Search Interviews:

Jeremy Weisz 4:07

Chris, for many people, when people hear crypto or NFT, it almost feels like a black box. We’re not sure what it is. I want you to talk a little bit about you know, one of the reasons you did a heavy shift into this which has to do with I know what the platform’s and the things that were going on with match node and then, you know, we’ll talk about what is it like why, how did you dive into and what you’re doing? So what caused you to kind of look deeper into the NFT space?

Chris Madden 4:36

Well, you know, we really enjoy working on Facebook as an ad platform and now meta but Facebook changed its name to meta for a reason, say a lot of the changes that we were already tracking. We bought Bitcoin as an agency in 2016. We were only a couple of years in because we saw a future in which digital interactions and digital networks are going to be owned by craters are owned by people rather than owned by centralized systems. And so I think we’re now at a point where meta Instagram, all the different parts of meta and all these centralized platforms understand that they themselves are admitting it. And they’re coming later than a lot, so, so that so that was like a strategic digital landscape reason that has to do with my advertising agency and my view on those different large players in the industries. As far as what none of t is and why we decided to do it. And NFT’s are the first chance to really own a provably any digital object, of course, in the past, you might own you might have an image or some some piece of sensitive information, like a big statement, anybody can copy that get their hands on it, you can copy things infinitely. What NF T’s allow for is some digital verification of ownership. And so I can make an NFT, you can decide that you want to buy it from me, you can keep it forever, you can do all sorts of different things with it. Nf T’s I think to in the broader landscape are a little bit pigeon holed for what they can be with a like a really broad applicable to what’s closer to like a website or a web page and the reality the things that it can do. It can display images, it can carry metadata. But what really matters is that I think it’s the it’s the piece of the crypto industry that has most brought normal people into it because it’s relatable, you see this on this thing. Those things are easier to understand and maybe some previous crypto movements that were really truly financial in nature, like decentralized finance, gotta get pretty excited about lending and loans and bonds and things like that to really get this whereas this is a fun accessible way to dive into crypto to dive into NF t’s a very friendly community that’s really helpful and really been eye opening to me. And then I think going back three or four years ago, when NFT’s were frankly first invented, I started watching it with crypto kitties, which first came out on the Ethereum network. And in what a little bit of I think an easy criticism is like it’s can be shallow and short term. And so I saw those years ago that adding a charitable component to an NFT project was was really necessary. And just looking at a lot of e-commerce and DTC web two brands that have broken out, like that charitable piece of those businesses and adding meaning and purpose to that wasn’t was a pretty obvious thing, in my opinion. And I think it’s really helped us as far as attracting a values based community, all the people in our community. You know, some people are surfers, and some people live near the ocean. And some people are marine biologists and it’s like, global. So we’re really excited about what has happened so far. Yeah, that donation number we are super proud of. And we’re just at the beginning, there’s so much to do. And I could go on and on.

Jeremy Weisz 8:00

Yeah, I mean, if you’re watching, if you’re listening the audio, you can check out the video as well on the postman’s Inspired Insider, and I’m pulling up the Seabums website and you can kind of see what it looks like visually. And then you see all this, these cool images when you decided to first get started with this. Where did you start, like walk me through the journey, a little bit of Seabums. Sure.

