Loyalty, Community, Ownership – Redefining the Brand 3.0 Toolkit | EBC11

Hi everyone. Welcome to our panel. I think it's the best panel of the day.

Oh, for sure.

For sure.

Well, we haven't made any mistakes. Yes. [laughter]

Exactly. Um I'm Melina Sag. Um I'm your host today. It's a pleasure. Uh quickly about me, I'm the co-founder of Connected Future.

We are a smart product company on chain. We turn premium goods into digital assets. Um, and it's a whole new way to own, trace, and engage with your products. We are powered by Concordium uh blockchain. So, if you want to know a bit more, then uh come and speak to me afterwards.

Um, today we have four fantastic speakers with us. Um, and we're going to explore strategies around loyalty, community, uh, branding, and user engagement in general. And so, our first guest is Georgie Ma. I will start with you. Since September 2021, Georgie has led the FC Barcelona AI and blockchain strategy and projects.

And before joining football, he was a physics professor heading national and international research in quantum technologies. He has published around a 100 scientific papers, authored a book on applied quantum mechanics, and he holds three patents and lectures worldwide. Welcome Jordi. Um, next we have Sebastian. Sebastian is a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, globally recognized for his leadership in gaming and web 3 innovation.

He's the co-founder of The Soundbox, a leading virtual world with over 8,400 brand collaborations. That's quite a number. Congratulations. Empowering players to create, own, and monetize experiences through NFTs and the SAND token. And currently he serves as the ambassador of Schain, a new ZK powered blockchain built as the financial backbone of the creator economy powered by the sound token.

Maybe you can tell us more about that later. Welcome Sebastian.

Thank you.

We also have Robbie. Hi Robbie. He's the CEO of investment at Animoka Brands, a leader in web3 entertainment media and services. and he's also the CEO of the Sandbox in gaming since 2012 and in blockchain since 2018. He has a deep experience across TMT industries from early web, mobile, television, magazines, and free-to-play games.

He also co-founded One Media Group and Redgate Media in the past and began his career about 30 years ago building wireless networks in China and Indonesia with Mitra Media. Welcome, Robbie. And then last but not least, we have Diego. Diego has 20 years experience in branding and marketing and eight in blockchain. He has reached millions and millions of people through his content.

And he helps tech founders go mainstream today by turning complexity into clarity, which is something we all need. [laughter] Um he advised Adidas, Borshi, Salesforce, Mastercard and others Fortune 500 and today he guides web3 leaders like B network and Aptos to build trust and scale in the mainstream. Welcome Diego.

Thank you.

Let's go straight um into our topic and our first question which is about trends and the evolution of the space. Um, looking ahead guys, um, in 2025 now, what's the most significant trend or shift that you've seen happening um, over the past few years? And is there something that maybe you want to share, Sebastian, with your experience with the NFT back into 2021 um, until today? What can you see is happening? Well, uh, we see a lot of experimentation and innovation in the space like the speed of it is just mind-blowing.

Maybe I can ask quickly in the audience like like who's been already in crypto back in 2020 or before raise your hand.

Oh wow. Okay, we have a good portion of it and then anyone else after I guess so less than half of the people in the audience are OG's. Um 2020 was really like the rise of NFTTS u blockchain gaming in 2021 metaverse u start to rise as well in 2021 uh we've seen from there 2022 23 still NFT metaverse um we afterward we started to see like meme coins and more like culture moving into like tokens essentially we've start to see now a rising trend around like real world assets set more DeFi related use case um a growing number of chains and actually more fragmented ecosystem overall into the blockchain space. So anyone who's was in 2020 21 Ethereum was essentially ZL1. Nowadays I would say it's much more fragmented and that doesn't mean there are less audience.

They are like actually more audience more engaged more than 300 million users wallet overall active in crypto but they are split around different use cases. this year I think and particularly since the US has been changing their policies around like digital assets we're seeing a much increased um um adoption from institutional side and regulatory side of crypto that's leading toward like real assets defy use case tokenization of pretty much everything from securities to commodities um but on the consumer side like the traction keeps rising as well and we're seeing trends from like prediction market, real money gaming and still like blockchain gaming as a leading use case since some of us are in the space and of course on the space of entertainment and culture as well.

