NFTs: The Choose Your Own Adventure Story of Modern Brand Strategy
In a world where daily interactions increasingly take place in online venues, and “three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online”, NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are emerging as potent cultural artifacts of the digital experience that are shaping the world we live in. Companies that wish to develop a strong and lasting presence in the digital landscape must consider the role that unique, tradable, digital assets can play in shaping brand perception and determining their fortunes in a crowded media landscape and a starved-for-attention economy.
What Makes A Memorable Brand?
When you think of the most iconic brands you realize that you’re never really just buying a product or a service, you’re buying a feeling. You may even be in need of a rock-solid product that carries innate quality, or functionality, but even then, one must admit, you’re most likely still buying a feeling, or you’d buy the other one.
Depending on when you were born, you probably can’t even see the word “Classic”, without thinking: Coca Cola, so entirely have they managed to capture the world through amazing storytelling that invokes the most nostalgic, heartwarming, refreshing summer love; or frosty and adorable polar bears on skis at Christmas. To achieve this, Coca-Cola and its ilk have had to direct unbelievable resources towards high-quality film production and equally unbelievable resources towards television, digital, print, and other advertising in order to saturate public consciousness and become top brands.
The Digital World: The Frontier of Brand Strategy
With the birth of the internet a whole world of interactive media came to life, however not until the advent of blockchain, and with it, NFTs, have we had the capacity to transfer provably unique digital objects from person to person at low marginal cost. This is a game-changing development, not just for new forms of value transfer, but for companies and the customers they hope to reach.
If television is a series of parallel one-way streets which you choose to travel on, and the internet is a vast network of everything from superhighways to local neighborhood streets and alleyways that you can explore, and crucially, interact with; then apart from their fungible cryptocurrency counterparts, NFTs are truly the first kind of non-fungible “objects” that can be said to exist within this vast, interactive network.
A New Medium of Brand Consciousness
In his book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously observed that “The medium is the message.” In this light, NFTs are perhaps the ultimate expression of that observation. NFTs are a protean medium for infinite messages circulating through a virtual bazaar of value.
Whether you’re an independent artist, a large media company, a record label, a sports franchise, or a retail marketplace, you now have access to a new means of reaching your customers, clients, or fans. Because of their uniqueness, NFTs are a natural kind of instantly transferable collectible that can possess a variety of attributes; image, video, audio, the written word, but they can also provide utility in the form of access to exclusive services, discounts, events, content, and more.
Everyone loves and appreciates tangible objects, and we will probably always prefer to toss a tangible baseball vs. a virtual reality simulation of tossing a baseball, or at least one might hope so. There’s something wonderful about the physics of an object arcing through space and time to a friend with a glove, but this is no time to plunge your head into the sand and pretend the world of objects isn’t changing.
Non-material in-game objects, like “skins”, as exemplified by games like Fortnight, CS:GO, and others, demonstrate that the immaterial world of NFTs already has a strong use case, and as younger audiences are naturally gravitating towards these meta-versal spaces it only makes sense that they have ways to convey their status and personality there. NFTs, bring the capacity to make these in-game skins provably unique, tradeable, modifiable, and burnable. In this context, NFTs are the digital luxury goods for specific subcultures that over time are becoming more and more a part of mainstream culture.
NFTs for Your Brand Strategy
For the portion of our lives that we will collectively live online, and through the power of blockchain, digital objects are now functionally “real”. If you’re an individual or a company that must operate within a modern global economy that is coming to grips with the “realness” of digital objects, then you simply cannot afford to dismiss NFTs for ten years in the way that many people dismissed Bitcoin.
At FACINGS, we’re here to make the somewhat dizzying array of possibilities that NFTs present into a rewarding value proposition. To that end, we’re building a suite of tools to help you navigate these new domains of value with purpose. If you have a project or idea ready for launch, our concierge NFT services are here to assist you.
NFTs present a “choose your own adventure story” of brand possibilities that challenge conventional marketing by breaking down the last remaining walls between your brand narratives, and the adventures your customers are having. We are at an exciting crossroads of digital media ownership, gamification, and user-directed brand experiences.
Which direction will you choose?