Chris Madden 8:24

So I had been kicking around similar ideas around cleaning up the world like literally paying people to go out and clean up a place around them as a side project before the pandemic started. And like I said, I’ve been pretty deep into crypto and NF t’s just watching it and listening to podcasts and things like that. There seem to always in my head, there was a missing piece of how to really get started. And the missing piece was a friend of mine, Nate who is the CO creator and the artists who you’ll see if you keep scrolling down the website for those of our listeners who are also watching. So they know started the project was literally one of those quick moments where as soon as I thought of Nate, I was like, ah, that’s it. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that sooner. So Nate and I are friends. We have a close mutual friend that introduced us and his Nate has a design agency. He introduced us to lending tree this was many years ago, lending tree became our biggest client. So again, in the Matchnode. World, this all felt very, it was very it made a lot of sense. Nate has passed us business. We passed him business we’re like let’s do this. He also wanted as an artist wanted to dig into web three to learn more. And so when I had that moment of clarity, that little light bulb, I texted him, and I said do you want to do an MC project with me? And 10 minutes later? He said yes. And it was October of last year I remember that because it was the bowls first preseason game was the next night and I said you got to go the Bulls game and talk about it. So he said yes, we did. We sat down and it was that quickly we shared it was always going to be a part of it. I think in my initial text I threw out a couple of components and charity was a piece First, first conversation, we agree that the ocean should be the focus. So then they start. So over the next week or two start sending me images of different fish sorts of characters that he’s drawn. And fast forward a month, and we’ve locked in on this base character that you’re looking at. And the way these NFT projects work is that they’re algorithmically generated. So there are 10,000 pieces in our collection. They’re all completely unique. They’re all different from one another. And basically, you can see just right here simply there’s like a background, that’s different colors, there’s different types of fish. And there are different like headgear, for example. Now there’s, I think there’s something like 14 traits, I’m just naming three. But for those three traits, they may have put in 20, or 25, or 50, different possibilities. And so we run a piece of software that algorithmically lines these things up and creates 10,000, there could have been maybe, I don’t know a million or 10 million based on all the different possible traits. But so we run through those 10,000 unique tricks. There’s a whole lot of technical learning that we have to do on how to actually do this. And so you can see the button there to MIT to Seabums. If someone connects their wallet. clicks, mint pays the eath to mint, it, that seafoam is automatically passed into their wallet, the next Seabums in the line. And so we don’t know what that next Seabum is, and neither do they. So there’s this fun moment of where you’re almost like opening the one that you’ve gotten. So

Jeremy Weisz 11:28

that’s like opening a digital pack of baseball cards.

Chris Madden 11:32

Exactly. It’s definitely like except

Jeremy Weisz 11:33

for it’s a unique, it’s guaranteed unique. Yeah, like if each pack of cards had a card that was unique, and only you would get it,

Chris Madden 11:44

there were 10,000 Total cards, every every one of the 10,000 is unique. You’d open up the pack and like, Oh, this is the one that I got. Yes.

Jeremy Weisz 11:51

Got it. And so they get it and then what? And then another

Chris Madden 11:56

part of the community and you know, there’s, there’s an invent what that is a huge question the NFT space and different projects answer that question differently. brass tacks, when you get down to it, then what is you own this piece of art, you can do anything with it. So we do pass the commercial ownership rights of the piece of art to that so people can do anything they want, they can change it, they can. And people have done a lot of different cool mods, we’ve got some cool artists in our community that will put their favorite sports team as the background, or you’ll make one for Valentine’s Day or make one for Earth Day or people can use it to make their own merchandise and sell that merchandise. People can start a business they can do anything they want to when they own it. So that’s the first thing is that it’s really like what you’re getting is this piece of art, your ability to own it, your ability to transfer it to others, whatever you want to do. And also note that 20% of the money that you paid, went to charity. And then there are a lot more things that we’re working on. And as you scroll down, there is a Metaverse component of it. There’s another project that we bought into that basically allows us to build a Metaverse with play to earn capabilities on top of Minecraft so we hired an agency that’s helping us build that and build a Minecraft world that you can go in and see right now that’s all CBOs based. And as next piece of development finishes, we’re gonna be able to have like Seabums games. So if you own a Seabum, you go into our Minecraft world, you play this game, you’ll get rewards like money. It’s called the world’s token that this NFT project is launching. And so that token, then we get part of that to charity. And so these games are about cleaning up the ocean and things that fish would do to clean up trash. That’s a virtual world. We have a very important real world piece of this, which is about cleaning up the ocean. So aside from the charitable piece that where we’re donating money at the Mint, there’s also we’re doing especially with the weather getting nicer, we’re recording this in May I live in Chicago.

Jeremy Weisz 13:57

And isn’t that quite nice yet? Yeah.

Chris Madden 14:01

Doing a lot of beach cleanups. So anybody who does a beach cleanup. In past months, we’ve been changing the incentives, but we’re giving people incentives to get outside and clean things up. So in the past, if you went outside, and you cleaned up for an hour or two, and there’s parameters and kind of details on what we’re looking for, but basically if you do before and after pictures, you do that three times we send people Seabums, there’s a specific kind of NFT that we’re now giving out. And every time you do a clean up and a month, you get entered into a raffle so now we’re gonna Seabum. So we’ve been adjusting what that looks like. But it’s all these virtual and real worlds community building possibilities that are unlocked that again, lead back to this mission of improving ocean health.

