Mastering Loyalty & Partnerships: Tips from Mastercard’s Seb Oddo and IYK’s Austin Marchese

Transcript

[Music] we're going to start with a great conversation with Austin marquezi who is the CEO of iyk and Sebastian Otto who is the global vice president lead for Innovation web 3 and blockchain marketing and Master Card and fun fact I actually went through the CSX at the time CSS accelerator in uh the spring of 2023 so with that please welcome Austin and Seb hello everyone uh first off I want to thank Anna and the whole a16z team every single time I collaborate with anyone involved in a16z I'm like

wow they are absolute Legends the sheet that Anna sent us before this I was like all right I'm feeling good we're totally prepared and so before we get into a little bit about myself as well as Sebastian in terms of the structure of today's conversation we're going to be going through some general web3 marketing strategies that mastercard's currently going through and how they look at it as well as some dos and don'ts in terms of getting Partnerships across the line for these massive Brands and so Sebastian can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how many games do you think the Yankees are going to win the World Series in that's funny actually I was just on the phone with some of my team members and we were looking looking at ticket prices um and

it's it's crazy um I think they're going to sweep them but that's a Yan fan born and raised Staten Island yeah um so hi everyone my name is Sebastian oo I'm the global vice president of um digital marketing Innovation at MasterCard prior to MasterCard I worked 12 years in sports uh for the one of the largest Sports marketing companies called octagon um and I helped uh athletes agents and Brands think about what was next and then um I had the opportunity to go run um client Partnerships or gva Chuck in 2021 you know in 2021 it was a a pretty wild year where we helped launch many Brands into web 3 and now um I sit on the global brand strategy and Innovation team at MasterCard where we

think about Innovation and technology and how we could apply it to you know sponsorships like the Grammys or World Series or Major League Baseball um and um yeah that's what I do and a father of three yeah and I'm a a dad of uh three amazing children at home amazing and so Sebastian and I we've collaborated together iyk and MasterCard and we're going to dive into like how we got that partnership and what those deals looked like uh a little bit about myself as Anna mentioned I'm the COO of iyk we were formerly in CSS now CSX and um yeah so what iyk does is we connect physical products to the digital world what that looks like in practice

is we'll work with artists creators and Brands to chip physical products and this allows them to get first-party uh data as well as create these immersive digital experiences uh we've worked with Brands like MasterCard coinbase Live Nation pudgy Penguins Doodles 90cc uh and the web 3 ecosystem among others and before that um I ran a web 3 Consulting agency called the incubator which uh I leverage my social following I created Tik toks and and grew over 100,000 followers there and that was a I was able to use that to grow the business uh from that marketing perspective and so now Sebastian I know that MasterCard just came out with their crypto strategy

as of this morning so well it's it I wouldn't say this more and I would say that we've uh MasterCard has a crypto and blockchain team um and they are incredible if you if you um want to follow them please follow our handles um and see what we're up to we've done a number number of Partnerships and that team could speak to um the business better than better than me but they are um they are all in so now H how does MasterCard look at the web 3 ecosystem right now when I first started at the company I was um before leading up Innovation for Global digital marketing I was the head of web 3 um marketing and uh one of the first things that we did was we built the platform called pass to

Priceless where we um we took our prices.com platform form and we started to align um you know the blockchain with our pricess execution so think about uh you know buying a prices.com package so whether it's going to the World Series or going to an All-Star Game and getting a digital asset tied to that we built a system that allowed those experiences to get tokenized um so for for example I'll use the World Series as or the Major League Baseball as a perfect example um consumers could buy packages on the website and we issue nfts to them and the more that they buy the more nextg loyalty that consumer will build um with us so when they come on site and we scan

their nft we basically know um how loyal they are as a customer for us um and that's been helpful when we think about also cross passion verticals when you think about culinary if that consumer bought a culinary package on prices.com but then also bought you know a baseball package maybe we could send them in n that was a culinary experience at Yankee Stadium on the field so we could start to bring together those passion points um and really make you know nextg loyalty something that's what we've been focusing on with the platform when you're having these conversations internally at MasterCard I know you mentioned that um that they're all in right and as Founders in this room

