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Recently, we examined why web2 toolkits like Reddit Pro aren’t the best option for brands that want to engage consumers and retain loyalty across their products and experiences.
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So what is? Drumroll, please.
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From art to sports, luxury fashion, and even credit cards, Web3 is ushering in an entirely new set of tools for brands that want to build deeper connections with communities across dynamic environments that they can customize to their greatest needs.

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Let’s break down some of the benefits we talked about last week in greater detail, starting with web3’s ability to help brands:

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1. Gain insights into customer activity and behavior across both online and real-world touchpoints.
2. Leverage new analytics by connecting data from wallet signatures and onchain activity to build richer profiles and segment audiences more effectively.

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Mojito's technology breathes life into dynamic web3 experiences for brands. We simplify the complex backend, allowing the front end to effortlessly focus on the fun stuff – including sticky consumer engagement.
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Our recent collaboration with the forward-thinking museum turned this vision into reality. Mojito worked with Toledo's team to orchestrate a digital art experience by Osinachi & Yusuf Lateef. Our community engagement portal enabled Toledo to provide a smooth minting process, hassle-free claims, turnkey community management and reporting for the museum. The result? A powerful drop of 10,000 NFTs.

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Image credit: Vanessa Bucceri

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At the start of 2023 Mojito made some bold predictions for web3 adoption this year. As June is around the corner, let’s see how we are doing...

🍃 The term ‘NFTs’ is replaced with ‘Digital Products’ 🟢 On track

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More loyalty-focused programs are gaining traction (e.g. Starbucks Odyssey, Nike .Swoosh), new giants have launched memberships (e.g. Adidas ALTs) and major sporting IP has delivered 1m+ claims (e.g. ‘Inside the NBA' on TNT watch-to-earn program). Almost none of these global initiatives are using the term ‘NFT’s’, but rather things like ‘digital collectible.’

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Every single loyalty program in the future will use digital tokens (NFTs) to capture, incentivize, and reward consumer interactions, and we will continue to see focus on loyalty points rather than the NFT tech and terminology behind it.

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🍃 The Rise of Physical Asset-Backed Tokens 🟢 On track

A number of brands launch digital twins, NFC chipped products and there's significant growth in builders within tokenization of physical assets. Asset-backed tokens are being 'redeemed' for physical items ('Redeemables') with increasing frequency, from KITH x Invisible Friends campaign, Nike’s Cryptokicks to Avenged Sevenfold ticket access.

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🍃‘Connect Wallet’ Across Major Websites  🟢 On track

There’s a shift towards brands offering token-gated accounts as secure user authentication, that's invisible to the customer. Instead of managing different accounts and password, with web3, customers are starting to connect a wallet to verify their membership status and gain access. Customers can get access to subscription-only content (e.g. TIMEPieces for TIME subscriptions) and potentially other future rewards (e.g. Mastercard Music Pass offering AI generated experiences).

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🍃 Web3 Goes Web2.5 🟢 On track

Web3-native projects are exploring the transmedia franchise landscape to attract new ‘non crypto’ fans into their universes. e.g. Pudgy Penguins launched Toys on Amazon, and World of Women launched WOWGs Monopoly Game. Metaverse Web2.5 has seen major brand activations to scale traffic and DAUs (e.g. Roblox x Gucci x Vans and Coachella in Fortnite)

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🍃EVM Chains Will Dominate Non-EVM Chains 🟠 Too early to call

Brands continue to choose Polygon and Ethereum for their web3 activations and loyalty programs as a clear winner. That being said, with the excitement of ordinals, Asprey Bugatti launched a few weeks ago with a Bitcoin NFT project. EVM chains have faired better in the bear

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🍃The End of the 10k PFP Projects And Money Grabs 🟠 Too early to call

It seems to be the end as we know them. Web3-native 10k PFP projects solely focused on floor price and speculation, but yet to deliver tangible utility at scale, have struggled. Large scale NFT launches have been reframed. Nike .Swoosh is a new "community experience" that sold 50,000 on May 24th. Doodles is a "media franchise." Boss Beauties is a "media + entertainment brand." Deadfellaz is a "collection + metaverse brand." 

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🍃Brand-Hosted Secondary Marketplaces 🟢 On track

Major brands (e.g. Sothebys, Amazon, Mattel) and bluechip NFT projects (e.g. Art Blocks, 9dcc) have launched Direct-to-Consumer marketplaces with enforceable royalties and an elevated user experience.