Jeremy Weisz 14:49

So people could win a one of these and Seabum NFTs for participating in the cleanup as well. Absolutely. That’s Cool. I love that. You know you mentioned the metaverse, there’s a lot of things people may buy, because they want something cool. They want to change it. Maybe they want to make merch out of it, but they can also use it in. It’s also being used in the metaverse. And so just explain a little bit of the metaverse, you know, when I when I and I don’t know if I’m thinking of it properly, but I’m thinking of it like a virtual reality. You know, I have an Oculus quest to, you know, I put it on in a game virtual reality game. And you can interact with different games. So I don’t know if I’m thinking of it properly. What is the metaverse? And how would how does that relate to the NFT?

Chris Madden 15:36

Good question like this, this discussion around what’s the definition of a Metaverse is a useful one just because it opens up the discussion of I don’t think there’s a perfect definition. But there’s like extremes, you know, so I think of a Metaverse is a persistent digital experience. So that can be lots of different things. You can I’ve heard, I’ve heard people argue that we already live in the metaverse in lots of ways where like our banking environment is essentially Metaverse and a lot of people don’t even go into a branch. We’ve got images on our phone and in our screens, that our experience of having wealth and having money, you know, with this relationship with this bank, that’s pretty nice. You know, then you mentioned Oculus quest VR, I would definitely say that games and virtual reality are the closest thing that we have so far. And it’s the it’s the jumping off point for which people can go a little bit deeper. Imagine like, well, what if everything was again, what if you’re always in this in this world? And I don’t see it quite like those are like two extremes. And the reality is there’s just like all this grey in the middle as the hardware and the software and the experiences all are working to get built, where like the various very earliest point of what that can be. But I do like the way Mark Zuckerberg discusses discusses that in which he says, there’s this real world clearly, that has nothing to do with computers as humans interacting in real time. There’s this fully virtual world, which might be a video game or Oculus quest, like you mentioned. But the real world is a blend of these two things. And the metaverse is is another angle on that. And so the way that NF T’s have to do with the metaverse is because if you can imagine yourself having a virtual experience that is important to you, which I think is part of the metaverse really taking place in this cultural mentality right now is that people can start to imagine and understand that there’s this virtual world where there’s things that are really valuable to me. And NFT’s are the obvious first step, there were like there are NF T’s that are worth hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of dollars and why. And I think for people who, who aren’t as deep into the space as maybe someone like I am, you can wonder well how that could ever make sense. And it’s just, it makes sense to me, because I already understand that the virtual world is important to people. And you know, we all can look at our lives and see examples of that. So as the virtual world becomes more important, or more important, there’s things that have value, and now we can trade them. And there are symbols of identity for sure. And NFT, literally, a profile picture is part of the original intent. And in Twitter and Instagram are changing their profile picture capabilities to signal that you truly own that NFT. Like those things are about identity and status. So there’s a lot in that, and how identity and status translates online and into these virtual experiences and how that is different or tied to or not your real world identity. I think people aren’t running experiments on that to understand what different communities of people want to do. And what are the limits? And where’s the innovation?

Jeremy Weisz 18:45

So many questions, Chris, based on that, but you know, what I want to ask so, but someone can use it, like we mentioned for for merch for their own use for whatever they want profile, they can, they can, you know, change it, but you can say they can also use it in different games. Like if they’re playing different games, online or virtually, in, you know, whatever game like you mentioned Minecraft, they can use it in those games and and you say like, you reward those people for using it. I guess that I imagine that’s the case, because then they’re spreading the word on, you know, see bombs and other people say, Oh, where’d you get that? And then Is that why you have that reward in there? It’s like, oh, they then they go back to see bones.io And like, I want to get one of those.

Chris Madden 19:30

Well, there’s so like, that would be one way to do it. That would be basically Seabum saying we’re going to pay these people for being in this virtual world because we think that money is going to come back to us somehow. I can see people trying that that’s not what we’re doing. There is another project called the NFT worlds, which has built all these blockchain NFT web three capabilities on top of Minecraft and and basically we bought an NFT that represents a piece of land See, that has these capabilities in Minecraft. And then we hired a firm to build out a world where there’s an old town that looks like seaside. And there’s water everywhere because we’re sea bombs and there’s a building a game to pull trash out of the ocean. The point is that the funds for that come from this token that NFT worlds the larger project, like overlay project builds. And so I and the people who own sea bones can make worlds this token that we are not generally it’s a third party generating that token. So I think that’s a really key question. And key difference is like, who’s generating that economic value that’s being passed on. And in this case, it’s not us just creating value and giving it to our holders. It’s, it’s coming from this third party that we’re participating in, that has built this layer on top of Minecraft.