working on kind of Cutting Edge web 3 technology when you're presented with a new idea what are the those like behind the scenes conversations like like how do you get it from this idea that was presented to you to something that MasterCard can go and execute because it's not as simple as just let's go and do it no and especially when I when you said that question um I started to think about my time at Vayner too when it was very early and Brands were just getting their feet wet into web 3 and blockchain it takes from what I've seen and what I've really experienced and really tried to push forward it really does mean bringing the right people to the table and that just that doesn't just mean the

marketers that means regulatory teams that means legal teams that means Finance teams and really educating people so that they understand what we're trying to accomplish and by doing that we could move a lot faster so if we have a crazy idea like we'll talk about in a few which was you know embedding memories within merchandise at one of our events that was a spark of an idea that we had to run up the chain and and get approved but in order to do that we had to get a you know a stakeholder committee together within our company to really truly understand what we were trying to accomplish and if it was going to be doable as a company that's trying to sell in or work with MasterCard whose responsibility is that

to get the right people in the right room like should that be something that Founders should be proactive about or kind of lean on the person who's in Mastercard or whatever the brand is like how do you make that happen I you know for in our particular case it's the Whoever has the idea it could be someone in finance that has a big idea it could have some someone on the Global Marketing team like myself so um it's the responsibility of that person to really bring a coalition of people together I think for Founders working with Major Brands it's important to truly understand where that person is in the process of getting something approved and how you could help them right um how you could issue maybe educational documents or details to help

that person really Shepherd that idea to the end yeah so one of the things at iyk what we try and do is like when we're working with Sebastian or masart or whoever like making their life as easy as humanly possible and so if that means Sebastian needs a image to throw in a deck or if they need a deck for this specific thing let's make it on his behalf so that he can focus on the things that we can't actually control which is having those internal conversations ultimately as a company that's sitting outside of the other company you need PE Champions internal to actually get these things across the line so it's like who is that champion and because their day is so busy so you

just want to like support them so like what are some things where and one thing one thing there so um the user experience is really important and you've you and the team at iyk have helped us really help explain what the consumer Journey was going to be at a lot of our uh experience that we worked on together and you know it the best right CU it's your Tech so I think that's important too and we know our experience and our consumer Journey on site at an event so by layering your user experience ours and making that one big moment um for consumers on site that's super helpful yeah and so how can yeah as a company make their pitch that much stronger because we're not in the room when you're making these pitches

and so yeah how can we educate you use your journey Etc and so you've sat kind of on both sides of the aisle and so there's two terms when I'm like thinking about different brands that we're working with like crypto curious versus crypto native and so a crypto native company like Vayner 3 it's crypto's like core to their ecosystem and MasterCard is moving towards that more crypto native as well but there are other brands that are more crypto curious and so from your experience like ad Viner you're working with a wide gamut of companies whether it's their first time their second time or third time in the web 3 ecosystem how do you like best form these conversations to get the deal

done yeah in 2021 when we were talking to a lot of Major Brands Fortune 500 Brands we had to do a ton of Education um at those organizations and as you know with with Gary ve and and his amazing team there they're all about education they're all about free education right education consumers and Brands by just giving back and being empathetic to the world and that was what we did first was we educated consumers and Brands about what what was happening and then from there figure out where in the stage as at their organization they were so if they needed to understand how to get crypto on their balance sheet versus how to you know um design a 3D asset that was really important for us to um you know educate

um in the process and so understanding what level of Education they yeah what level of education and then what resources we could bring in to help them at that stage and then help Shepherd it um forward how do you best identify that because I I know I've personally been on calls where I'm having a convers and I'll sometimes just straight up ask them like are you a crypto degenerate like me or like where where are we on the Spectrum here like and so how have you best identified like how you need to inform them because also depending on the product you don't want to make it too complex because you're going to scare them away but if it's too simple they might not actually get the concept you'll know immediately when you walk into a meeting whether or

not someone's on board web 3 and ready to go or whether they uh are a doubter and you need to right so you'll know that as soon as you go in um and I think for for us also there were some brands that leaned into educating their employees right which I found actually really cool to think about like that a major brand Fortune 500 brand was going to invest in their employees to teach them all at the same all at the same time where we were in the process of web 3 that to me is you get all the marketers like on the same page right then and there I I respect that I think that was that would be really cool so some Brands came to us and said we want to educate others were like we need you to tell us you know what we need to do

