How I Made Normies Care: A New York Fashion Week Metaverse

one I'm Swan sit I used to be the head of digital marketing and e-commerce at companies like Nike Revlon Estee Lauder during the pandemic I amassed three million followers in a year on clubhouse and fell into nfts so now I use that audience for education and onboarding but I really specialize in working with Builders and making sure that the great technology that they're building has product Market fit and impact now my whole career has been talking to people about technology and adoption so web one everyone told me I'll never buy anything online well I usually ask did you Uber sometime this week and of course the answer is yes you guys probably all ubered today well Michael if you took an Uber you not only bought something online you got into a complete stranger's car or if an Airbnb you slept in a stranger's bed great and then web two people said oh I don't care about social I don't want to know what influencers ate for breakfast but arguably social is what kept us connected during the pandemic and also is a lot of the community building that we have in web 3. and beyond that with devices right people used to say oh I could never give up a Blackberry I need those buttons well how's your blackberry doing now or are you on a full screen device right so technology is only scary until people adopt it but what I want to talk to you guys today about today is how do actually when you're building amazing Technologies or even companies that use those Technologies for services how to make the normies care one thing I did a couple months ago was I had this idea for New York Fashion Week huge cultural moment tons of attention and now we've built metaverses for fashion before and to be honest they've been kind of lukewarm so I said if we were going to build one that actually gets people's attention what would we do and there are three insights that were really important to this one no one wants pixelated fashion I know we love our metaverses and our avatars but fashion is about texture and movement and color and fabric so putting it in a pixelated cartoon form doesn't resonate secondly anything that sometimes goes online as an additive of a physical experience is often derivative and a second-class citizen it's an afterthought oh we've got this great event online you're all here in person but okay you can just watch it on a 2d screen and maybe the sound is good or maybe it's kind of fuzzy but we reduce it as an afterthought which doesn't Elevate the experience and thirdly those two worlds aren't connected we're in person now we can all meet each other at break but we have no idea who's on the other end of that broadcast so we said if we're going to build a metaverse for Fashion Week how do we do it well the first is actually we didn't lead with the technology we said our assertion is that if you want to come to this show which is Vivian Tam's fall winter 23 show you're an equal you're no less if you're in the metaverse and we want to make those experiences in real life and online equally good and if not even make online even better now Vivian Tam last season had already put characters on her clothes she had apes and punks all on the clothes on the runway which is a first step because she was starting to understand that iconography and art is the first step in a new language so then we said this year let's add more we'll do more apes and punks and doodles and cool cats we'll put it on the clothes but in order to connect to the community you have to give them a way to access it so what we did was we took the exact rendering of the fashion show now Fashion Week looks awesome online right it's glitzy it's got celebrities in real life it's like a warehouse right the seats are uncomfortable it's freezing there's no bells and whistles so we said let's just recreate that we're not doing a Fantastical online experience where you can fly around because that's not what we're going for we're going for Equitable experience so we recreated every detail in that room from the lighting to the seating then when we built the metaverse we actually streamed that into the real world on a big LED screen in the back of the room so now if your details are the same where you have the same seating same lighting same atmosphere you see the real world when you're standing in the back of the room and then it almost looks like an infinity mirror that goes into the metaverse at the end of the runway then we said all right what are the things in real life that everyone wants how can we bring it to the metaverse red carpet both had a red carpet arrival with an interviewer and Paparazzi so when I show you some of the videos in a second you're gonna see we're splicing in if you're an anonymous web3 influencer you're equally as important as a celebrity who showed up in New York City we also gave lots of fun bells and whistles to online that in life people didn't have so there's some Easter eggs if you snuck around went backstage you not only actually saw what was happening in a live feed in the real backstage but we had actually all the drawings even the model lineup and all the outfits backstage so if you actually walked back there before the show started in the metaverse you would have seen that no seen what no one in the real world would see it you would actually see the entire outfits and model lineups we also did something with gifting so if you are lucky to be in the front row of a fashion show in real life you get these incredible gift bags products swag the front row of the metaverse those seats were assigned just like they are in real life but we shipped everyone the same gift bag that was a front row metaverse prize the same way it would be for someone in real life and on and on and on but the main thing we drove home is the actual show was a live feed of real models and real clothes into the metaverse because it's not pixelated fashion and then when we had the after party we had a DG in the metaverse that was reverse streamed back into the real world so now you're starting to see The Duality of how these things come together from a technical perspective you're probably all laughing because you're like wait that's all but yes that's all because when it comes to experiences what matters is what you're doing and who you're doing it with the tech is just in the background right no one thinks of that so I'm going to show you a quick video to actually show you the experience because I think it comes to life now again it is rudimentary it was on a website in 2D and we built it in six weeks so don't laugh at the experience but think about if you're in the metaverse and you guys were invited to sit in that front row you got Paparazzi interviews and photos you got a gift bag in the mail it's a whole new experience so guys when you throw that video up so [Applause] [Music] the same wall for New York Fashion Week you see it replicated that's the arrival in the metaverse on the left arrival on the