What's your take on that?

So I'm going to be really boring and refer to the previous panel about stable coins. Um because I think one of the things is obviously everybody's been talking about stable coins this year, but I think um I would say it's less about the excitement around stable coins actually more about for the audience here because we're all cryptonative. It's the fact that stable coins are actually not exciting anymore. They've been accepted. It's part of the furniture and that's actually more exciting to me because we just take for granted their existence because at the end of the day we need to tokenize certain basic things on the road to tokenizing everything else and the first thing you need to do is tokenize a wallet so that you have a place to put them and tokenize the money that you put inside and then once you have that everything else can start from there.

So I think now we've gotten to the point as an industry where we can accept the foundation exists and now we can all start building on top of that foundation.

Amazing. What about you Jordi an interesting trend or shift uh in the past few years that you want to highlight?

Okay. What what I will say is that I mean obviously I mean cryp uh crypto web 3 blockchain has been revolution but there is even a bigger revolution. The the revolution is what's going on with AI. AI is changing the life of every single individual. And from a sports perspective, uh what we see is that there is a trend and the trend is that people is or let's say AI will make people to be more focused on entertainment and health because we have more time to to be devoted to sports especially football and all these things.

So this means that uh sports I think we will play a super important revolution in the mass adoption of let's say web three blockchain technologies and in this sense what has happened to us is that the last four five years many companies have approached us and thinking that we could we could be a super amazing client for technology and what I think is that they have realized that it's the opposite. We could be an amazing provider of uh contents, data, uh funds, users, digital experiences, digital uh products, digital uh services and we are seeing this change and we like this change a lot.

Amazing. What about you Diego? What in inspire you you the most these days? Yeah, I think um before before my answer, I just want to ask you a question within the audience. Who here knows what is the difference between loyalty or engagement from web two to web 3?

By show of hands, like do you know what does that mean? Do you know do you know the difference between that we got here? So like for me like in a very simple manner uh we we are looking at that right like we sitting here and telling you what it is is web two but then if you look into web three is like people that raise their hands like in one word what is loyalty for you? Um just following um sticking around and and and being with the person,

right? What about your one word?

Uh loyalty. Uh engage with my favorite content creators.

Right. What was your one word?

You one word?

To be part of the community,

right? So if you think about it like we talk a lot about in web 3 about ownership but it's also about consumer shifting from consuming passively sitting around and taking what the brand's giving you to co-creators right and you guys know that really really well when what you do is that you're inviting your customer your user so they become a co-creator so they start adding value to it so they start building alongside with you right so I think that from a fundamental uh base of how we can kind of like define it I think that's a really good way to define And now when we look into the trends, I think that the world is going from like TV mainstream where everybody had the same culture. So we grew up watching most likely similar cartoons and consuming similar things regardless of us being from four or five different countries. Right now the new generations, they're basically niching down, right? Everybody has their own small community, their own small bubble, their own kind of like cultural element.

So from a culture perspective, that's what's shifting and that's where brands are starting to play a role and where new technologies like web 3, AI, immersive web, gaming are shifting and learning and leaning into that direction. So ownership is obviously a big part of it. But I think co-creation is what really going to shift the dial.

Amazing. Thank you Diego. Yes, if we are um diving into the subject a bit more and talk about ownership, loyalty, how do you create loyalty now? Um you Sebastian you have built a whole entire creator economy into virtual worlds. I've seen so many things where you can create learn play um and you have very distinct um initiatives like the the alpha season for example that to to me felt like it's probably something so exciting that is you know driving that um interest.

How would you um describe that you you're doing so well

exactly? Well, well, if I put what Diego said in other world like basically the future of content and the future of like economy in general is around user generated content and everyone participating in creating value and engaging with their favorite brand, a favorite content

and uh it's been one of the driving mission of sandbox. How do we empower anyone to become a content creator or a creator with no code tools now with AI and VI coding?