and if they're educating internally that means they're allocating budget which means they're probably ready to move and they're taking it seriously absolutely and so um in terms of our relationship and the Partnerships we've done um two deals so the first was at the Arnold Palmer Invitational where we worked with Mard to create a experience where hats were chipped users were able to tap the product upload a photo and now that lives on the product indefinitely and then the other deal that we recently did was with Live Nation uh ones to watch with MasterCard as well we actually have a program called artist accelerator which we help bring five emerging artists um through what it means to be

in web 3 and we teach them about merging Tech and Ai and Technology like iyk one of our events was at Live Nation headquarters and we did it with uh fast company and we had consumers come on site and listen to one of the artists perform and we had little like they look like baseball cards but they uh they were iyk um versions of our Master Card music pass and when you tap them you were then able to then mint a real nft um as part of that so it was a very easy onboarding it gave something tangible for people to hold in their hand or to listen to music and when they got home later that night they could mint it so it was it was um easy onboarding one of the ways that we look at it from a

relationship perspective is we call like certain Partners agency partners and in order to get this uh Live Nation deal on those cards those were produced by an agency partner and then live they're now a partner who has all these other artists that they may be working with and so the more that you're able to work with these specific like Partners it goes from like a onetoone relationship to a on to many relationship and those are the type of relationships that me personally I try and focus on because that's kind of how you can then scale out because you can only if you can only maintain 10 relationships you would rather have it

be 10 one to many versus 10 one to one and that's just how I look at it um from a a relationship perspective let's walk through like the entire conversation cuz I think one of the challenges with companies like we're still facing that right where it's like getting in the door having a conversation what's the best way to just like with these bigger Brands like get that first conversation get that first meeting booked well I think first is networking uh you do a great job of this um and being authentic to who you are um I can't tell you how many LinkedIn messages I get of people trying to to come in and and sell their service it's not authentic it's not real personally that turns me off it it it

doesn't I want to be able to connect with someone one onone about something really amazing so if you own a business a small business and you have something really interesting tell me why you think it would be impactful to MasterCard how it could help us um and put a little effort in instead of just having me to have to think about that cuz I have other things right and other priorities and goals that need to focus on so I think that's the first thing and then second is just making sure that you're bringing you know your what you're trying to sell very clearly to the table sometimes I I talk to companies and I come out of a meeting and I and one of the things that I love about Gary ve when we when I was working for him was that these short 15 to 20 minute

meetings um to get what you needed to get across and when you're forced to do that you really have to think strategically about what you're going to say so um you know put your good pitch together so you put your pitch together and now you're sold and so I know for our relationship we didn't get something done until like probably a year after having a conversation like when we first met up at nft NC I think yeah it it wasn't it was literally a year until we first did that yeah and so now it's about maintaining the relationship and I think there's a fine line between being annoying and being top of mind like what have you seen has been an effective way for smaller companies to straddle that

line but make sure that when they do need a service like theirs that you call them well perfect example would be what you what you all did right like throughout the year of our relationship you started to say hey check this out that we're doing that's cool look look at this Tech that we're working on you it wasn't you weren't selling me you were just explaining to me some of the great things that you were doing because your thought it was cool and I actually thought it was cool too so from there we we built a relationship and that's how ultimately it came to the table but um I think you know other ways around that where people are sending decks and people are like not being authentic it's just it's not going to work out we were having a conversation before this and um

everything is just relationship based yeah and especially in the crypto Community it's like such a small group of people that before I was at iyk keeping the story brief but Anna and I knew each other from her days at Gemini when I was running my Consulting agency and then ish and I knew each other when that same Consulting agency he hopped on a podcast with me and so then like once a16z got involved with iyk we all started having these conversations and it was just like this really small world of people where everyone you're talking to there's probably like a first or second order like network connection there and so every person is an opportunity to like make a positive

impact and like be authentic have that Network so that when mastercard's thinking of a deal oh they're thinking iyk they're thinking whatever product You're Building because like sure in the short term maybe it's better to get the extra 10% on the deal or the extra 20% or not do this but it'll come back around if you're not actually providing value and you're not being authentic and so that's one thing that we definitely try and do cuz we find it's a competitive advantage to have good customer service and for people to enjoy working with you and and there are there are many times that You' have said to me Seb like this is not going to like this is not for us right