Jeremy Weisz 20:52

This is fascinating. Because when we’re looking at the page, and people are watching the video, are these Seabums and NFTs people have already purchased? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Madden 21:04

Yeah. So all of these are real and owned by someone and a couple of them I know very well. And they have stories and things like that. So you can see the one kind of in the bottom row that is a rainbow fish. So there’s a rainbow fish with a rainbow background and a unicorn head. Yeah, that one right there. So I own that one. Someone else made it, I liked it so much, I just like had to buy it. Because the traits of the rainbow background and the Rainbow Fish is extremely rare. Like when I bought that one, it was the only one in the whole collection that had the rate the double rainbow we call it. And I think there’s since been like two other double rainbows minted. So the one right next to it, that has like the wooden on the other side that it’s like a looks like a wooden carving with a yellow background. That is a one of one meaning that one was not generated with the algorithm we described, we took for very specific Seabums that the artist drew and put them into the collection that looked nothing like any of the other ones. So those would be among the most sought after. So yeah, those seed bombs you’re looking at are all real ones that people have purchased that are out in the world. And again, as I look at them, I can name a handful of like, I know who owns that one. I know who owns that one. And they do have stories, which is cool. In fact, that one that one I was telling you about. Somebody mentioned it was a long time ago, somebody mitad it, people who knew and we’re watching very closely, we’re like, oh my gosh, that’s a one on one. That’s incredible, it looks amazing. And wow, how exciting. A person went and put an offer to buy it right away from the person who bought it. And they accepted it, they sold it. So they sold it for a very low amount, like the equivalent of was point o 6/8. In the the mid price point of force on the order of like $180 at the time. And people were like amazed. There’s this huge, huge score. I felt badly for the person who sold it, but we never found out who they are. And so hopefully they don’t know. But yeah, that’s another interesting piece is the community and who buys them? And who sells them and why. And yeah, there’s stories behind so many of these already that I already again, just looking at them. I know. Also, how do they

Jeremy Weisz 23:11

confirm the owner? How does it work as far as just verifying the digital token of that? NFT?

Chris Madden 23:21

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a good question that until I got as deep into this as I did, it’s hard to discuss, and hard to understand theoretically. And then as soon as you take that step of deciding to get into it yourself with, you know, maybe $100 and an hour of time, you start to realize like, Oh, I get it, because basically, you don’t sign into our website here, you connect your wallet to MIT. And that while it is something that’s on your machine already, because you own it, you might have Dr. Jeremy Weisz dot ease that you bought, it’s like owning your.com And that’s in your wallet. And, and then you might say I want to buy one out there button NFT before I want to try it. And then so you buy one of these NFT’s you meant it, it shows up in your wallet.

Jeremy Weisz 24:09

So if I’m like Chris, I want the rainbow and rainbow, right? And I’m gonna send you this and then there is like basically a digital stamp in your wallet that with that purchase, essentially, yeah,

Chris Madden 24:22

yeah, there’s definitely transaction information. And so because I own that double rainbow, you you’d have to buy it from me. And so I would have to agree with you on what the price is. And then we can do this on a platform generally, because generally, it’s like we don’t know each other. And that’s the point of crypto we can can we can transact without knowing one another and trusted and so I could put this up for sale on open sea, or you could put a direct offer on it on open sea. In either case, we say yes, that’s the price. I click Yes. It immediately leaves my wallet and goes into your wallet and like we can all see that. It’s like it was in my wallet. One minute I refresh. It’s gone. opposite for you. There’s a, it’s called an ether scan, which is like the receipt. So if you and I were because we know each other if we’re doing a direct transaction, I generally don’t recommend this, but we know each other, I would trust you, you would trust me, we get bigger not US Open see, and you could just send me the eth. And then I can just send you that NFT. And in both cases, we could send each other the ether scan link, which is a receipt, and it would say, from Chris’s wallet to Jeremy’s wallet, this thing was sent. This is the time that it was sent. This is how much gas we paid, etc. So yeah, that’s what’s really cool about it is, it is all completely true tracked. And there’s this idea about crypto, that it’s maybe net sketchy or shady or you could like it’s good for criminals, it’s like really bad for criminals generally, because everything you do is tracked and publicly visible, at least in theory,

