How Brands Should Use NFTs | Overpriced JPEGs with Avery Akkineni, President, VaynerNFT

Transcript

[Music] hello good morning y'all welcome to overpriced jpegs i'm carly riley and today on the show i have avery akane who is the president of vayner nft vayner nft being gary vaynerchuk's nft business within his broader vayner x conglomerate it was such a dream honestly for me to get to speak with avery i think gary is brilliant when it comes to nfts and how he's been able to approach the space and bring more people into the space and avery is no different she was so well spoken on the topic and like gary i think is really able to cut through the noise of of what's happening to get to the heart of what matters in

this industry right now i find myself i think about nfts constantly of course and there are times where i overthink it or i i sort of overthink why a brand or an individual would want to get into nfts or or how they would do that and talking to avery just grounds you in really what's happening here in my opinion and and the way she talks about it is just very grounding so if you are somebody who has been thinking about incorporating an nft strategy into a business you run or your day-to-day life in some capacity i think this is a great episode to listen to she has so much wisdom in that and we really get into like how vayner approaches this with the brands they work with pepsi coach robert mondavi who's a who they just did

a wine drop with so take a listen let me know what you think i hope you enjoy it and enjoy your holiday this will this episode is probably dropping right before christmas so if you celebrate christmas i hope you're enjoying it and broadly are having a relaxing holiday season thank y'all now a word from our sponsors everyone is talking about the metaverse these days and we're all still trying to figure out what it actually is because everyone is looking for how to get exposure to it that is why a metaverse index fund is so important because in such a young market an index can give you broad exposure to all the various players who are building out all these digital worlds that will ultimately become the metaverse and that's why you should check out the metaverse index from the index co-op the metaverse index gives you simple easy

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best thing is on juno sends your crypto directly to your own wallet whether it's your ledger your metamask or however you hold your crypto on juno can also be a checking account for your crypto where you manage both your cash and your crypto from one simple account it's free and opening up an account with onjuno comes with a metal debit card that gives you five percent cash back at select businesses including uber starbucks walmart target and other web 2 companies use code bankless when you create your onjuno account and our friends at juno will air drop you fifty dollars in each when you set up your first crypto paycheck sign up at on juno dot com crypto to get started that's o n j u n o dot com crypto well hello i am so incredibly excited to welcome you avery akanani to

the overpriced jpegs podcast i'm your president of vayner nft i am a v friends holder uh a big v friends fan you know a broader a gary vaynerchuk fan so really really excited to be picking your brain today i think what y'all have been doing over at vayner nft is just totally groundbreaking and impressive so i really want to dive into how you all are thinking about everything you're doing thank you so much for having me i'm super excited to be here awesome so let's let's just start a little bit with your personal background and and really i'd love to understand your journey to when did you first hear about nfts and what was like the click moment for you yeah so i'll tell you a little bit about myself um i'm originally from nashville tennessee so southeast part of the

united states and i spent my early career in california and the reason that matters is because one of my first jobs i was working at google and that's actually where um i worked with aares who connected the two of us um but i loved working at google when i first joined in 2012 it was this huge like sort of it was three years after the iphone launch it was a huge moment in a technology shift as people were increasingly using their phones as a portal to access information and google was was really that portal to you know people's discovery of new information organizing it making it useful you know whether you're looking into like what's a cool new coffee shop or you know how to buy a mattress online all these things like google was really providing that through their suite of products like maps and youtube and search

it was incredible i was just like enamored with the technology and enamored with what they were building what we were building um and i moved to new york which was awesome and i then joined vaynermedia uh which is at the time very much focused on social media community management social campaigns creative media strategy coming together to inform um brands on sort of what they should do in um in the world of social media uh i then moved to the asia pacific region to start vayner um from sort of our base of singapore but with offices in bangkok and sydney and tokyo and hong kong and that was an incredible experience um to learn

um a whole like many new cultures and just learn so much that was new to me um and also helped build our vayner brand um out there in in the asia pacific region and about a year ago is when i started to get really interested in nfts um last christmas i had dinner with gary um and we were talking about what was next like what was the big thing what where what we should be focusing on as a company and gary was super passionate around nfts nfcs are going to change the world talking about sort of his initial concept for befriends and just was so convicted um that this was going to be a giant technology shift so i actually then moved back to the united states this summer um shortly after we launched

b friends we launched vayner nft and i've been very much focused on nfts ever since learning from awesome folks like you um and helping our partners uh navigate their journeys into the world of web 3. so it sounds like it pretty immediately clicked for you too like gary and and probably many people have heard gary spiel and nfts did it click for you immediately in that dinner and was his feel basically the same spiel that we hear now or like has it evolved from those early conversations yeah for me of course gary's passion like comes through in anything that he's talking about um but i think for me it was really understanding that like the concept of digital ownership um was the big unlock for me in understanding why this was a big deal because we know people spend so much of their time um in

you know engaged in digital screens and that's increasingly a very important medium for people to express themselves whether it's through collecting or gaming or engaging with people even on things like this or social media social presence really matters and people need to own things and they're sort of digital presence the same way we do in our physical real-life presence so it's really thinking through that concept that made it click for me um personally and i will say it wasn't immediate at first it it took me some time to like really understand understand the why um because there's a lot of sort of passion um in the small but mighty nft community um and sometimes that can come across to a new person is overwhelming but the more you sort of