you were you were real with me even though I try to push on you to get to try to figure it out because I wanted to work on you work with you there were times you're like I got to pass on this because it's just not the right and it's not going to be authentic to who we are as a as a brand as a company so I that that builds more credibility in my mind with iyk um that they're not going to just take it to for money purposes and then try to figure it out they know who they are and they're not going to they're not going to fake it so appreciate that and so now it's time so you have the relationship you're you're ready to close the deal and one thing that I personally struggle on is like how do you price these deals because you

want the MasterCard deal you want the Big Brand deal but you don't want to charge too little and like put a bad deal in front of you then that kind of devalues your services you don't want to ask for too much and now it doesn't actually happen so yeah how and also because you were on the other side right you were on the Vader side so you've been on the agency side where you're pitching in and now you're on the brand side where you're getting pitched too so like what is the art to pricing when I was on the agency side my my main goal for the teams that I manag was to show the client what we had to deliver build award-winning presentations uh websites um

documentaries anything and show them what we had and we did that and we did that at a at a rate that was affordable to the clients a lot of people think Major Brands have millions to spend it's not it's not that way right they have marketing budgets and those marketing budgets need to be um split out across Global teams um but my goal on the agency side prove to the client that you are really good and you did something amazing and that's when all the other projects started to come the real relationship right when they start to come to you and ask you that they have a problem and they need you to solve it that was and I think that that's you know that's that would be my advice to a lot of the businesses small businesses wanting to work with Fortune 500 Brands

is prove yourself and then you'll W you'll see how um once you're in the system how much um business would ultimately come so that initial deal get get it done be aggressive there and then if SL when you deliver that value you'll be able to reap the the benefits on the followup yeah and you should do it because you believe in your company and your brand you know you're going to do some really something amazing for them and from that everything else will will fall into place right that's how I live my life what are some of the the competitive advantages right so like internally at iyk we say that customer service is our competitive advantage

that the tech is going to be the tech but you want people to want to work with you you want people to feel like that was amazing not only because of the product but also because of that customer relationship so what do you think like cuz some of these companies they may be competing with other Fortune 500 companies to close a deal like what are the competitive advantages that a smaller company needs to lean into in order to different differentiate themselves from maybe the viners of the world that are also competing for this I think like I I when you said that I immediately thought about presentations like delivering an idea before you could execute and when I when I come to iyk and say hey I'm thinking about this idea

um what do you think about it immediately you all could like put together a concept imagery really helped like iterate very quickly and then get it to us and we could run with it and go get it approved where I think some of the larger agencies need to run that like can't even start the work on a design process or iteration uh because it's got to run up the chain and they got to get maybe get paid for it to do it where I think some some small businesses that are starting could really use that to their advantage to help especially around Innovation quickly help Mark Global marketers get their idea to you know to the executive leadership right so that pace because if it's a if it's a big agency yeah they may need you to pay a, $2,000 for a deck

for two slides yeah and so now you're waiting and the meeting's coming up on Tuesday yeah or you might say I have a 3D designer that could whip this up in an hour let's do it that's the advantage in my opinion yeah being able to move quickly uh so a quick story on Sebastian so he was a tedex speaker and he gave a talk about piggyback rides and so he was in a business of piggyback rides and what this meant was that as a father he wanted to give as many piggyback rides as possible but due to his and you can correct me if I'm missing any of the story but due to his obligations like grocery shopping um cleaning the dishes Etc he was only able

to give a certain amount of time for piggyback rides and the goal was to give more piggyback rides so what in his day could he automate and could he offload such that he could give more piggyback rides because that was ultimately what he wanted to spend his time working on and so now my question the founders here are in the business of building a successful company um what should they be offloading and specifically in terms of like this relationship and like the marketing angle like where should their focus be and then where should they be offloading and getting it rid of that from their schedule so that they can be in the business of making a successful

company again when I worked at Vayner we've really focused on time management and really figuring out priorities and even at MasterCard now what what are the key priorities for for you laying them out at the beginning of each week and really staying close to what those priorities are sometimes we get so distracted by life that we forget about what our priorities are and those could be for personal right I have priorities I have to go see my daughter's volleyball game at 400 p.m. on Thursday like that that to me that that's very important doing that for every little thing in your work week would really help bring to to life how you could bring get more piggyback rides or how how to go sit down and have a cup of coffee um to