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🍃More NFTs for DAO Membership Management 🔴 Few use cases

DAOs have fallen back in their promise to be the governance model of choice. Notable exceptions include the mighty Nouns DAO that have been funding wide ranging CC0 projects to accelerate the Nouns brand.

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If you'd like to explore any of these use cases, contact us

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Image credit: TIME

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First major media brand to pioneer token as a digital subscription

TIME was the first media giant to experiment with web3 and has a number of marquee initiatives. TIMEPieces genesis collection, themed “Building a Better Future,” featured original artwork from more than 40 influential artists. Owning a TIMEPiece will also unlock unlimited access to TIME.com through TIME’s 100th anniversary in 2023, exclusive invites to TIME’s in-person events, and access to special digital experiences. Owners of multiple pieces will also be extended additional opportunities. TIME was the first media brand to add Connect Wallet, validate TIMEPiece NFT ownership and serve the TIME subscription content seamlessly along with a membership rewards program.

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The Why

"While many of the NFT drops that have happened to date within the media space have focused on high-end single editions or multiple versions of collectibles, the release of TIMEPieces marks the first time a major media brand has taken on a Web3 approach toward building community and using this technology as an innovative extension of our current Digital Subscription efforts,” said former TIME president Keith Grossman at the last year's launch.

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Our 0.02ETH 🍃

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Covered by Mojito, the web3 consumer engagement platform. Empowering brand leaders with powerful tools to drive consumer engagement, sales, and loyalty for all levels of web3 maturity.

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Image credit: NFT Now

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The Why 

Tokenized media brand NFT Now believes the future of media is community-centric business models. The recent launch of their Now Pass and Now Network is the company's most significant web3-native move to date.

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NFT Now: “We believe that media companies shouldn’t serve you ads. They should serve you opportunities.”

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“The Now Pass is that first step for us in pioneering this community-centric media model, and starting to really redefine what the role is for a media brand in a Web3 environment,” said NFT Now Cofounder Matt Medved. 

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'Now Pass' utility

The 'Now Pass' grants holders access to:

• A Discord channel and “Alpha Chat” to share news and insights between members.
• Attend events, such as the NFT100 gala and an inaugural community meet-up held in New York during NFT.NYC.
• A membership portal where holders can earn rewards for their participation in the ecosystem. 
• There are plans for an onchain voting system for content curation.

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Results

NFT Now offered their Now Pass for $500 each, and sold out of their 2,750 total supply in less than 48 hours, raising $1.1 million. That price tag is the same as The Information's annual subscription, 50% more than the New York Times, and 10x more than the Wall Street Journal.

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Extracts are sourced from NFT Now:

• ‘The Now Pass Sold Out. Here’s What’s Next’  
• ‘The Now Pass Mint Is Officially Live’ 
• ‘Web2 Media Is Broken. The Future of Media Is Tokenized’
• @NFTNow tweets

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Tokenized media brands we're tracking

137pm’s culture token promises access and collabs with cultural icons. Dirt aims to break down Web2 media regimes by publishing content from a network of freelancers, using blockchain infrastructure to keep media decentralized.

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Our 0.02ETH 🍃

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NFT Now has been deliberately building community since day one, and has strong support from builders and creators throughout the space (including us!). So it probably came as no surprise to the web3 community that NFT Now were able to sell 2,750 tokens, even at an elevated price point compared to traditional media. But how does this scale? How do the economic considerations of supply and demand come into play when it comes to making access to media brands liquid? Is the business model predicated on one-off sales of tokens, or will it mature to something more steady and reliable like subscriptions today? What forms of incentivized participation do communities actually want, and which will drive real ROI? Will royalties be a significant revenue stream, and if so, what's the right growth strategy there? If NFTs really could behave like cookies one day, and power a new-era of digital advertising, what specific steps should tokenized media brands being taking today to be poised for that future later? It's clear to us we are in the earliest innings here with many emergent possibilities ahead. What is clear is that media brands are motivated to experiment, and as we all know, necessity is the mother invention.

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Covered by Mojito, the web3 consumer engagement platform. Empowering brand leaders with powerful tools to drive consumer engagement, sales, and loyalty for all levels of web3 maturity.

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Image credit: Bluesky

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What is Bluesky ?

Bluesky wants to enable a marketplace for media algorithms that users can vet and choose from in order to have total control over their feed, instead of it being decided for them by a centralized corporation. 

The Why

Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber has said that the idea is to “build a platform where a centralized figure cannot censor.”

