The second in a 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 the challenges of getting earned media coverage for an NFT project.
1.73 seconds. Less than 2 seconds. Usain Bolt would barely be out of the starting blocks. That’s how long it took me to find a journalist or commentator saying something blisteringly negative about NFTs and the people communicating with them about them. In this instance, it was former BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones who tweeted last year “The whole NFT thing is just a massive troll of technology journalists. My inbox is a hot mess of nonsense”. Take a look for yourself.
I can understand the ire that much of the tech press feels towards many NFT projects, based on how they’ve been approached by them to date. Those who’ve plied their trade in professional media relations for a reputable PR firm or in-house press office know the basics of email pitching technology journalists:
A journalist friend of mine recently shared their screen with me, searched for “NFT” and showed me the extent of excitable and, in many cases, execrable emails they get a week on the subject. The sheer volume of content (and its quality) brought to mind the factory of one thousand monkeys at one thousand typewriters employed by C. Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons to produce the next great literary work: “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”.
However, there is more than one way to shoe a horse. Or, in this case, bang on about 10,000 JPEGs of cherryade-loving aliens in third-party media outlets. I know which skill my Grandad would value more highly… So, we developed the following plan to approach media for this client:
And with the final one, we got lucky last week. Twitter announced that it had launched a new service in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand for owners of NFTs to connect their wallets to their Twitter account, and have their NFTs as their profile pictures. These would appear as a hexagon-shaped profile picture, rather than Twitter’s usual circle. Our brilliant team picked the story up overnight, messaged the client and asked for commentary first thing in the morning. Within no time at all, we’d spun the content into a pitch for commentary to media, offering Paul’s expert opinion on the move. We pitched it out to the journalists that we knew would have an interest in this, and potentially be covering the news, and looking for industry insight. And then, we nervously waited….
By the Friday evening, we only went and got it published in Wired, didn’t we?! The content went live around 8.40pm on Friday evening and my DMs blew up from about 8.44pm. Of course, I’m slightly disappointed that it took less time for me to find a negative article about NFTs online than it did for our team to find this great piece of client coverage, but you can’t have it all…
As is customary with the Hard Numbers team, we weren’t finished! By Sunday morning we’d secured yet ANOTHER piece of coverage, this time in The Sun! It’s a marathon, not a sprint, though. We’ve got eight weeks until launch for the Pandimensionals, so we’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then, but I’m glad we got our first coverage runs on the board so quickly, and in such premier media outlets.
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.