Jeremy Weisz 25:54

how did you decide on the pricing? As you could see, I don’t know if you’ve changed it. You know, as it gets popular? Do you change this pricing right now? You could see it says meant to see Mom? 4.0? For Aetherium? Yeah,

Chris Madden 26:09

so really good question. And so the way we set it up is that we cannot change the price. So point zero 4/8 is the price. And we set that price basically by looking at the market. This was in December, looking at the market of other projects. We always saw this project with the charitable, charitable element with like friendly art. We always saw this as a project for people that come in to NFTS from the outside potentially for the first time. So we want to make the price lower than most certainly you’ll see project selling for point one are much more for a lot of different reasons

Jeremy Weisz 26:42

what is equivalent today about what is point O for a theorem.

Chris Madden 26:49

Project the price of the value of one eath was $4,500. So point oh four was $180. Now it’s there it was chugging along at $2,000. But we’re there’s been a lot of tumult in the market. eath is at $2,000. That’s $80. So it adds a layer of complexity to our business for sure. We’re spending money on ads, we’re doing other things marketing wise, we’re paying different people generally, a lot of people want to be paid neath and we’re preferring that, but there’s reason of course for us to spend US dollars in the business. And and that has been a challenge to be like, we just got a bunch of eath. And like when do we sell it in order to turn it into cash in order to pay our bills? It’s like as if we need more complexity and entrepreneurship. Right.

Jeremy Weisz 27:41

Talk about the physical component. You know, I’m looking through here I don’t know if there is a physical one. I see this cool gold. Sebum here. And in this relates, I saw it from the Chicago Bulls, right. I remember seeing I don’t know Michael Jordan came out with something with those like a bowl that had like six rings on its horns. What are the Chicago Bulls doing? Or anyone else in this space with with NFT’s?

Chris Madden 28:09

Yeah, I’m excited to answer that question. If you scroll up to the top and go to the lengths click to click on beach cleanups, and I’ll describe some of our I are in real life stuff as I answered the bulls question. And thank you. Yeah, thanks for asking. The bulls are one of the clients of our agency, Matt. So Matt Stone, my digital advertising agency, works with the bulls to help them sell tickets, which is super fun. And we really enjoy working with them. And the first NFT I ever owned, was summer of 2021. And the bowls put out their first NFT project. So I was all in on this, my client and our friend who works at the bulls, Dan Moriarity who was putting this all together. And it was like a different part of my brain where I was like obsessed with NF Ts and crypto. And then the national digital advertising part of my brain, I wouldn’t say they’re totally separate, but I didn’t put them together too much. Let’s see Dan, my client work on NFT’s on behalf of the bulls. This was their first drop they did last year. And now subsequently, the more very recently that they’re doing another one, it was just continued to show me that this was something that like professionally, I needed to move towards a one to move towards. So with the balls, if you have all six of which no one really does, and you get the super special ones you can be like, you get like a contract for a day and you get to sit on the bench. And so like they invite you into, you know the experience of the team. And again, I don’t know that anybody actually has all six of those in that way. But there are different perks for if you have one or two depending on which ones you have, you might get tickets to a game. Here aside from the metaverse piece I was describing before. We’ve really focused on getting people out and helping to clean up beaches and waterways so of course not everybody lives near a beach or can get to one but most people live near some body of water that ultimately empties to some other body of water. That ultimately empties to the ocean. So anyone that wants to go out and do a cleanup? It’s usually about a two hour play. There you go. I have I have those kind of five. What do you have? I find that the six but I don’t have is the if you scroll down, I didn’t get the I didn’t get the Seattle one. So I didn’t get that one right there. I four of the six. I didn’t get the Seattle one. I didn’t get the first one.

Jeremy Weisz 30:27

So you get all of them, you get some kind of cool, special experience.

Chris Madden 30:32

Yep. And in this scenario, you go right there, like bowl for a day would be the legendary if you scroll down those words. So yeah, that’s cool. So basically, we as project owners, get to decide you mentioned the Seabums NFT. That was gold and circling. That is not something that you, you could get directly from our website, we dropped that people meeting, we automatically gave it to every wallet that had three Seabums in it at a time that we were going to do that. So this is

Jeremy Weisz 31:05

a physical thing right here.