right the same step and repeat you have celebrities who are splicing all of this together which got the media Impressions we had portals that was cool you actually could talk between the two worlds this is the backstage access where you see all the inspiration boards which fashion really cares about even the New York skyline out the window was exactly the same now on the left you see someone watching it on the computer on the right it's the physical live stream we just said it's one to one to see all the people standing in the metaverse watching it and on the right it's the real world so the colors the chairs kind of silly but you know what when you're in the real world and you don't understand it makes a lot of sense those are the gift bags that people got in real life but on the left they were shipped out and then we had a proof of attendance a bunch of media coverage around it because the Press actually understood what it was foreign so just a quick Sizzle reel right the technology is not crazy we used a pro a platform called battum that serves the most Fortune 500 companies um it's really simple 2D experience but the one thing that we elevated that you saw a bit of was that portal right it was a computer in real life actually two stations but also a space in the metaverse where you could walk up and have a conversation and that's what we called breaking the fourth wall because if you're doing these two worlds you want to be included right Community is actually the intersection of believing and caring about the same things but interacting with other people in it and that was the piece that's sometimes missing when we put something in the virtual world so those portals you saw two women talking their influencers they have a ton of influence in the real world they were teaching celebrities who didn't even have an idea I'd never heard of web3 about what this metaverse world could be but we were seeing them on both sides and that was actually the thing that made everyone turn and look differently they're like wow this always felt like a video game but now that I'm talking to a real person on the other side it finally makes sense and then that last slide I don't know if you guys noticed but this was again a project that we whipped up in six weeks because Fashion Week doesn't wait for anyone and we got four and a half billion with a B billion media Impressions organically off of this story because fashion and the Press finally understood you could be a part of this and still be at home so how does this apply to what you guys are building and there's a few tenants that I like to think about when I advise companies all the way from Adidas and the board Apes with into the metaverse and cool cats to some of these platforms I work with the first thing when you think about Mass adoption and making normies care is don't lead with technology technology has to work but if you lead with it you know that emoji that has X's as eyes I think people glaze over they don't care in fact I let a gaming panel with FaZe Clan and I said every time someone says the word nft you have to put ten dollars in the swear jar so don't lead to the technology it has to work but did the consumer we don't know what language a website is coded in if I asked you your favorite kind of music you wouldn't say MP3 you would say rock or jazz or rap so I don't know why we continue to harp on word phrases like nft so don't lead with the technology in fact hide it as much as you can because you utility comes when it's easy to use and not teaching technology second thing is solve a problem right or make it really fun there has to be a purpose now sometimes when we see cool new tech we're like yeah yeah that's great but that's a peak and then a drop right if you don't have a purpose or a problem you're solving it's not going to stick so this is where I spend a ton of time with web3 projects trying to find product Market fit didn't matter if it was web 3 or even when I built blinds and shades at one of my first jobs out of college I worked with my Engineers they're like yeah this automated shade is so cool and I'm like how many people do you think are too lazy to pull up a blind right and there's some but the idea is though if you solve a problem you not only get people excited and interested in using your product you bring commercial value some of us might have the luxury of building just for the sake of building but I think most of us want to sell product have an exit for our company so you have to solve a problem the third thing and this is the key because even if you get those first two parts right the most frustrating part is this one it's using analogies that make sense to the outside world because we can talk about all these things we care about but if it's not something they can frame their thinking around it's really difficult so similar to how I was saying like you kind of shake things up by joking around if you took an Uber you got in a stranger's car right I'm Gonna Leave You guys with one story that really drove it home for people so I was at South by Southwest last year and Tony Shea who's the CEO of Zappos passed away during the pandemic so somebody had a memorial dinner or some of the Business Leaders and friends that he really influenced I was sitting next to a really lovely gentleman named Phil and it feels so look very Miami Vice is in a picture pink jacket a turquoise shirt and we talked a whole evening about Tony's leadership principles and how he really changed the tone of what a leader in the modern business World should look like had this lovely dinner parted ways now the next night was the sandbox party with Paris Hilton DJing completely different vibe the night before it was solemn it was celebratory the next night it was a full-on rave dance party so I'm there with my web three friends and I see Phil walk in now I mentioned that Phil was in pink and turquoise he's also kind of a boomer so he walks in with his Boomer looking friends and he said Swan what are you doing here are you involved with all this you know that's the hand motion that older people make when they don't know what something is are you involved in this I was like well yes actually so sandbox is a metaverse company and a metaverse is a virtual world where you can interact with other people or things and there's sometimes an economy and it's like and that little image is an avatar which is a physical representation of who we are so that's Snoop Dogg that's Paris Hilton and he Chuckles and he says Swan he puts his hand on my shoulder and he's like I'm the creator of second life I know what an avatar is so as I pick my foot up out of my mouth um I realize you know what everything we're building while the technology is hard and we're trying to work on adoption the concepts and usage for the normal person is already here we're getting it so deep into decentralization and what a metaverse is and at the end of the day people just want a fun experience thank you [Applause]