Similar brands we're tracking

A number of Twitter alternatives have spun up recently, including Mastodon, Farcaster, and a rumored one coming from Facebook. They all talk about consumer control over what they see, and for publishers to be free from censorship, through the use of blockchain. 

Our 0.02 ETH 🍃

While media brands like NFT Now and TIME are experimenting with ownable access passes and digital rewards as enhancements to their model, social media platforms like the above are betting that decentralized control over content recommendations will increase consumer satisfaction, trust, and ultimately, stickiness. How these worlds intersect at both the user experience level and the data interoperability level will be fascinating to watch play out, because clearly media brands and social media platforms will still need each other even in this new web3 world. 

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Covered by Mojito, the web3 consumer engagement platform. Empowering brand leaders with powerful tools to drive consumer engagement, sales, and loyalty for all levels of web3 maturity.

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Signup for news, trends and analysis on tap. Join 2,000+ brand leaders going deeper into web3

Image credit: Reddit

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In July 2022, Reddit launched their ‘Collectible Avatars’ – 150,000 NFTs at $20-30 each for users to purchase (with fiat or crypto) to use as their profile pictures on Reddit. Roughly 3 million new wallets or ‘Reddit Vaults’ were created with the launch, generating ~$6 million for Reddit to-date, with $2.5 million of that from secondary royalties. 

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The successful drop was not only a win for Reddit, but for their community as well. Since all of the Avatars were purchased via user-owned ‘non-custodial’ wallets, they could easily choose to sell on secondary markets where the average price is around $114 for an Avatar. The rare "Cyber Snoo" avatar sold for as much as $24,149. Reddit users love showing off their Avatar, and have made requests for more in future.

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Reddit also gave users the ability to earn royalties on any future sales of their NFTs. While ~75% of their secondary trading volume has been on OpenSea, Reddit announced that it would be launching its own custom NFT marketplace in January of this year. 

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Our 0.02ETH 🍃

The Reddit community traditionally has been skeptical of crypto, and so the widespread positive reception of this launch was a great win. In large part due to its seamless user journey, making it easy for crypto newbies to stand up their own wallet and get their first NFT (using MPC wallet similar to Mojito’s). Everything about this drop was positioned to make NFTs more accessible and user-friendly and to pave the way for wider adoption of the technology.

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Reddit is taking an even deeper step into web3, with the launch of their custom marketplace, and this will allow them to enforce royalties (including payouts to Reddit users), as well as increased trust for new crypto user Reddit fans who don’t want to sift through the chaos of OpenSea.

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Cutting-edge brands are discovering that NFTs can be used in many ways to identify, analyze, track and re-engage high-intent consumers. The most popular method is also the easiest to understand and easiest to implement: Attendance NFTs.

The consumer premise is that event attendees may claim a free NFT in order to prove they were actually there. Brands can offer a simple digital memento, or lay the groundwork for a web3 membership community, rewards program, and more. The good news is that brand leaders don’t have to decide all that upfront. You can enter the market with a simple memento and then add utility later.

The brand value is in list-building, audience insights, and collaboration opportunities. That’s because when a user claims a free NFT, the brand collects their wallet address and can analyze all their onchain data historically and moving forward, including other brand or community associations.

Attendance NFTs are one of the best low-effort, high-reward ways to seed and engage audiences. Human behavior is already there – it’s common to keep a memento to remember an important event, be it concert ticket stubs, a fridge magnet from a souvenir shop, a badge from a conference etc. Attendance NFTs are a digital version of these mementos – proof you were there but with much more exciting functionality for future benefits than just physical keepsakes.

What brands should use Attendance NFTs?

Any brand can create these NFTs with a custom image and information about the event to denote attendance of any type, be it real-world or virtual. The token can easily be distributed to attendees via QR codes, a download link, or via email. With Mojito, consumers don’t even need a wallet to get started.

Unlike other NFTs, attendance tokens don’t tend to trade on secondary markets, but rather are used to denote status or achievement within a community. That said, some Attendance NFTs for major events or special moments sometimes do trade on the secondary market for people looking to collect these mementos – even if they weren’t there themselves to mint them (like this XCOPY POAP for those that participated in his art sale, and this DevCon POAP from the first-ever DevCon conference in 2019).

What do Attendance NFTs look like today?

