The New Era Of Brand Marketing Starts With Blockchain, Believe Or Not

—By Luis Carranza, Founder at Fayre Labs—

Brands need Web3 and blockchain whether they know it or not. In the mid-2000s, brands that got into social media grew faster than those that didn’t. Why? Because brands follow audiences.

Audiences are now exploring NFTs, play-to-earn (P2E), the Metaverse, and other decentralised activities, collectively known as Web3. Beyond the hype and buzzwords, Web3 represents the rejection of centralised, value-extracting entities that force you to remain on their platforms. In plain English, companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google take a lot from their user-base and give back, profit significantly from them, and in return give back a little more than superficial value.

Decentralisation in finance is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s happening in art, brand and fan loyalty, social media, and gaming. Web3 is about giving users more control of their data, their smart devices, and the value they create. The Metaverse isn’t a place, at least not a physical one. It’s the idea that games, worlds, and digital assets should be interoperable and not live and die in a closed environment.

The rise of Roblox and Fortnite to include concerts and virtual live entertainment is great, but imagine being able to take your items from one world to the next. Items become more valuable. And if items become more valuable and there are places to sell them in NFT markets, users can make a living playing games. That isn’t the future, it’s the present, and it’s happening now! In the Philippines and Venezuela, players are earning a living playing, trading, and breeding Axie, a digital play-to-earn game creating its own economy.

Now back to brands. Brands and the people behind them, those in marketing departments and agencies love to talk about agility and innovation. While most can talk the talk, entering this new world of engagement isn’t always easy. Meetings, Zoom calls, sign-offs, and existing structures make it difficult to move as exponentially fast as the audience they are chasing.

My team and I created Fayre as a way for brands to enter Web3 with a familiar interface. The brand dashboard we’re creating feels like managing a social media feed and engaging with audiences. Campaigns can be launched, run, and managed by existing teams and with existing knowledge.

In the beginning, we’re supporting them with the NFT and Metaverse strategy, wallets, minting, and also with the best practices on engaging an NFT community and adding value to fan and fan loyalty NFTs. We’re encouraging brands to drop high-volume NFTs for free or at a low cost but then add value to the NFTs through engagement and future offers and exclusives. Once you have your audience, you can get creative and add value. The difference in Web3 is that the value could be sold, giving the most loyal and active users a tangible reward.

The rules haven’t changed, but the tools have. You still have to engage, add value, be creative, align with public relations and overall be fantastic to your audience. The difference now is that they get more tangible value for their actions and can “cash out” as well. Brands need Web3 activations to connect with the next generation of users. They need blockchain, whether they know it or not. That’s why we made Fayre.