However, like creating content, it's a passion. It's a hobby. It's fantastic that we can break down like the barrier of technology to facilitate that. But it's only the starting point and then comes many challenges. One of the main challenge we saw since we started sandbox in mobile in 2011 is like there was not a fair value distribution between like the platform, the games and the users who are contributing to that content.

So the games and the platforms still take away most of the revenue and users who participate in making content whether it's on Minecraft on Fortnite now on sandbox back in the day on mobile they were like just not earning anything else than like fame social fame and recognition for their participation. Blockchain has changed that game totally back in 2018 and uh when we started to work on the new version of sandbox we input it we we adopted blockchain and NFTs to enable content creator to like tokenize all their creation on it and be able to sell it distribute it in the game but outside like um on marketplaces and also we launch a sand token and we've seen all the rise of like token based economy so that um project could involve community and share the value with the token holder for their participation growing the value of the token distributing that wealth. Still we've seen limitation and we're on those model. We've seen that uh a lot of the interest in the toko was uh essentially driven by speculation instead of like fair participation. people were looking at the use of the technology for like quick scheme into like getting rich rather than building long-term value and engagement based as well on real product and real adoption.

And so we saw like the flows of those system instead of the real benefit. So what uh we launched recently sunshine on October 1st is the next phase of like how we enable like participation and how we enable like supporting the value for the content creator at the core enabling them putting in place a system where anyone can contribute where loyalty has value where every interaction is on chain. It will contribute to build your reputation, your identity and um content creators will benefit to access to new ways to monetization to new ways of building loyalty with their audience while the audience as well benefit from like supporting their content favorite content creator. So it become more of like a virtual um circle that supports the content creator and the economy behind and the just to give a number the content creator economy is roughly $250 billion and it's poised to grow. I think we some uh studies project like it will grow to over $700 billion in the next 5 years and it's still very much of a web two uh based economy at the moment.

What I mean is like content creator like they are being paid uh usually after 30 to 60 days by wire transfers. Uh they don't have access easily to um financing. So as a content creator like your activity your job is not really recognized. A bank will not give you a loan. It's not really taken seriously as an activity.

And so we are trying to change I wouldn't say change the game but change the perception that people have and support a future a digital future and digital economy where like it just blend it with like a physical world.

That's amazing. How how do you think you um what do you think is going to help to it's a learning curve. It sounds like how do you think we're going to get there? You know,

I I was going to say I think there's a big push though because I think content creators are fed up with the take rates from web two platforms. There's because I you know there's

the simplest proof that I saw lately is um I was doing a little bit of research. I don't know if any of you are familiar with a site called Only Fans, but Only Fans is probably the biggest place in the world for content creators to have a direct relationship with their audience on a pay-per-view basis basically. But Only Fans is known for adult content. But did you know that more than 30% of Only Fans creators and revenues and content are not from adult creators? Because the take rate is only 20%.

So if you move from Instagram and all these other places to Only Fans, you get 10% back and people are not stupid. They want to make more money as creators. So you have personal trainers and chefs and all kinds of people in other content categories now using that infrastructure in spite of the fact it's known for adult content as a brand name just because they want to make more money and they want to monetize their own stuff more. And so we in the web 3 community have an incredible opportunity because our infrastructure is cheap. We don't need to charge 30% to still make healthy margins.

So we can create products built on very very passionate fan groups that don't need to have audiences like the size of FC Barcelona. It's great if you do, but not everybody does. And so we can build products where you can actually have an audience of thousands or tens of thousands of loyal customers because they spend so much more because you're not building the whole user acquisition funnel. You're just taking the bottom tip and getting the super fans who are highly engaged, who love your content or who are happy to pay for it.

Very clear. And Jordi to to uh to you about the experiments with blockchain tokenized assets, the fans groups. Um can you share a little bit about your experiments at FC Barcelona?

Okay, but let let me say a comment is about content creators. Don't think that this is about individuals. It's about individuals but also about brands like FC Barcelona. We are uh

you're a content creator on social networks. Yeah. And and you know we have more than 500 million fans uh register in let's say in in channels in Facebook in Instagram etc. And we create the content and the user and the content creators are uh we see nothing. Yeah.