The web3-native company POAP (Proof-of-Attendance Protocol) pioneered Attendance NFTs over the last 5 years with 27,000 users and more than 6 million NFTs. That said, their service does not mint to Ethereum or Polygon, and the creative is limited to a low-res static image. Others including Mojito have since started offering brands ways to mint Attendance NFTs on more popular blockchains with capacity for high-res imagery, motion graphics, etc. to ensure audiences receive the best digital mementos possible.

Attendance NFTs - Use Cases:

• Group Participation: Online communities give Attendance NFTs to members who attend weekly or monthly meetings, rewarding engagement and participation, like Gmoney did for his The Cutting Edge Twitter spaces.
  

• Event Attendance: Crypto conferences often give out Attendance NFTs to attendees, and collectors can demonstrate how long they’ve been in the industry or showcase repeat attendance to events. Attendance NFTs have been given out at over 100 Ethereum community events so far, many through POAP.
  

• Gamified Engagement: Web3 events sometimes use Attendance NFTs for a scavenger hunt type campaign – encouraging attendees to collect all of the tokens at different locations throughout the event and incentivize participation (like at NFT.NYC 2021).
  

• Capturing Moments: Some web3 games, like Decentraland, use Attendance NFTs to commemorate special milestones or in-game achievements, like the 10 million user milestone party hosted by MetaMask in 2021.
  

• Rewarding Loyalty: Gmoney’s web3 fashion label 9dcc includes a chip in all of his T-Shirts, that allows someone to mint unique Attendance NFTs upon scanning the shirt. Tokens are collected every time someone wears his clothing, so he can see who is representing the brand in public, and at which events.

Attendance NFTs - By Vertical:

• Musicians can issue Attendance NFTs for fans who attend their concerts (concert attendees is often information bands don’t have access to today), and reward superfans with exclusive content or early ticket access in the future.
• Fashion brands can issue Attendance NFTs for fans who attend fashion shows (either in-personal or virtually) to get a better understanding of their audience.
• Sports teams can issue Attendance NFTs for game attendance (in-person or virtually), and even issue special mid-game Attendance NFTs for major moments or victories.
• Entertainers can offer a POA to all fans they meet IRL as a way to start building out their own membership platform/fan club.

Attendance NFTs: What Comes Next?

Attendance NFTs badges allow consumers to show off their community status, but brands can also build on these tokens as a foundation for further consumer engagement:

• Reward consumer loyalty: reward engaged and loyal consumers with a free “thing” – even outside future utility, collecting these badges is a great way for deepening gamified brand loyalty.
  

• Continue the conversation: these NFTs can unlock access to group chats, discounts, future event invitations, more.
  

• Custom benefits: those benefits can be further customized based on things like the dates/times of the Attendance NFTs that were minted.
  

• Message consumers directly: these tokens allow you to have a direct line with attendees: organizers can message all Attendance NFT holders directly, or allow holders to chat with each other.

How do brands use Mojito for Attendance NFTs?

Brands like the Milwaukee Bucks, Liverpool FC, Sotheby’s and CAA have used Mojito to mint free NFTs as rewards for event attendance and brand loyalty with great success. Our team has guided 100s of web3 launches, and can solve problems for clients ranging from technical to user experience to commercial and finally to legal and security. There is no greater way to boost your brands chances of web3 success than partnering with Mojito.

Want to set up Attendance NFTs for your brand’s next physical event, digital live stream, product launch, store opening, conference, brand anniversary, or special moment? Get in touch

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‍What's the trend?

Why are global brand giants like Nike and Starbucks getting into web3?

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Sure, it might be because younger consumers show an appetite to buy digital products, but the true answer is more fundamental. Global brands are building in web3 for one major reason: data.

Interacting with consumers in web3 introduces a whole new kind of CRM with a richness of data not available to brands in web2. Marketers can see a connected wallet’s complete web3 activity, including interactions with other brands, interactions with other consumers, spending levels, and more.

As a result, the latest trend among global brands in web3 is not to sell NFTs, but to give them away for free – with a focus on building a large tokenized community rather than immediate revenue. When you sell NFTs, naturally you’ll convert fewer than if they are free. The more NFTs you distribute, the more wallets you connect. The most wallets, the bigger your addressable audience and the more you know about them.

Building your web3 audience with free NFTs is a low-cost, low-risk way to develop an engaged and incentivized community. You do not need to deliver as much value on Day One as you would with a high-price NFTs, but instead build up the value proposition over time as you learn more about your consumer.

