT projects, which had very different outcomes, and what can be learned from them.
This week I’m going to talk a little bit about BODR, BT, the D-O-double-G and NFTs. Yes, much like the marketing industry, if there’s one thing web3 needs to make it more accessible, it’s definitely more acronyms…
But the last week or so in NFT marketing has seen two case studies: One where the talent behind it seemed to have had the Wrong Idea, and one where the results were Beautiful. And then I’ll talk about how I can apply lessons from this to the project I’m working on currently – Pandimensionals.
The last two weeks saw two very high profile NFT launches, which both had very differing results. Firstly, the DJ who must be SICK of getting tweets complaining about broadband provision, BT, who released an NFT project called “888 Inner Circle”. It was a collection of 88,888 NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Following one of the key trends from successful NFT launches over the last year or so, the NFT offered some form of “real world utility” and offered to grant those who bought them member-only benefits. So far, so impenetrable for anyone who doesn’t know much about NFTs… But the kicker came with the pricing of the product. It was sold via a “Dutch auction“ process which priced each NFT at between 11.11 Ethereum and 8.88 Ethereum. For those who aren’t bothered to Google this, based on the price of Ethereum on 14th February, that’s between $31,916 and $25,510. Which is a LOT of money.
The project then saw an awful lot of criticism from folks on Twitter (NFT Twitter often refer to themselves as “degens”, but I won’t for the purposes of this post). This was seen as a “cash grab” by some on Twitter, who thought the pricing of the project was, much like Snoop Dogg after enjoying some of his favourite produce, far too high.
Ultimately, this ended with BT sending a very apologetic tweet, and some significant climb-downs on terms and price. BT could be forgiven for thinking that this NFT thing Ain’t No Fun. Where did this project go wrong, and how can we apply lessons from this to our client – Pandimensionals? There are four Ps of marketing – price, promotion, place and product. The mistakes were made in the two of the Ps – product, but more importantly, price.
Whilst many projects now grant usage rights to NFT owners, this project didn’t. People felt rather miffed about being asked to spend tens of thousands of dollars on something that didn’t ultimately “own”. Pricing ultimately was the mistake – the perceived value of the product didn’t align with what the punters were being asked to cough up.
But now onto The Next Episode and at the same time Snoop Dogg gave an absolute marketing masterclass with the release of his Bacc on Death Row (BODR) album as an NFT. In a shock-and-awe PR masterclass Snoop Doog announced the acquisition of his former record label Death Row on February 9th. Then on February 13th Snoop Dogg performed in the halftime show at the Super Bowl in front of a global audience of 112 million viewers. And whilst you were frantically running around Sainsbury’s to buy your beloved a last-minute present because you’d stayed up all night to watch the Super Bowl (just me?), Snoop Dogg had generated $44m from the release of his 20th studio album. The limited edition NFT run of 25,000, each sold for a cool $5,000. Again, there were several ongoing VIP benefits connected to ownership of this NFT, including private concerts and private parties, including possibly BBQs at Snoop Dogg’s home, and a limited edition, custom commemorative chain. That’s right, Snoop sold over $44m of product in 5 days and didn’t break a Sweat.
Again, what can I learn from this that I can apply to selling 10,000 pictures of aliens on the internet? Well, Snoop Dogg clearly got 1 P of marketing absolutely bang on – promotion. The planning around this release and the timing of everything here is something that is the stuff of a marketer’s dream. When it came to this release, Snoop Dogg’s approach was definitely to Drop It Like It’s Hot.
And if you think I’ve Forgot About one of the important Ps of marketing – place – here’s the rub. Both projects, whose fortunes could not have differed more, were both sold in exactly the same “place” – on Gala’s Music Store.
So, lots to learn, and lots to think about here, in relation to our goal of helping make a success of the marketing of Pandimensionals. First and foremost, we’ve got to get the pricing right. As I mentioned on my blog last week, this is a challenge, given the fluctuations of the value of Ethereum. Secondly, is product. The core product is high quality in comparison to a number of other NFT projects – the quality of the artwork (which, if you understand generative art, and how hard it is to deliver a consistent standard, with enough variety, over thousands of images, isn’t as easy to produce as some NFT critics would have you believe ), the thought that’s gone into the metadata that accompanies each image and the traits, and the lore that sits behind it is genuinely next level. But we need to make the product even more compelling by talking more about the future roadmap for the collection, and the future utility that will be provided to owners of the NFT. I’ll talk more about this in the next week or two. And finally, promotion. Unlike Snoop Dogg, we don’t have a live audience of 112 million people that we’re broadcasting too, or 19.6m followers on Twitter. So, we’re going to have to be a little bit more creative in how we find and reach our audience. And we definitely can’t afford to Lay Low.
If you want to follow my journey into learning more about NFTs and how to market them, I’ll be posting about this regularly to this blog, and I’m tweeting about it using my (not evil) alter ego Darkly Spray.