understand the deeper motivations it's how you understand how this technology is going to scale to not just hundreds of thousands but billions of people how would you articulate that why like as you've been in this space like what what is that why to you now the why is really digital ownership it's being in possession of assets that matter to you as a person digitally so the same way that people have you know been obsessed their instagram presence or wanted to spend money on video game skins you want to you want to tell your story and sort of socially signal what you're all about right what harley's all about what avery's all about whether it's you know the kinds of digital clothes i wear or the kind of digital or i collect or the kind of places i go digitally um your your digital life really matters

we'll talk a lot about social signaling i think that's gary really helped that click for me and and i think that's a huge part of this overall narrative so let's talk about vayner nft and i heard you say and so correct me if i'm wrong or confirm that this is right that there are sort of three areas that y'all really focus on and and first being influencers and celebrities and i want to talk about some of the partners you have there on that side second is is brands that you work with and then third really being platforms like coinbase and and others is that is that sort of how you all think about it and break down your your areas of interest yeah so i think it's it's like individual people it's associations and brands and then it's platforms yes um i think that those are our areas of

interest but really though like it all falls under one umbrella of intellectual property owners navigating the world of nfts um so whether it's a person or a brand or an association or a you know product sort of getting into that world of nfts and the services that we offer our partners is like education and consultation like that's really a huge focus for us um then sort of collaboration and helping with like first sort of forays and then also like full-on you know end-to-end nft program development and management do you do the developer side or you're more on this crafting the strategy or do you have developers that will work with brands to build their smart contracts yeah that's a really good question so we're intentionally technology agnostic um and

the reason for that is that we want to work across all the different platforms and all the different teams and all the different technology so we are like the market consultants um i think that's something the space really needs because you have incredibly brilliant people at specific platforms or on specific chains who are telling you this is why you need to do this on my marketplace that's why you need this on my chain but there are very few people at the moment who sort of sit across all of them and say no this one makes sense for you but not for you and your goals are this and you know this is something that really matters to your you as a person or your company so this is a better way to go about it um so we do not actually do the technology development in-house but we sort of

advise on on which um which technology deployment makes more sense and work with a number of different smart contract partners that's really interesting i would love to maybe push maybe it's worth doing it right now like can you give a high level overview of like well we recommend ethereum for xyz reasons if you're interested in this versus solana versus flow or whatever right how do you all think about that do you have high levels yeah i think the vast majority of stuff that we've done today is sort of ethereum based and then also on sort of like layer two um that bridge to their evm compatible because that's kind of like where a lot of the nft market is today i think flow makes sense if you're building something like a closed ecosystem um and if you have enough like star power and brand power to really

drive people yourself and you're fine to have that as more of a closed ecosystem than you know an interoperable um you know solution a little bit more like ethereum um i think openc is so huge for like the current nft market on the sort of ethereum and layer two based um and then you know there's also a place for for like chains like tezos one off uses them um very green there's there's a place for for everything we think um and understanding the different ways to go about it uh i think that's our value right understanding the pros and cons of each of them so each partner we can craft a solution that makes sense for them versus just sort of like rinse and repeating one program um we love to be be able to uh get our hands on different types of

technologies and understand the pros and cons of each and by fl say like kind of closed programs or closed ecosystems you would say put on flow for example is that like like obviously top shot is famously what started flow and it's so it's sort of like hey we have this one specific thing we do it's not like you're trading on openc regularly it's for one specific kind of set of experiences you come to this place is that is that what you mean by closed ecosystem or is there more yeah nba top shot like works awesome because you can pay on credit card it's a custodial solution so it's really easy for normal users to kind of get their hands on nfts you're not paying high gas fees which totally makes sense if you're nba top shop but if you're like an emerging musician if you go and build this sort

of closed ecosystem for you know if you go and build this ecosystem for yourself on flow there isn't that level of like a traded marketplace today i think that'll change in the future um so it makes so much sense for topshop but maybe it wouldn't make sense if you were a more emerging um you know creator or brand um that doesn't have the pull of mba because obviously everybody loves the nba and what they've built incredible how did you learn in this very like nascent world like how did you become an expert in these different chains and what was going on and how do you keep up with it all as it's like moving ridiculously fast and things are changing all the time yeah it's a very good question um for me i i wouldn't consider myself an expert in nfts i don't think anyone really is

and you know that's the problem because it's so new and there's things that change so quickly um i think i i'm more of a you know very active student of the nft game and of the nft world and um in my role i've been fortunate enough to hire 40 people who are all obsessed with nfts a lot of them have been doing this way way longer than i have and you know they've really helped educate me on the not just like the how it works but the why the history um what you know projects that have failed in the past projects that have succeeded in the past and i think that you know historical context has proven super helpful it's also an incredible thing for these people who've had this as their hobby for a long time to now be sort of full-time professionally working

on nfts so that's been a really cool experience for me as people who were you know working as school teachers or who are working as hospital administrators and doing entities on the side now you know they're helping educate me and helping educate our partners and you know nfts and web3 is really their passion okay diving into specifically so you have like an influencer or or an individual client i guess that's how you kind of bucketed it what are like this are there kind of typical benefits you're like hey you as an individual you want to launch an nft here's sort of the standard suite of things that an individual versus a brand might want to offer somebody or think about as they're launching their nft so like an initial conversation that has a standard flow that happens i think it's really about education and we get so