Chris Madden 31:07

Now that’s not a physical thing

Jeremy Weisz 31:08

that was not Oh, they get the digital version of that. They get that digital version of God. And

Chris Madden 31:14

we kicked around like, should we do? Should we get some ocean plastic that’s been recycled and pulled out of the ocean and use it to build a 3d model where we could give this as a prize to 20 people, all sorts of ideas like that there is in real life merch, we are making beach cleanup flags, I believe there’s no beach cleanup flag in Mexico beach cleanup flag in Costa Rica in Southern California. We just did a cleanup in Chicago with some with my co founder and other people in the community a couple of weeks ago. So

Jeremy Weisz 31:43

there’s a shout out to you know, TerraCycle I had Tom Zacky of TerraCycle on the podcast, and that will be cool to partner with TerraCycle. To produce they they I don’t know if you’re familiar with TerraCycle. But oh, yeah, like if you see some packages, like chip bags have been made out of recycled materials, but they have they create basically as a company these products out of all the stuff that they cleaned up like you have here. You know, this and this cigarette butts like they have I forgot collected X number of millions of cigarette butts through their their cleanup, so but they actually have stuff in Walmart and Target from the recycled material, like not just recycle, but the cleanup stuff they’ve done. So

Chris Madden 32:33

would love to connect your partner that we’re looking for. So you’re on it. So those those in real life pieces are in developments STILL TO COME important. And you know, there’s a whole lot to do on all on all sides. But that sounds like a great possibility.

Jeremy Weisz 32:52

So, you know, this is fascinating. Chris, talk about the Chicago Bulls for a second, you know, of what you do with them.

Chris Madden 32:59

Yeah. So on the advertising agency side, we started very small, my co founder Brian and I just working with, you know, whatever clients we get and building the business that way, we had no outside funding. And we really started with our own blood, sweat and tears working with early clients and slowly building it up. So we’ve been in business for coming up on nine years now. And it was maybe four years ago that bulls filled out a form on our website and Jeremy huge admission that you and I had met before Andy connected us and we met we met through entrepreneurs organization, and I was in an entrepreneur’s organization meeting and got this email and I was sitting next to my business partner. And I remember saying like, Okay, we just got a lead off our website of any company in the world we think I’d be most excited to work with. And he I think the bowls were his second, his second guests. So they they filled out a form on the site. But we had done the work to be practiced to win the business. We’re working with the Chicago Cubs ownership and helping them launch Gallagher way, which was their entertainment district. And I think that helps. But what we do with them is we help them sell tickets. So we have a certain budget that they want us to spend each season that have a certain return, let’s say $4 in the door for every dollar spent, or $3, or $5, or some numbers like that based on their season and what they’re expecting. And then it’s our job to go and get that return. And so it is a creative. So their team, they have an in house team that of course, like every game is creating digital content. And we meet with them early in the season to decide how are we going to translate that digital content into great paid social ads that drive returns. And so there’s a big creative piece to it. There’s a technical piece to it because understanding that return when the tickets are sold through a third party, which is Ticketmaster. A lot of moving parts between the ad platforms changing details, Ticketmaster chain Seeing details. And we’re continually going and looking at finding wins to track better to convert better. And so we just really love working with them. They’re great people that have referred other business to us, we now work with the United center, their arena as a client, we work with the Blackhawks as a client that they helped us get. And so now we have three or four different sports teams as clients. And always it’s like, here’s our budget. Here’s our particular setup, we’re trying to sell tickets. And so the bulls are a big global brand. They were thankfully better this year, but they’ve been not great in past seasons. So we take those things into account, we’ve worked with some NHL teams, a couple of them didn’t have great results on the ice of the season, they’re not 500 They make the playoffs. So that can be very different. And we’re marketing, you know, family night at the arena or different promotions they might be doing. There’s like pro sports and like lots of different theme nights. And so those those things become some of the things that we promote to try to bring people out. You know, if it’s not just about having the best team in the league that season.

Jeremy Weisz 36:00

Yeah, I mean, because we talk about these big brands like the Chicago Bulls and new balance, you know, these are established

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 36:08

companies that have over time transition to digital. So I want to hear about traditional marketing, versus the and how that transition to digital works. And I also want to give a shout out to Paul Ratner of the Golden State Warriors, I’m gonna have to send this episode to him, Chris, because I want to know what the Golden State Warriors are doing with the NFT space and and other stuff like that. So I’ll have to get their their take on it. But I’m transitioning from traditional or having a mix of traditional and digital.