really recharge I'm I'm very um focused on wellness and how important Wellness is for our well-being and if you don't do that you wind up just getting caught up in this spiral of of um entrepreneurship which is the craziest I give a lot of respect for for people who have small businesses so that that would be my uh advice is to really prioritize if everything's a priority nothing's a priority like what was a whether you're working with Gary or a MasterCard like how many priorities can there be this we all have I mean if you take a 100 of your priorities for the rest of this week you could look at them if you really sit down and say which ones do I really which ones are the most important if you had to do it you will um so

that's my my recommendation with to to be really to do that um and make it a a habit right a lot of us say they'll do it only during their busy weeks but if we do it during if we create a habit of these um you know prioritizing what really matters in life then you'll start to become a lot stronger on those top priorities and you start to really then create award and winning campaigns you start to then win those business deals because that brand is more important for your company so you're going to focus 100% on that one like you said um you know that one that could you know split out instead of 25 others that are just going to waste your time right the high leverage opportunities yeah absolutely

operational leverage okay so before we get into the Q&A for this if there is a spark notes for dos and don'ts let's call it two dos two don'ts for people who are tackling or trying to close business with Major Brands sure so a do would be um please be authentic please be real be human um there's so many people that reach out to me that have automated messages and it's just and they they just blow up in their face because they forget to replace my name with somebody else that they just sent us so be authentic who you are um that's a that's a due and then the second due

would be think about the company that you're trying to uh win business from and how your product could be relevant to them put a little effort in so if you are going to pitch a a mass card um why does why why should it matter to us and look at our mission right do well by doing good what is your how is your product going to actually help us on our larger Mission and which department within that company does your product best you know best suit is it the you know um the purpose-driven marketing team is it the sponsorships team think about that as well and then don't don't keep nagging um a company that might not of interest because then you lose

credibility really um i' so many times people get mad at me and really I I I can't get to all my LinkedIn messages they get mad at me because I didn't respond to them but it wasn't on purpose it's because I'm prioritizing my family my career my goals um in life so that's one thing and then the second don't don't think this is to your point before don't think that you're going to land that first deal immediately there has to be a real authentic partnership and relationship there and Trust right I trust that iyk could get a project done um so that don't think that it's going to happen immediately and don't feel don't get down on yourself because you

don't land that first one keep keep trying amazing uh so with that appreciate all that speci uh we are going to open it up to Q&A this is personally my favorite part where we get to have an open Forum one of the words you say a lot is authentic right and uh I'm a developer and I can't be authentic online I try my best to I'm authentic in person and I can speak in person so can you give me any tips on being more authentic online as a developer yes as a developer um I the developers that I've met in my career that have been authentic have have

provided real add-on and build build on to projects so for example there have been many marketing projects that we've put together in ideations and when it lands on that developer's desk there's two things that could happen that developer could say all right I'll just build it to whatever it's going to be whatever you ask or the ones that are truly authentic to themselves might say I might get some push back if I say this but I truly know that this is not going to work and they bring it back to the marketing team in a way that's empathetic and that is solution based and those developers have always I've always had a lot of respect for those

developers because they're being authentic to themselves and to their craft so that that's how I would answer that I also so I want to brag about one of our Founders Ryan uh he is you may know him but like awesome developer also really big nerd it's great when you're having a conversation with him like on calls he doesn't like hide his enthusiasm or like he doesn't hide his like nerdy qualities where he's like talking about whether it's the engineering or like his keyboards or his guitars or whatever it is like that is

who he is like he loves these things and so that's him right so that is authentic to him and there's no reason to like hide that and so if you like like really going deep on python or like really going deep on solidity or whatever it is like don't hide that and like when you're talking about smart contracts or whatever it is like nerd out for like 2 minutes and then like okay sorry let's bring it back like there's no problem with that because that is where your interest goes and so just like do it like yeah don't I don't I don't think you have to be and Sebastian kind of probably this is kind of how I treat it or like a lot of it isn't that serious