many people um calling and say they want to watch nft and the first question is like how much do you know about nfcs have you done your research i think it's really a thing where you need to do your thousand hours of homework to really understand the space and i think that the partners who are jumping in and just trying to do something to ride the wave those are not working what works is really putting the time in to understand what is happening in the world of nfts and how brand can bring value and brands have a lot of value to bring i totally think that um brands and celebrities like they're going to bring mainstream adoption to nfts and that's a critical part of the market development cycle but you have to think about it like the right way and it all starts with

research right if you look at even how gary entered the nft space started by a supporter he was buying on assets we've done that with other partners it's gone over really well because it shows you're committed it shows you're interested um and that you want to be a part of the space versus just you know coming in and trying to sell something that there's no reason it needs to be an nft um and i think that brands also um need to understand like the value that they can bring in beyond just like their distribution like yes absolutely the distribution that they can bring of their followers and their community coming into the world of entities is awesome but how do they do that in a way that actually enriches the full community um is is something that honestly everyone's

still figuring out it's so new so few brands are participating in space now i think last this week and last week were really like watershed moments in the nft community because that was like the week that brands came to nfts you know there's been like little trickles of like little things before but it was like nike bought artifact pepsi dropped something white castle dropped something just like all happened you know what a really um l'oreal came out with something um all in like a super kind of compacted period of time um that uh you know everyone's figuring out what's the the right approach for for their brand and for their community i definitely want to focus heavily on the brand side but on the on the individual side i want to ask you a couple questions because i've thought about this and and

i've had people approach me and ask for advice and like you said i'm like i have this podcast but i couldn't feel further from an expert you know it's just something that i'm passionate about and i research all the time and whatever so on the individual side and and it feels like the obvious thing that comes to mind to me and i almost feel limited by it because it's like i'm i'm so stuck on it is is obviously access and so you look at something like like gary obviously is a model for this i think he really initiated this wave of i'm gonna you know you're gonna get to come to this conference and you're gonna get to facetime with me if you want or i'll come on your podcast and really selling access but then what gary has done i think obviously so so well and so

brilliantly is he's saying i'm also building this broader ip so i am going to work to make this individual nft a collectible so you're going to get this you're paying upfront for immediate access and i think there's a very convenient easy calculation that can be made there like when i was looking at v friends i was like do i think this if i pay two thousand dollars for this is a is a multi-year multi-day conference worth two thousand dollars yeah that feels like a no-brainer so like the utility i'm getting from this in and of itself justifies the valuation but then of course it's it's grown so beyond that initial valuation because you have this belief that gary will build long-term ip it's a very long intro to say most individuals

they are not interested in building incredibly long-term ip probably or trying to build like you know build an animation studio and and make these collectibles so does that mean not all of these projects have to have sort of this long-term value creation or is do you think it is important that there's long-term value creation and for a celebrity who's like this is just access to a face time with me what are the other avenues for long-term value creation if there's i know there's sort of two questions there but this is something i think a lot about no i think you're you're absolutely right that um with gary's there was almost like a guaranteed value because you're getting access to this conference if you were an initial buyer right now if you're a buyer like the prices is more than two thousand dollars um so yeah uh i've done very well thank you to

gary thank you a few friends that calculation is a little bit different um and now what you're um what you're kind of betting on is gary's ability to turn this into ip less so than just the conference the conference is not the biggest part of v friends anymore but the initial side you know three years for three like nine days of a conference like that's a really good price actually you're getting a guaranteed value out of it um i think that where it comes beyond and we've done this with different programs right where you get access to an individual um you get to do something cool with them like those are always moments that um you know fans love and they want to engage with i think the other thing that you're betting on though is that this person does something with their initial community of supporters that this you

know influential person is building a community that their nft holders will have first access to that's really like the bet it's like yes there was an upfront guaranteed value but it turns into something beyond that upfront value um over time as as the nft market also continues to explode so i think those are the two ways to think about it is like one what's the direct value that you're getting at the upfront and second what is that sort of appreciation value that you'll be you're betting on the person it's like i would think about it like their rookie card if you will it's like this is their first ever asset if you think this person is going to be a star then you want to be an early supporter and so it sounds like what you're describing there especially makes sense for kind of up-and-coming celebrities if

you're somebody who's good at spotting you know the hottest artist before they're hot right like it the stage we're in right now and if i'm hearing you correctly is that this at this moment in time this especially makes sense for some of those nascent artists is that mean there's less of a less of a moment for this right now for your taylor swift or justin bieber's who are already so massive or it's just it's a totally different thing no i think i think there's room for both um i do think that nft is for emerging artists and emerging creators and emerging athletes are a uniquely great opportunity because they're not represented already by huge labels and they don't have 45 people that they need to credit every time that song is played um or you know their art sells or

whatever so if i were an emerging artist like nft should be a huge area of focus but if i was a big artist i would think the same thing it's like how can you create um i don't know if you ever did this when you're a kid but i was like part of like different like fan clubs how do you create a tokenized fan club where you give those your token holders early access to you or to your music or to your you know behind the scenes or how do you create special moments for them in the same way that you know in the 90s we had the like mail-in fan clubs i think the same thing can be true for those bigger artists we've seen bigger artists and bigger like influencers and names and athletes do drops but we actually haven't really seen a big celeb