Chris Madden 36:42

Yeah, good question. I have no Steph Curry owns at least one NFT exam in the same product that he is in, but as his den Moriarty. So I like definitely got some some tips on NBA players buying into projects, and it’s a basketball game. But so yeah, you said it. And we are not the agency. We have some e-commerce business, of course, but we’re not the agency that’s working with digital native brands to sell mattresses, we are established brands like bowls, and like new balance that are shifting to digital that no, but the world has changed quite a lot since their businesses started, you know, even lending tree lending tree I think of as a digital native brand. But lending tree started as like a lot of people with a lot of phones call centers in North Carolina. And then they went out and opened an office in the bay area to build out the technique. So. So with established brands, it’s essentially like one of the things that we think about is that they have a pie chart in their slide deck somewhere with the ad budget, and they you know, 10 years ago, it was more slanted towards traditional. And now it’s more slanted towards digital. And we’re the people that help them make that transition. So it means that there may be people that are really important to the organization internally that don’t understand it or aren’t as comfortable and like what does that mean for the work that we do and how we might have to win people over again, very different from if this is a digitally native founder. And they want all the cutting edge tactics, metrics, discussions, just the language we use, the way that we approach the problems, the way that we sell to them the way that we understand where their team might be coming from changes. So as I mentioned, we also work with the United center, that has been selling luxury suites for 20 years. And this year was the first time they ever tried to sell them digitally without a phone call in there. And so one of the people on the team was the person who’s been leading this for 15 or 20 years. And he’s great and was very excited and open to learning, but admitted that this was very new to them, and that they had not tried this before. And so it just, it just takes more of a position where we have to help people. The good thing is that because the numbers are so clear, they’re surprised at how clear they are compared to traditional. So they might be comfortable with a billboard or a TV ad because that’s what they’ve been doing. But when we come to them and run a 90 day test or something, we can say okay, okay, this is how much money was spent, this money came in. These are all the different tests that we ran, here’s what that creative looks like what happened, we learned that we need to change this word so that when we change that word, here’s what the outcome was. This is very convincing people like unless you like have some sort of preconceived bias where you’re just like not going to get go and go along with it, like numbers speak to lots of different kinds of people. And so that’s kind of some of the approaches that we take to bring maybe people who are used to more traditional approaches into the digital approach, make it feel like something that they can have success with, that they can understand clearly, like, why it’s a win.

Jeremy Weisz 39:45

Are there any tips you can give? As far as you know, we are used to from the premium sales standpoint, you know, rubbing elbows and doing more of the traditional stuff. What has worked on the dish aside for that, because actually, you know, I mentioned Paul Ratner and I, that’s one of the things I believe, I don’t know if he still is in charge of but he was of their Premium Suite. VIPs. Right. So what are some things they could look at doing? Or you mentioned some some verbiage, what what stuff are you doing? That’s working?