The most common way to do this is with a free ‘membership’ token distributed to existing users, allowlisted communities, or even the general public. Nike is minting free .SWOOSH ID (~300k so far in beta) for users to co-create and engage in its emerging web3 ecosystem, while Starbucks minted free ‘earnable’ Stamps to users who complete brand engagement ‘journeys’. In both cases, these global brands are onboarding their existing users to web3 and/or attracting web3 native users into their ecosystems, and enriching their consumer datasets at the same time.

This is the next evolution of consumer web3. No more quick and dirty cashgrabs. Instead, brands will focus on building their web3 dataset, seeding their web3 community, and growing consumer value over time in order to increase lifetime value and evangelism.

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‍Build your web3 audience with free NFTs

Here are proven ways you can capitalize on this growing trend:

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So what questions can you ask the data?

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🤔 What percentage of existing customers converted to our free NFT? How many of those wallets have any prior web3 activity? How many are brand new to crypto? What’s different about these customers compared to those who did not convert?

🤔 Of the new users to your brand, what’s their prior web3 activity? How do these users differ from your existing customers who converted?

🤔 Of those with prior web3 activity, what third-party collections and platforms have they interacted with, how often, how recently, and how much was spent? What are the other most popular NFTs your community owns?

What happens next? Ok, your free NFT strategy worked, and you now have a large and active web3 community clamoring for more. This is when it gets exciting:

🎁 Token-gated experiences: Brands can offer value to web3 audiences by gating content, merchandise, events, and more behind ‘token-gates’. These are webpages or mobile apps that require a user to prove ownership of a specific NFT in order to access or interact. This is an immediate way to make a free NFT valuable to the owner.

🎁 Token-based personalization: More than just an access token, where all NFTs within a collection carry effectively the same value, brands can also detect that someone owns a certain trait, number, or set of tokens, and then deliver a personalized experience around that.

🎁 Token-based collaborations: Web3 interoperability makes brand collaborations and community cross-pollinating extremely easy and effective. Brands can offer token-gated value not only to their own NFT audience, but others as well. This is an effective way to reward holders, create buzz and grow community.

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How can Mojito help?

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Web3 is moving past its experimental phase into its early adopter phase, and innovative brands are already staking out their territory and setting the bar high. This means the time to start building your own web3 community was yesterday.

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Mojito has powered free NFT drops for the Milwaukee Bucks, Liverpool FC, Sotheby’s, CAA, Lyrical Lemonade and more. Get caught up quick and build a foundation for future campaigns with low-risk, low-cost free NFT activations powered by Mojito.

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Image credit: Fashion Network

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‍What's the trend?

There's a long list of brands building NFC chipped fashion lines, linked to NFTs.

Recap: Near Field Communication (NFC) allows two devices to connect with each other over short distances like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

The recent rise of NFC chipped fashion links clothing to NFTs creating  authentication, resale, community and engagement opportunities for brands. Providing a certificate of authentication, that's is critical for luxury fashion houses to validate provenance.

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Here are some great use cases

👜 LVMH 'Authentique Verify' allows Patou to connect each high-end product to a unique digital fingerprint, verifying the asset as authentic

🧢 NFC chipped 9dcc caps allowed gmoney's community at the real life treasure hunt @NFT.NYC to earn NFTs, personalised POAPs, socialise with the product and interact with the 9dccxyz ecosystem.

👟 The RTFKT x AF1 drop boasts an embedded World Merging NFC Chip so holders can flex their collectibles in digital and physical worlds.

🧘 NFT chipped Moonpay terminals enabled Alo Yoga to distribute free in-store NFT claims of daily affirmations for mental health awareness month

🧥 NFC chipped Wrangler jacket x Jeremy Booth allowed anyone to earn a ‘Concrete Cowboys’ POAP @NFT_NYC

🥼 NFC chipped Cult & Rain hoodies ‘Drop 002’ links to a 3D AR animated DreessX NFT and portal to the brand’s app

🏟️ NFC chipped Endstate Sneakers links to the NFT rewards including tickets to DeVonta Smith hosted event and an Eagles watch party

💍 NFC chipped 18k gold ring ‘Frillz’ by Metaverse Futurist Cathy Hackl links to a certificate of authenticity

🚗 NFC chipped Renault 'Racing Shoe5' provide a 2nd NFT and a certificate of authenticity

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Our 0.02ETH 🍃

Luxury brands can better track of their inventory and activate against the entire lifecycle. Meshing NFTs to the clothing brings the consumer closer and invested with their garment for the current and future opportunities.

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