do a program to the scale of like a v friends right um because it's a lot of work and it's a lot of commitment from that person on an always-on basis to continue delivering value to their community and their community really expects a lot especially with the current market of you know nft holders they do have a lot of expectation um because of just how hot the market is right now so i think it's an opportunity for both of them i would love to see justin bieber or taylor swift you know create an nft program that really rewarded their holders and you know built over time and they have so much value to give as well like they perform at you know the best um best concert halls in the world like they do the coolest things like they could create so many amazing experiences

which could be done like tokenized for their fans and i think we're seeing katy perry right isn't she has an nft component to her vegas show i think she's doing i think there are tickets that are nfts the ticketing world is like always i'm like that's how this goes mainstream in my opinion like that's how you get that's how the social signaling piece comes in etc etc on the music front i feel like there's a lot of conversation or i i hear a conversation around getting a share in the future revenue of an up-and-coming artist and this being a really exciting way that artists can reward their fan bases as opposed to all their money going to labels or this or that and i feel like that there's this exciting potential around that i don't know of any artist who's done that specifically and i'm

it feels to me like that starts to really bump up against security laws have y'all thought about that i think something gary has talked about i'm not trying to put you in a position to be a lawyer but how does that work yeah so definitely like not financial or legal advice but i think that there's absolutely ways that um it's a little bit unclear right now but that um like individuals can give back to their fans what i would direct um you know listeners to is check out like what lamella ball is doing or he's continuing to give back to his fans um or like what the boss beauties community is doing it might not all be a direct financial give back it might be like hey you have voting rights here you get this perk um that so that it's a little it's you

know sec compliant and you're also sort of finding ways to reward your holders along the way even what like you know let's talk about enos domains as an example um they just launched a token that they then gave to their holders right i think there's a lot of stuff like that you can do that you're not giving people like a check or like a direct um financial outcome but you're giving them some type of other like bonus access and letting them sort of share in the growth of you know as your star rises yeah uh um a boss beauty's holder uh uh whatever the the table is yeah yeah you're friends with lisa is that right y'all are that's awesome um i actually too i i talked about this last week on the podcast i i've sort of made fun of lazy lions in the past i think i

i don't know if you're familiar with lazy lions but you know they're very they're a very active community and i think sometimes very happy this sort of like eye roll uh sort of reaction to lazy lions because they they feel like they show really hard i hadn't dug into it i was digging into it last week and they have this raw awards program and it's interesting because i do think they've set up this dynamic we're like hey we'll directly reward you for really just for being a holder but in exchange you have to you know go show the project in places they sort of created a way to reward their holders with without while making it seem like they're sort of rewarding them for taking actions which i think helps you get around some of those those tricky laws um let's talk about a couple of your

specific partnerships on the individual side uh i was sort of very active in the v friends discord or checking it often when the nasty like nastia drop happened um how did that partnership come to be did you all approach her did did her team approach y'all how has that been going uh that's what i've i've been curious about because i was following it closely at the time yeah for sure so um nastia for those who of listeners who are not familiar nausea is the um biggest sort of followed and subscribed youtuber in the world with i think over 250 million subscribers across her channels which is crazy she's seven um and nasty has this incredible story of you know her parents were filming her videos because um she had some health

issues as a child and they were filming this away for her sort of family who um didn't live nearby to like you know see nausea's progress a massive following and like nasty is really her health issues resolved thankfully and she's really turned into this um character who educates um children and their families on you know good behavior and how to be polite how to be a good person think like sesame street kind of vibes but for a modern 2021 audience um i had the chance to meet her actually last week in miami um really sweet kid and her parents are so awesome and wanting to support so gary actually sort of got to know them want to say they're russian he has his sort of like russian connections as well um and they were interested in you know sort of

exploring something as a new way to engage with nazis community we wanted to make sure this was something that was super simple because most of nausea's fans are not into the world of nfts right um uh they are probably children and their parents and their parents so we wanted to do something really simple um the nfts were actually ten dollars that were like you know each had a letter per name and if you got all six then you got um a bonus nft that like had all the letters kind of strung together and then we had a few that sort of gave special access to nastia one was like hey you've got to have a 30-minute meeting with nasty alan zoom and of course her parents for supervision and what happened it was really cool a guy actually bought it and then had like toured nasty around the

metaverse and filmed it and like used that as a piece of content as her like first experience in the metaverse um so that was like really nice and there are three tiers there was one that was the letters which were ten each then there were some that were social follows because you know to a lot of people um having nasia like follow you on social is like a comment on one of your things is is really a special moment the third tier was this meeting with one one-on-one sort of meeting with her and you know this family had toured nausea around the metaverse and it was a simple program that we really see as like nastiest rookie card like the first naustia um nft we do have some plans to do future um integrations with it and we started integrating the letters and some of her content

sort of is like an ip thing i think we also learned a lot um in terms of it being very very early for her fans and how they're thinking about nfts um and i think that's something that we continue to to find in different capacities it's like hey sometimes we're too early on on some of these things and it's an awesome um first move but we need to wait a little bit until like the technology's evolved to a place where like her fans really get it and understand the value and um you know why don't like log in on a website using their wallets because that was a kind of key learning for us is that we were super early on it for that period right how far away do you think we are from this being so mainstream that that's no longer the the obstacle