Okay. So then about uh our let's say uh adventures in the in in blockchain web 3. So to give a context FC Barcelona is a nonprofit organization about and is basically about scoring goals. That's the the main let's say uh thing that we have to do but uh and but we have also subsidiaries for for-profit companies. uh one of them is called baralizing and merchandising that has to do with digital physical assets JS stores etc.

And there is another one that's vers that has to do with uh creating digital experiences market them using emerging technologies and this means AI blockchain extended reality. Why this which is our hypothesis is that we have hundreds of millions of funds worldwide in Asia in Africa in South America and the only product that we only let's say offer them let's say B2C is come to the stadium and buy a ticket they will not come or buy a jersey so we have many people engaged and there is no product for them and the only way to go there and come with something is if this product is digital. So we love blockchain especially in terms of ownership and traceability. Okay. But in our case I don't want to hate I don't want to say we hate but we don't like speculation.

We don't play to this to this game because we are a club of 125 years of history and we want to be there if it's possible forever. Yeah. And so we have to start creating things. We did for instance our first NFD that it was auctioned in southeast New York in the 2022 and something that we are very proud of that's typical from our club is that it's not only about let's say doing things right there are there are artistic drivers in whatever we do for instance in the way we play but also in the things we do and that NFT that has to do with Yon C has been exhibited in in contemp museums together with Andy Warhol, Banksy, Herring, Kusama, we are super proud of these things and then we have done many things other let's say NFDs uh digital collectibles our first digital album on a platform called collectible uh we have created our let's say discord channel to promote engage people and now is the is the I would say that is the biggest or largest discord channel from from a club in the world and we are excited with these things. But let me go to the very beginning probably you know the club because we have had many famous players from let's say from Yan K Maradona Messi etc.

But the club is not this. The club is five professional sports, men and women, and also eight material sports. Probably we are the biggest club in the world. And what we think in everything that that we do is that it's not about football and male is about everything and women. Yeah.

So for instance, our second let's say masterpiece wasn't about Maradona. It was about Alexia Payas, the best women player by far in the world two years in a row. And so I think there should be proposed a message and utility and experiences and they should be nice not related to speculation with whatever we do. And I think the best utility that we could provide to something is gamification. Gamification and these guys know a lot.

And this is what we want to do. That's

gamification. Okay. Amazing. I think we we didn't hear captured everything so well because of your because of your mic. Um but um I think we got the uh yes the the general idea.

Thank you. Diego. I'm going to switch gears a little bit and ask you um how you are working with brands and businesses when it comes to loyalty community. Do you have key principles that um you have that you share with them uh when implementing new strategies?

Yeah, it's it's really interesting, right? Because talking obviously about Barcelona and uh I I have like a let's say a three-step framework that I always talk about, right? The first thing is about your position. Uh so as a brand, you want to position yourself almost like in a new category, right? So how can I create something that's extremely unique that nobody can own, nobody can claim, nobody can steal and how I make people engage with it, right?

So back on my Adidas day work for four years in headquarter in Germany during co uh we had like just this ginormous challenge which was nobody's is doing a sports because everybody's locked at home. Nobody's buying anything because why would you buy sports clothing if you cannot get out of the house? Nobody's buying you know street wear because if you cannot go out of the house why should I buy a 200 bucks shoes. So the positioning we took there which was really interesting in one of the activations uh that we did which was the biggest ever for Adidas was a home team. So what we've done is Adidas has 2,500 uh partners players creators musicians and during that period of time the positioning was clear.

Adida's main idea is how sports can change and shape people's life, right? That's that's what the brand lives and thrives. So, in a moment like everybody's at home, that was never more important. So, what we done within that position was we went out and we got all those 2,500 players, people from our from our uh roster and everybody was creating content. So you could go and have a call with Messi and he would like you know teach you something or you could get and uh see how they are training at home cuz as soon as COVID is over they're going to need to compete so how they're keeping shape.

So we went out and we did the biggest ever ever ever ever ever ever social activation with Adidas under that term, right? Our our our mission as a company is to change people's respports and now that they need the most, how do we do that? We leveraged that roster and brought everybody together and that had a huge spike within the company, right? So how you create that ocean that nobody could steal at that moment, nobody could go there and do the same and nobody did. And then once that was really successful and COVID was over, we were looking from inside of the organization, how can we tap into web three, right?