where everyone's a human and so just be a human and where you kind of run into issues is when you're like pretending like you're not a human because that no that doesn't like resonate with people when you came to MasterCard what was kind of the original or kind of the biggest hurdle to get an institution as large as MasterCard kind of on board with web 3 and then I know you look around Corners so what do you think is sort of the next turtle that you're excited about that you know you're going to have to do a little bit of um politicking for yeah the space the web 3 space crypto space as we all know is is unregulated to some degree right in different areas so ensuring that we're that we're being compliant is the top is

the most important thing that we can do so education was really important for me to talk to Regulators legal teams franchise um privacy teams and ensure that we were going to build whatever we were building was going to work globally that was going to meet all the jurisdictions globally and that we were going to be authentic to who we are personally um so you take the compliance and then who we are those were the biggest challenges that I had but like I said before it wasn't just myself I had really really incredibly smart people in each of those areas franchise legal regulatory that once we educated as a team we then went as a team forward and that was the only

way we were able to get anything done because we had those incredible teams together when marketers try to do it and I've seen this in my career when marketers try to push an idea through without those teams involved there's a lot of friction and there's a lot of conflict within Brands and it doesn't then create what we're all trying to do here which is build the next a of the internet onboarding millions of people like my mom it's not going to get done if there's just this one super focused marketer that believes his or her idea is the best it needs to be authentic to everyone so yeah that's how I would and then oh and then thinking forward so I believe that in

the next 6 to 12 months things are going to get really crazy in terms of what's real and what's not real I truly believe that I already see it with my kids my kids say to me that is that real they don't see it I could see it cuz my eye is a little bit trained with certain things um what does that mean that means that when we start to think about the convergence of AI blockchain in web 3 there's this Middle Ground of opportunity but also like how do you you know uh move through that in an authentic way because a lot of it's unregulated right now um I think I'm gonna have to figure out a way to start talking about that convergence curious

internally at MasterCard how big is as your team and are you like well integrated within the marketing and Partnerships teams or is it more of a siloed team just curious about the structure and how it's been evolving so our Global brand strategy and Innovation team so half of the business is um half of the global brand strategy and in Innovation team is focused on our brand what does it look like smell like feel like right um and then the other side our Innovation side is is thinking about what's next our Global team sits across um multiple regions globally so we're so close to our Americas or APAC or emia teams and we're helping them and they're

helping us think about marketing campaigns so we're very integrated and then you know our B2B teams product teams we're thinking talking to them on a regular basis so it requires a lot of coffee chats right like going hey what are you working on um a lot of like Network building um to really just stay connected and that's what I spend a lot of my time doing is is being being a human and asking just people how they're doing and what they're working on um I have a question maybe better for Austin so just thinking about like our priorities as an early stage startup my gut says it might be better to go after Crypton native companies rather than big established Brands just so we can move quicker they can understand what we're

doing at a quicker like much faster um but obviously you guys went after like the master cards of the world could you just talk through your thinking about why did you decide to go after maybe more web 2 native than web 3 native or web TW curious I guess yeah and yeah just thinking around that a lot of our first Partners were web three and we're crypto native so like our initial drops were with companies like 90cc coinbase and so like to your point right those were the least the path of least resistance for us was initially those crypto um Native companies but what that allowed us to do was create these

experiences that were compelling to non- crypto native companies so like your crypto curious companies and it is something that on our side we definitely still have internal conversations we're like our product best fits at least how it was initially designed is a crypt based company and like so it's it best works for crypto companies so that's the product and so like what Sebastian was saying earlier where like sometimes there's use cases where it doesn't make sense and so we knew that that use case made the most sense um once we were doing that in parallel for all of that like we're having conversations with like people

like fashion across different companies where it's like this is really interesting but the truth is that from like a partnership perspective if we were just like oh we're just going after the master cards of the world it took a year for us to get the first thing going and so if you extrapolate that out across everything now we're not doing anything for a year which wouldn't have been great and so I think on our side it's like what is the path of least resistance maybe that's crypto companies and if it is crypto companies that's fine but the use cases that you're doing they should translate across the alley to your web 2

companies and like some of our use cases are just more crypto native and we we just don't pitch those um but our product is definitely um it's Unique so I think every product's different but long story short I'm a believer of like the path of least resistance to build case studies to build social proof and then that's when you can go whale hunting all right thank you s Austin thank you [Music]