right and it's really about what you're providing to the audience not so much do they know how to even buy one of these do you have a time frame in your head yeah i think everything's going to be an nft in like five years right like your receipts will be nft your plaintiff will be nft all this will sort of exist in your wallet um as as linked to you as an individual person um so we're an individual holder i guess um i think that we are a few years away from that though just in terms of like adopt like you know if we do that like market adoption curve we're still at like innovator like starting to move into early adopter but like it's you know there's onboard so many people all the time like friends and family from different walks of life and they i think

that click moment that you and i talked about the beginning of the podcast still needs to happen for a lot of people and what is going to drive them in i think will be some direct utility will be like hey i have to get an nft because i want to go to this basketball game or they'll be like oh i want to get this um you know incredible bottle of robert and dobby wine so i'm going to get an nft 2 and then i'll just set up my wallet just because i think it'll start like that and then there will be other reasons that they need to interact with nfts that ultimately drive them into it it's like when people first had email you know maybe you first had your email to get like two things a week and then it builds and then there's more use cases

and there's more use cases and it you know that then becomes something that's like ingrained in your daily life but that change doesn't happen overnight it happens gradually i want to give a special thanks to overpriced jpeg partner block block not only because they are a sponsor of this show but also because they are my employer block block is an innovative blockchain lab we work across nfts and the metaverse and our goal is really to push the industry forward with every new project we take on we founded and currently run the meebit style which just partnered with larval labs to create more metaverse friendly renderings of me bits which is awesome we are also partnered with a sundance award-winning filmmaker to build the first dow that will own

a feature-length documentary film we have a ton of cool projects down the pipeline and are really looking for cool people to partner with on this so go to blockblock.io to subscribe to our newsletter and be kept up to date about what we have going on and also to check out open roles we have available we'd love to have you apply come work with me coming out blockblock.io xerion is the perfect place to view the entirety of your crypto portfolio all in one spot not only does xerion aggregate all the tokens across all of your wallets but it also displays the nfts that you've been tirelessly collecting xerion even reports the value of your nfts in your overall portfolio giving you the most comprehensive report on the entirety of your crypto portfolio and

now sirion is going cross-chain xerion's comprehensive tracking and trading support also extends now to arbitrarium optimism polygon and binance marching to deliver a complete illustration of all of your assets across all of the chains that you use xerion isn't just a place to get an understanding of your portfolio but it also hooks into defy activities like trading borrowing and lending all in one convenient place so you don't have to memorize all the various defi websites to do all of your d5 activities to get started go to xerion.io bankless and load up your wallet or wallets into the xerion interface and supercharge your defy experience and enrich your nft lifestyle that's z e r i o n slash bankless okay something that you and i were

actually talking about right before we hopped on here is you were mentioning that actually a lot of the brands you work with aren't immediately trying to commercialize the nfts they issue is and they're not trying to get rich off them brand like budweiser doesn't need to get rich off of anything other than their beer at this point but they're not trying to make money off of them at least initially i think that's really interesting and not something that a lot of people realize because people think of nfts as like this gold mine where you just go and try and make a bunch of money so talk about that and and what actually is kind of standard right now with the brands that you you work with and how they think about that yeah so i think a lot of our brands have zero intention of commercializing i can

um i'll talk about one that's actually launching tomorrow which is coach so coach came to us um a dear partner who i've worked with for many years um recently uh took on a leadership position within coach and um he was like hey like i was i've been talking about nft since the time i told him i was moving from singapore back to the states and i was like i think this is huge get a wallet set up get a b friend get on board i want to help you like this is going to be how we work together in the future and it was like okay okay avery like let's see first explain to you what does it even nft mean um and then you know over the course of the past few months it's been like hey we did this we did that we did this and

he's like okay i'm ready to try something what are your ideas and we had a couple of different ideas some around collaboration um and some around you know giving like tying into their existing programs um because they want to like first start by learning and doing something small and his first objective is like i don't want to make money from this this is not um something that i'm looking at as a money maker it's something i'm looking at as a learning so what's a good way to do that and you know for this first phase of the program it's actually they have the uh it's coach um and they have this really fun little game that they have right now called snow city and it's like one of their you know holiday um one of their holiday activations and they have these cute little characters

and we were like okay one of the challenges that they've had this year is the supply chain right um supply chain issues have led to a lot of challenges for retailers in terms of what's available in store and we did so we couldn't give away anything right now but we could do is create these nfts that essentially unlock um a free uh custom bag that's made to order that you can redeem in 2022. we wanted to do a small number um so basically you get one of these nfts and there are different traits in them and they're super cute and there's only 80 um in celebration of their 80th birthday uh this is built on polygon and our objective here is just to one get coach sort of their consumers in starting to think about nfts the email

is going out to them first we don't want this to be something that nft flippers pick up and flip we want it to be something that actually gets their community into nfts and we sort of test is this something that they're interested in is this something that they would want to build a program out for um and we're you know we're starting with such a small number that of course it'll go very fast and people will be very excited and it's a way for coach to kind of give back as they learn is this something that we would want to pursue with our current audience um so i think that's one great example and and maybe a second example is um something that we dropped uh last week with pepsi um similar thing where they were like hey pepsi is all about culture like where where is culture happening