NFTs was really hot in 2020 and beginning of 2021. And then another way, right? So, how do we shape an specific spot within that culture that we can position ourselves and take over, right? And we did that with into the metaverse back in 2021. We did an NFT collection with uh um with Yugalabs and other partners.

We partner with Sandbox back in the day as well. And uh we made 24 million in 24 hours for the brand, which was unheard of selling digital assets. And that spiked that whole bull run of every single brand coming after and doing it. Right? So all of that had to do with the position and how you bring the people, the fans, your partners together to create something new, right?

And then the second part of that framework is the big idea. How do you translate that in a simple manner that anyone can get behind and it becomes really exciting, right? because of the way the world is moving forward through social media and gaming and now AI accelerating you know AI's lop like crazy nobody else no no nobody has more time to be consuming your adverts right nobody's sitting on tu on TV or looking at billboards so the the role of branding and advertising has changed dramatically and now it's all about entertainment right so how do you entertain people to get real estate inside of their brain leave their rentree And then whenever they are ready to to buy from you, they're going to remember you, right? Uh I play obviously a lot with the pink beanie and a lot of people ask me why do I wear it and the motive why I wear it is because every single time you see a pink beanie regardless of where you are in the planet, you're going to remind me, right? You're going to remind about me and what I stand for.

And I own now a piece of real estate inside of your brain and I live there for free. And that's the whole strategy and that's what brands do, right? Although in fairness I just picture a dog with a hat to be honest. [laughter]

Depends where you are, right? So that that's a lot to do with this element of the big idea and how you execute and the consistency behind it, right? And then the third element which is obviously commerciality and commercial and selling and movie numbers that we all love and that's what brand is also for is that you have this rule that we call in Brandy which is the nine uh the five and 95, right? So we're living in a world now of performance marketing. Everything is performance marketing.

throw a ton of money on meta whatever and now is AI AI search and that's all what matter drive the numbers ROI the economy is collapsing AI is going to take over our jobs everybody's going to die right that's the mentality on the mainstream [laughter] right now which is crazy so everybody's putting all the money on that 5% audience those people know you exist they've engaged with you you're going to put ads in front of them and that's how you're going to convert at a certain point you're going to run out either of budget or you're going to run out of an audience there is no more people that want to buy from us because you took over the market and then what do you do right and that's where the branding element of it comes in which is the 95% which is the positioning the big idea and buying piece of real estate on people's mind because whenever they become ready to buy guess who they're going to buy from so that's usually the way I I I talk to those brands and help them especially tech founders tech heads that think that oh the mainstream still don't get decentralization the mainstream still don't get zero knowledge proofbased algorithm the mainstream still don't don't get why we have bridging in defy. It's not they don't get it, it's that they don't give a and they never will, right? And the reality is is how we translate that in meaning to them rather than and how we dump down the the the content or the message. They're not interesting zero knowledge proof based technology, but they might be interesting on someone stealing their private data and credit card and knowing more of things about what you know they actually want to share. So it's a lot of that element on how you shift the conversation and how you tr you you translate features and benefits into meaning in people's life.

Absolutely. Robbie, do you have anything to add to this?

Sure. I was going to say first absolutely right and I think that this points to I think the strength of something you said earlier on which is about co-creation because co-creation is actually just getting your customers to in get themselves more invested in the success and the outcome of your brand or your experience. Part of that can be owning a share of the network by owning a token and part of that can be actually putting work in at the same time and becoming an active community member, maybe being rewarded for it because you're able to participate in the economy of the of it. And I think that's the exciting thing about the web 3 tools that we have available to us because actually it's up to us as you know business owners to design our products to make use of all those resources and tools because actually there's an infinite sort of variation of ways in which we can implement these strategies but I think the one thing is clear we have to provide a lot more value to our customers and we need to provide a lot more value to the brands and marketers and IP who are seeking to connect with those customers because they haven't gotten a lot of value in the past and have been paying a very high fee to the middlemen for that privilege.