Chris Madden 40:19

Yeah, well, every situation is different first. So like I mentioned, the success that the team is having and the sport that they play is a huge impact on the team is I remember, I saw someone who did some of this work for the Golden State Warriors, the warriors are really good again now, but that wears were a topical world. And he’s talking about how he’s selling tickets for the Warriors via ads. And everyone’s like, that’s so easy, like they sell out every game. So what that team might need is really different from a team that’s struggling to fill the arena and a small market might be needing. But on the luxury suite example, the bulls are the United center hired us, as I mentioned, to run the same ads for them to sell luxury suites, the answer is the most luxury suites in the in the NBA, potentially in the country. So there’s a lot of inventory there, there’s not sold, generally, I sold over the phone, it’s a high dollar amount out of corporate purchasers. So what the what we did, and what we did in collabs, a deep collaboration with the United center team is start the build out a page that works to sell this thing digitally. And so questions are, for instance, like how many people can come? And what’s the total cost? So instead of saying, this is gonna cost $2,000, or something, it’s like, well, you know, the suite with 10, people like $200, per head, all inclusive, you get food, you get parking, you get a ticket, you get a hat, you know, all of a sudden, that seems really different than like, Oh, this is $2,000, what am I like, no, versus you wouldn’t tell your friends at $200 a head for a big night out, of course, not inexpensive, but it’s just a very different positioning. So as we started to go down that path, as always, in digital and in advertising, the first thing that we start with putting the market ends up not looking at all like the thing that we’ll have in the market six weeks later, because we learned so quickly. So one of the big takeaways that they were excited about, and we were excited about is that the title of this product is executive suites of economy, executive suites forever. We and they I don’t even know who came up with the idea initially on their team or ours. But certainly it was on their team started. We ran into us calling them all inclusive suites. So everything’s the same, but on the one hand, six executive suite, and the other hand is all inclusive. It seems intuitive now, but all inclusive just did so much better. And it just gave us a like a big signpost of this is this is the direction we’re headed in. And this is the messaging that people want digitally. And all inclusive experience is something that people make sense makes sense to people, and they’re used to shopping for all inclusive necessarily includes me, but I’m part of what’s included in this and it’s for me, whereas executive or exclusive but executive in particular, a lot of people are like, that’s not me. So that was a big breakthrough. This was one example. And there’s so many other things that the different teams use different back end platforms when their ticket master anything called Feefo that they use to run the backend and running tests against those things and how our work is being tracked. There’s a lot of technical pieces in the background, too. So that’s that’s one, create an example where all inclusive, really be executive. And then there’s a lot a bunch of technical examples that are little breakthroughs in the background that can really make a difference in return.

Jeremy Weisz 43:36

Chris, last question, because I know we’re at time now but match I want to encourage people to check out match no.com If you’ve been watching the video, here, you’ll see I’ve been pulling up some of the images here you go, there you go to Seabums.io to check out what what they’re doing with the NFT project. Last question, Chris is just a few resources that you recommend people in NFT or crypto I’m sure you’ve done some learning throughout the journey. If there’s any one or any other NFT projects people should check out from, from like, the basketball, NBA or whatever it is, what are some resources you recommend in the space?

Chris Madden 44:17

Thank you. One podcast I really like it’s a theory of based and so they touch on a lot of NF T’s but they’re talking more broadly in the space is called Bankless. The Bankless podcast. The bank was podcast has a spin off called overpriced JPEGs and overpriced JPEGs is the NFT focus and so as a podcast I’m really taken to and I really enjoy listening to because they have some really intelligent takes. The basketball project is called hon Kong’s called the rumble column lean League and so Steph Curry has some of the merch and wears it and it’s turning into a game they’re calling like KONG. Yeah, like Donkey Kong, kind of so we all different NF T’s that are ultimately going to become players in this video game that is a basketball game. But I would also point people to like if you’re looking for more philosophical, deeper first principles, thinking around crypto like why and why does all this matter? Tim Ferriss has a couple of podcasts that I really appreciate about crypto that are some of my favorites with a guest named involved Rob accounts, and aVL, Southern Nevada and Tim Ferriss podcasts about crypto one with Nick Sabo, which is like really deep on the purpose of money and the idea of my historically, and why these changes are happening now and why they matter and why they can reorient the world for good, which is really why I’m in crypto. So I really believe these systems have huge possibility to help our societies be better structured with better incentives. And then the other Tim Ferriss podcast would be again with navall and Vitalik Buterin. Vitalik is the founder, one of the creators of Aetherium. And I really admire him I admire the way he thinks and right so Tim Ferriss with navall Raava Khan and the talent Buuren is amazing. So So there’s a bunch of podcasts right there, hopefully, you

Jeremy Weisz 46:12

know, that’s great. And I watched one with the Pomp on the podcast with Jim Cramer which I thought was was great also.

Chris Madden 46:20

Yeah, I like to Pomp out for sure. I’ve listened to many of those. I appreciate pumping his energy and his talents for sure. He’s a great I think evangelizer for the space. He’s so hardcore Bitcoin I love Bitcoin Bitcoin what started it all, and I’m happy that Bitcoin exists, it was necessary I own some of that I believe in a long term. I’m sceptical of people who are overly certain about you know, which which one is going to be the winner this or that Now that said, I have my own biases and beliefs but I wish pomp was a little more open and said things beyond Bitcoin.

Jeremy Weisz 46:54

Chris, I wanted to first want to thank you. This was fantastic, everyone check out more episodes and, and Chris, thanks again.

Chris Madden 47:00

Thank you so much, truly appreciate it. Jerry. Jeremy, thanks for having me.