culture's happening in the world of nfts they want to you know give it give back and be part of it so we talked about a couple of different ideas and pepsi's had a long time connection with music um they sponsor the halftime show they sponsor so many different like musical activations emerging artists big artists like they just have a very rich musical history so we created these almost like meme um uh microphones that are like kind of a nod to how nft community is just like ridiculous stuff with like laser eyes and sunglasses you know just these things that are um these generative traits that like all came together for the 1836 assets which we they wanted to give away for free they're like we don't want

money from this it's a zero percent secondary royalty and it was free so there's nothing cash grab about this at all and i think as brands entered they want to be really clear that they're not trying to be a cash grab they're not trying to use this at like to take over their business in time just like anything um of course their needs you have to pay the piper but i think as many brands just get into the early exploration stages they're thinking about this more as a way to learn um and a way to enter the community um then then directly commercialize and on the flip side i think those who are ready to commercialize they're really ready to play they're like set up to take crypto they've got a wallet they've got an ens and i think if you're all in then you're

usually like okay i i feel better about commercializing this more as a break-even thing um and many you know many of your listeners uh may or may not know but like to a brand like five million dollars a million dollars that that isn't actually a large number to them at all um so it's that's the least of their intentions is getting a million dollars out of consumers so that you just touched on a couple things that i wanted to ask about one i was going to ask how much does something like this cost and i guess you just sort of helped give us some context and that probably a million five million brands are spending on this do you think it will continue to be really just a part of the marketing budget for brands with the added benefit that unlike most other things in their

marketing budget they will actually maybe make a little money off of it at some point on secondary sales but that it will it will stay in sort of that marketing budget category for brands for for most of the future if all of the future honestly i think the better thing would be if it didn't i think the better um if brands can really lean into it and there's nothing wrong with like making money from nfts um you know this is if you look at a lot of the biggest projects and you even look at like yoga labs and larval labs and v friends like it's totally fine to make money from projects um and i think it shows that you're actually in it because and the better thing is for holders is actually that money goes back into making the program more awesome so like the the

second level of thinking is that like actually it should be like cost neutral um that's how i you know talk to brands about where the future could be is you know you can actually do something that that generates money that kind of pays for itself if you will um and then reinvest that in your community to continue building something with them where they're sort of benefiting from it um i think that that's a while away for most brands and i'll give you a few reasons why um a lot of brands are there's unclear regulation around cryptocurrency there's unclear regulation around how they should recognize revenue from secondary sales um it's a whole new world and you know companies that have been around for centuries are they cannot move as fast as nft projects um and they have

you know fiduciary duty to their um shareholders um you know to make sure that they've uh they really understand all this stuff so i think we won't see most brands getting into the space of taking royalties and um commercializing this until they've really invested and that also requires a significant amount of legal diligence which requires specialized counsel you know a number of different things like that so i think brands who are dipping a toe are going to do it for free and considered a marketing expense brands who are going head first and all in are gonna understand this space much better and be in a place where they actually can actively participate versus just doing sort of charity things or give back to the artists or sort of marketing stunt

related programs and to paint this picture really specifically is what you see in some number of years time something like pepsi who at this point is just spending the money to learn they'll actually issue an nft that they'll sell and by buying it you'll get to come to some like pepsi sponsored concert where their their partner musical acts are in and you've now bought that as an nft from pepsi and maybe you get whatever of some free pepsi at the event or whatever right and but and ultimately the cost of the ticket or the cost of this nft right we're talking about will actually allow them to to break even on the event what they generated in that plus secondary sales

will allow them to bring that sort of picture for like a brand like pepsi or any of these brands that's what you see them as as absolutely wanting to do in the future there's two use cases you can look at already who've done this successfully first is um playboy so not a banner client but um playboy has done this they charged you know a thousand bucks for their nft and you got um you got like access to their avatars club i'm a holder of that and transparency but that i mean you paid like consumers paid to be a part of that and they did it they wanted to um you know consumers wanted that engagement with playboy because they love playboy and it's a media company time they're all more examples are coming to my head as i'm talking yeah yeah and keith grossman has done a really

good job of articulating this it's you know a business in order to pay people and to pay insurance and you know have all the the aspects that go along with um running a business you do have to commercialize that in a certain way you know keith's very active in supporting artists and he's just says in the most eloquent way and i would encourage everyone here to follow keith um see what he's done with time and time pieces um but it's you know time does take a cut because they have to because that's you know they're investing the technology they're investing the staff to run this budweiser same thing um this was a lower mid price and that was intentional because they wanted to do something that normal fans could get their hands on of course it flew off the digital shelves real quick um but

uh you know people wanted to pay to own a piece of budweiser history and to be part of you know verified um community of holders and there's a lot of awesome stuff that's coming to those holders as well um and that you know they they did the whole nine to get it set up there's an age gate you know they got their openc page set up they um built a custom site they take crypto they have an ens they hold nfts um and they did all that legwork be to make it so that they can really like actively participate um and then another example would be like a robert mondavi where you're you can if anyone's listening and hopefully there are none left maybe there will be hi um uh we did this really cool collaboration with robert mundabi and bernardo