If I can jump in in what you're saying as well like it's good that you were comparing like how uh culture was shaped before. Culture was shaped through radio through newspaper through TV. Nowadays culture is very niche but it's also shaped through gaming and it's shaped from the community you engage with. So brand have to think about like how do I not not just about like how do I sell and I convert a customer an audience into a customer but more like how do I shape my presence in their culture on the long term and I be relevant I touch them within the media that they they're actually consuming and what media are they consuming on one side yes social media but now more and more like gaming like gaming is basically the mainstream media that's capturing more attention that Netflix YouTube and social media combined and why Is that because the attention time of user is usually in the range of like tens of minutes or up to hours versus like the few second that like the culture of like fast scrolling and fast swiping and changing as a customers too as well. And so uh it's a great thing and maybe something for a conclusion that it's taking us to world like gaming because gaming is still one of the most creative industries most of the challenging on the business side to succeed and make something uh lasting but also like it's one of the industry which is constantly because of the high failure rate thinking like how we're going to engage and make things fun and making things fun make actually people want to spend time spend money into it and keep talking about it.

So that's for me so important.

That's great. Let's shift quickly into the future. We have a few more minutes and talk about maybe the next five years. Uh Jordi, uh what's your vision for the next five years?

Okay. from from our point of from our point of view we as a cap I'll so for instance we have an e-commerce uh that has more than 20 million visitors every single year that is selling jerseys for instance worldwide so we have to have we like to have let's say uh crypto payments but I think was Robbie who stated at the beginning we see a stable coins as the way to do it at least in our Because as we said, we don't want to play with speculation. We don't want to play with things that could damage our reputation, but we want to be there because technology is super interesting. So offering the possibility to our fans worldwide to be to have the chance to buy things with crypto in this case is stable coins is something that's going to happen. And I think that it's going to this is going to be a mass let's say uh on boarding of people in the crypto world in a super seamless way.

And I think it's not only it's not it's not only does doing that many other brands will do it

and

right

just and just one comment uh the comment is the following is that because it's something that inspire me from from what Sebastian said for instance we have more uh five times more funds in Indonesia than in Spain. Okay. So and we very often don't realize this. So this means that we have to use all these digital tools and particularly AI to approach people in their language with the local let's say uh the local things that they like and and so being globally doesn't mean offering the same to everyone and and this is super important.

That's great. Thank you. Very quickly, Diego, next five years in one word. [laughter]

Yes, because then I would like

Bitcoin to the bomb. [laughter]

It's a hard one. Um, well, yeah, briefly, I think I I think we're going to see a lot of maturity within the industry. Uh, I tend to say there's three three elements within the industry. There's a cyber punks, there's the Dgens, and there's the the the now coming uh, you know, institutions, the mainstream. And I think we started the cyber punks.

the digents brought us to build all the ecosystem and test stress test it and now we getting to the to the stage of the the institutions look at this conference right I never seen so many bankers in one place it's wild so I'm also excited for that right so I think that that's what we're going to keep going I think it's slowly but surely we're going to keep going through that maturity period I think we are uh under puberty right now of our industry you know there's like 15 16 years old trying to figure out who we actually are but I think we're going to keep going and moving forward towards that direction

yes definitely Sebastian

uh well I think like the future is like essentially everything is tokenized and we don't even know have to care about it like the whole digital economy and physical world economy are totally blended content creator make a living can subsist and live economically from their passion and uh it's all based on the blockchain behind our bank are accepting any kind of token not just stable I'm actually a big fan of like having communities of their own token having credtor have their own points on chain have their own tokens and it can work within their small community of a thousand or 10,000 of fan it doesn't need to be accepted or only available to millions to succeed

and uh yes that's that that's for me like brilliant the big goal yes absolutely Robbie your vision for the future

I I think we just need to keep doing more of the same honestly you know I I've been to this event now four four years five years in a row and it just keeps getting better and it's because of everybody who attends and all the projects that you're creating etc. So I think we just keep sticking to it and and I think that we've seen the results already.

Thank you. Thank you so so much for sharing your insights, experience and wisdom. Uh thank you everyone and enjoy the rest of the day.

Thank you very much. [applause]