porcelain where you can actually buy um an nft which is a piece of unique generative art that features different traits of the wine and then that corresponds to one of these three incredible wine blends that's in sort of a collectible magnum that's made of porcelain um and that's just this really incredible program where also you're paying as a consumer to participate so in my view a lot of this will happen in the future but it's really brands who are gonna and of course nike just bought artifacts so you know people are happily paying up for a clonex and for digital sneakers and a number of other things um so i think that brands who are actually into it they will commercialize because why not this is a new way for them to build relationships with their consumers

and it doesn't have to be something that's just a free giveaway i think a lot of people today or in the market certainly as it was two or three months ago were buying nfts because they wanted to make money on the nft do you see this becoming a world where people are buying nfts because they want the benefits and then there's this side call it benefit which is that the value of it might go up but that no longer is the primary reason you're buying an nft you're buying the pepsi nft because you want to be a part of that club and go to that event not because you think the pepsi nft is going to moon in value is that a shift you see happening i yeah absolutely and i think the ones that have more of a direct value um it's you know you know exactly sort of like

the guaranteed value of what you're getting it's like hey you're going to a concert or you're getting a bottle of wine there's less speculation around that um than something that's like totally vague um that's just like hey you're being part of this club you have a mint pass what does that mean like i don't know but everybody's speculating on that that could mean something i do think that the market as it stands today which is december 16th um of 2021 it's white hot and i think we'll see some element of like market correction as well um as there's an increase in supply um of nft programs and then probably like the demand will catch up as quickly to the supply um so you know most people don't know this but like 99 of nft

projects fail and don't go anywhere um it's only these like few that that really like hit it over time and have proven their value so i think the speculators market um won't continue with the pace that it is now and that's for the right reasons but at the moment there's a lot of speculation a little bit of a gold rush um and you know maybe you think about it similar to like the dot-com bubble um where everything is valued super high um based on sort of speculation and let's see where that lands i'm so long nfts and you know gary has a saying that we have forever to be right with our programs and i totally believe that it's like nfts are here to stay this is something that we are going to be doing for a long long time soon if there's peaks and

valleys it's okay and we're not defined by like the floor price on any one project we've talked about these bigger brands pepsi coach should small businesses be exploring this now or is it too early for small businesses to be thinking about this definitely if i was a small business this would be something i'm thinking about for sure because the benefit that small businesses have is they can move really quickly it's hard for for you know these big brands to do this um they're not set up to take crypto like this is a whole thing for them um you're a small business you can get set up um you know i'll give another example from a vayner project um which is called fly fish club um this is actually gonna be a small business restaurant um that's entirely based on nfts and it's easier to do that with a

small sort of committed group of individuals who um really believe in this from day one and kind of build like that um you know i have a friend who also has an awesome podcast i'm called lauren she has a restaurant in san diego she does co-apps there and it sort of like is starting to infiltrate that in her business so i think yes absolutely with the one caveat that it's super early and a lot of your customers might not care yet but in the long run i think getting those learnings and building that muscle is going to be a huge payoff does it require to have somebody on your team for whom this is their full-time job does it require the small business to say like hey i'm going to spend an extra x number of hours a week focusing on this and is that an impediment or is

there a way to do it more scaled down oh yeah i don't think you have to have someone like on your team focused on this 100 you could start with something like let's just say a poep so proof of attendance protocol maybe you say like hey great if you check into a restaurant 10 times and you get a free appetizer something like that then every waiter can verify that on your phone and maybe one person's going to like sneak it and like you know mark that they were there two days in a row when they weren't but overall like that's something that is not the biggest deal i mean that's training your customers to start thinking about nfts um i think that it's for most small businesses they don't have a person to give to this 100 but maybe it turns into a new business

like vehicle for them i'm going to push two more on the small business front just because i do think this is i think there are a lot of people out there who are small business owners or have their own personal business that don't have access to somebody like you right on a regular basis to kind of advise them so my two final questions are do you have a cost right like what is the cost for a small business that's not looking to do the million dollar pepsi route like what is it what might they have to spend to kind of get something up and running and second do you have a chain that you're like for a small business who's just doing a basic loyalty program you should use polygon for example or do you have a recommendation on that front i know you're chaining agnostic but yeah

um i think it really depends on the project right it depends on what you're trying to do um it depends on like who your audience is how familiar they are with crypto all that kind of stuff um our cost is vayner um we're always happy to sort of like share that out for any partners who are interested but we're really more focused on like enterprise level deals um and i think that for small businesses you don't need to spend a ton of money you could create something on nft cred you could create something invincible you can create something yourself on poep you don't need to pay like a specialist because i think there's so much you can just learn by doing as well there's so many incredible resources available on twitter on youtube on discord that teach you how to do this stuff um and i don't think you need to

pay a specialized agency to to do it for you vayner it seems like hasn't really gone the gaming route and that's a whole massive category in nfts am i wrong do you have gaming partnerships you're thinking about or is that sort of separate from from your universe could you see all getting into gaming what do you think about the outside of this we do we do a lot of stuff um with gaming sort of under vaynermedia but a lot of the major games right now are centralized so like they're not actually nfts i think there's a crossover happening because a lot of gamers are into nfts and vice versa but the gaming audience is way bigger than the nft audience as it stands today um so we do actually have folks within the um vaynermedia focused on gaming uh buga who's one of like the best esports

players is part of like the vader sports family but that is a little bit of a separate business unit than vayner nft which is specifically focused on nfts and we do see like um there's some interesting stuff happening in like play to earn sort of economies with gaming we haven't done anything major there but we're always looking to try new stuff and we'd love to do something with some kind of an nft game at some point okay on the same uh on the same line of questioning around what vayner kind of focuses on or doesn't douse i feel like that's something gary hasn't spoken too much about he's been very focused on the nft side do you have thoughts on dows do you advise clients on dows how do you see that fitting into this ecosystem yeah i think doubts are going to be huge we

haven't really found like the perfect use case for doubts yet um sort of from a personal investment vehicle standpoint and gary's interested i'm interested in it how that interacts with companies i'm not sure yet and so like kind of antithetical um it'll be interesting to see how those two things like played together maybe brands are part of dao's i don't know um that hasn't been our area of like initial focus because i think there's um some progress we made just in like the utility of dao's um as it relates to uh broader groups versus just like an individual finally as you like look to advise platforms i think you all are advising coinbase and that's a public open thing is that right how does advising platforms look like and a big question do you see coinbase potentially being a a

big help in moving the social signaling piece of this forward in terms of giving us really like a social platform where people can show off their nfts in a way that that we don't have right now yeah um i we are so big on coinbase and they full transformation they are a partner of ours but we think coinbase nft is going to change the game um for how people interact with nfts and also on board a whole slew of new users which is going to be incredible for the space um i think one of the gaps in the market right now that exists is really just a way um for people to show off their ass their awesome assets in a way that like their normal friends can get it like because you know normal people are not surfing open c to see what's in

carly's wallet um you could do it and i think in the nft community there are some forensic detectives who love to learn all this but i think that having like you know a social way to interact to like to share to comment um is something that coinbase and you can see this in their public demos um is gonna really uh add to the mix it's gonna be awesome so we're fired up about coinbase nft and also beyond just coinbase nft the developments that facebook and instagram and tick tock and twitter um who are all working on stuff um sort of in this vein are creating to bring in more people to nfts and make nfts inherently like more shareable okay last couple of questions i want to talk about this and and maybe it's a funny thing to talk about

given our show given what you do but i think we have this comparison of the rise of web 3 to the rise of the internet the rise of social media i think there's a similar dynamic at play in terms of down the line everyone will every business every brand will feel like they have to have an nft program much like they have a social media account but the internet and social media they've changed the game in all sorts of incredible ways but they've also ushered in problems and challenges and i don't think we talk about that a lot as a space and i'm curious do you ever have things you worry about with the rise of web 3 or here are the the two or three ways that i think we might want to be thinking about how to mitigate some of these challenges that

will come along with it yeah i mean there's so many different challenges i think about them all the time um you know as with anything new there are um things that we want to take from web 2 there are things that we want to leave behind of web 2. i think that the sort of data monetization from web 2 is something we know we need to leave behind i think that was a big problem and and even like during um my time at google it just started to become very clear that like i mean that's how google makes money and like they are a great company and their mission is don't be evil and you know there's a lot of great things that google is now trying to do to also make sure they're ensuring consumers feel very comfortable with them but that like data harvesting and monetization by

other companies as well um without people's necessarily knowledge or consent i think became a big problem that ultimately propelled web3 to be built in a different way where people are really in control of their data so that's um that's one thing that i think we we definitely want to leave behind and i think the other um the other thing that people want to leave behind it i've seen like sort of cautionary tales posted on on forums and twitter and discord is also the centralization of power with just a select few um i select two companies even from like an advertising vehicle perspective facebook and google are so dominant that they're called the duopoly that's where everyone spends all their ad dollars right like and i don't

actually think that creates a good ecosystem of diverse partners who are all sort of part of building a space um because it's so winner take all and i think that's something that as we build the world of web3 we want to see a bigger list of partners as part of that and i think as we're starting to see companies make big companies making acquisitions of of nft related groups um we just need to be very careful of that okay last question any fun gary vayner company stories could be about gary or just being at vayner in general that you want to share as a fun way to end this yeah so we actually just had our all hands yesterday um you know two days ago and it was this awesome like rah-rah you know coming from a big corporate world

like i was always surprised by how casual gary is during all hands where he really pumps people up thanks everyone makes every single person feel special and feels is who he presents to be is is what it sounds like you're saying there he is who he presents to me and better um he just sincerely has such good intentions and and wants to see like people in our company really thrive so you know one of the things that we were talking about was like just like uh canceling mean like people who are like not nice to each other who's like there's no spot there's no place for this within vayner um [ __ ] mean is what we're sort of everybody's sort of like messing up their [ __ ] because we want to be nice we want to be like the company that um that leads with kindness and leads with

compassion and leads with the glass half full and leaves with optimism so i think that's something that has really infiltrated our company culture is that is that [ __ ] me an attitude and you know just hearing gary like address the entire company that was like the main point of it it wasn't our numbers it wasn't what happened in q4 it wasn't this is our 2022 goals it was i want everybody here to be nice to each other and really build this culture built on kindness and empathy and business of course but that business follows when we have the right cultural foundations awesome well thank you so much avery i really really appreciate this i it's you know you're as wise as gary is in this space so it's very fun to hear you speak about it so thanks so much for being here and uh

we will hopefully talk again someday in the future when we're all getting nfts for everything and it's uh it's obvious that this was going to be a thing i love it i can't wait to listen to this podcast in a few years and know how right we are thank you for having me sorry of course thanks avery [Music] hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content

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