How Vayner3 guides brands into web3

Transcript

GM GM welcome to another episode of web3 Academy where together we're exploring Which web3 business models and Technologies are going to win we're here to keep you on the Forefront of web3 I'm Jaybird and as always joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead Kai who we got on the show today and this one is one that I was really excited for we have Avery who is the president of Vayner III so he's worked under Gary vaynerchuk for I think five years she said she's been in the space for a long time in terms of just marketing right marketing mainly with big Brands and just understanding how the internet works and how you know we interact and how we use the internet and she's kind of guided Brands throughout that just as you know Gary

vaynerchuk has of course if anyone here follows him I've been a big fan of him for a long time it really makes sense that they would make their way into web3 and they've done that they've doveted head first you know obviously they created V friends as sort of their first test project they're Pilots yeah they're piloted web three and now they're guiding along a bunch of big Fortune 500 brands fans into web3 as well and doing it the right way and you can just tell from this episode that she gets it like she understands invader3 to hold it get what that's going on with this space and uh and I think they are they're helping a lot of the corporate world understand where the internet is going as well and sort of like helping them understand how to navigate this space too and she creates some really really interesting I

guess case studies with you know Budweiser I didn't realize it was them who who got Budweiser to buy beer.e the ens name that's right I was like no way that was you I think it's really interesting to have somebody that is so strategic come on the show so we've had so many people on the show who are real doers in web3 they're the ones building the brands building the communities but Avery has that extra layer of really experience in that she's been working with Fortune 500 companies for most of her career so she was doing it in web 2 when when she was helping them launch their social media strategies and

helping them understand that space and now she's doing in web3 so she has that strategic high level understanding it's a different perspective it's an ability to break things down in a simple way so that anybody can understand okay why does web3 really matter if you're a brand an existing company what can you use it for and I love the way she said that it's really about solving business problems it's not just about going and launching an nft project and you have to understand the business problems of your clients and then okay how does web3 help you improve and solve those problems yeah I was going to say I think one of the key takeaways for our listeners as you listen in here is just to notice that she's not all psyched about just

the ability to launch a token right and that we can have these collections of nfts from what she's talked about with all of her clients they don't even care about the money aspect of this they care that they can create better experiences in different experiences for their fans and their customers and Their audience right and then I think the other thing I noticed is she really gets the idea of Community First and like building as a community and she talked about that a little bit I think that's just a key component and something that a lot of us need to wrap our heads around and I think when you zoom out like that and you kind of understand like this is actually a whole big change in the way that the internet works in the way that we interact with businesses it's not just about buying an nft that may or may

not go up like it has nothing really to do with that at all that was just kind of the first initial use case you start to see web3 in a different way and you also start to see that Brands coming into web3 it's not a bad thing some people on crypto Twitter flip out about this you know yeah maybe some of them did it the wrong way although I don't think many of them have done it in that bad of a way but it's like they're doing this because they want to create better experiences for their customers and I think that's an amazing thing so I think web3 is empowering a lot of good things and so she definitely sees that and she's pushing that forward why don't you give us a little bit of a background man because she's got a crazy background yeah so Avery akinini is the president

of Vayner 3 Vayner 3 is Vayner X or previously Vayner media so the Vayner X sort of overhead company runs all of garyvee's companies which I believe there's about 40 of them and Vayner 3 is their specific web 3 play and their web3 agency which Avery is the president of she spent her career earlier she was at Target and then she spent six years at Google so she's really a digital marketing expert that's her background and now leading Banner 3 and bringing so many Fortune 500 companies into the space well anyway everyone enjoy this episode it was an honor to have her on the podcast maybe one day we'll get garyvee as well though that doesn't take away anything from Avery I think she was absolutely incredible and gave us

everything we needed and wanted so let's enjoy this episode friends but before we get into it let's take a second to hear it from our sponsors the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these

centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-soverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web Theory Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we've partner with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today are you building a community around your brand well listen to this at web3 Academy our motto is Community First profit second why because engaged

communities tell you exactly how to improve your product and ultimately Drive growth they act as team members recruiting new customers and providing crucial feedback and they become brand super fans sticking by you through thick and thin but to engage your community you must first understand them that's where Chasm comes in Chasm is our go-to web3 tool for managing and understanding our community members it combines both on-chain and web 2 metrics all in one user-friendly dashboard with Chasm you'll know things like which other communities your members are part of and which of your campaigns are truly driving results that's why at web3 Academy we use Chasm to launch campaigns optimize growth engage our community

members and automate workflows with this all-in-one tool if your community is already on chain and get to know them better with Chasm head to chasm.xyz using the link in the description and discover why top brands like a mutable Nifty labs and collab land are using Chasm Avery welcomes a show I'm so happy to be here thank you both for having me so excited to have you and to dive into so much today but let's start off with your web 3 Rabbit Hole story and maybe leading into the creation of Vayner 3. for sure so I started first being aware of crypto in like 2014 I was living in San Francisco at the time and my husband is actually a professional investor or

not in crypto and hedge funds and his friends are always pitching me these like random like alternative investment ideas and 99 of the time I never listen to them but you know there's one friend in particular was really hot on bitcoin Litecoin and ethereum in that like 2014-2016 era so they were like you need to get on board with this this is going to be the next thing this is going to be the next digital currency and and you know New Year's trip I decided to create a coinbase got started with it got a couple of each at the time which ended up being great they went really really up and then it went like completely now I'm like zero I still don't know what's happening with Litecoin like is that still a thing um at the time it was like you know those were the three new super bullets on and

I was like okay sure like I'll get some why not let me explore it and you know I was following it really closely for six months and then it was like oh well this is why I never listen to these guys and you know sort of forgot about it I honestly didn't open coinbase for five years or something I had the app on my phone but I was very not involved in the crypto scene and I wasn't keeping closed TAPS in it all because in my mind it kind of gone to zero and that was that and no big deal I moved on with my life fast forward to pandemic life when I all of a sudden had a lot of time on my hands so I was like covering every like Old Stone and thinking through you know a bunch of different things and I was

like I wonder what's going on with that old coinbase account and I actually did it I forgot my my password I had to like off in through my passport it was a whole thing and I was pleasantly surprised when I reopened the app so the reason that I had sort of like reopened the app is I had just become aware of nfts this is like late 2020 early 2021 and I was like okay starting to read a little bit about what was happening with this revolution of nfts and particularly the concept of digital ownership fascinated me and my boss a chairman of vaynerx Gary vaynerchuk was super interested in this stuff and specifically interested in sort of some of the original projects like crypto punks and I kind of got into like a art

Rabbit Hole of digital art collecting you know Nifty Gateway super rare Foundation you know discovering cool piece of art I was fascinated by Art blocks and their minting process and the more I learned the more I was like this is going to be a huge thing for Enterprises and you know the blockchain enables this unprecedented transparency that can solve a lot of the challenges that we have in our sort of digital ad ecosystem today you know my backgrounds in marketing have spent the last you know decade plus working mostly on sort of Fortune 500 marketing initiatives everything from Super Bowl commercials to Snapchat ads you know I ran vaynermedia in Asia Pacific I was on our team in New York and before that I spent seven years at Google working on a

variety of different sort of Brands and direct marketing initiatives like I know a lot about digital marketing it's like literally what I've done for my whole career so I was like okay this is like this whole ownership layer of the internet that hasn't existed before and it made a lot of sense to me because everything that I read from consumer studies is like our lives are just digital first I don't know about you all but I spend six eight ten twelve hours a day in digital devices and increasingly people spend their free time in digital worlds as well whether that's Roblox if you're John alpha or fortnite if you're a millennial dude this is where people are from here I really saw these things like coming together but you know Gary really took to the nft market specifically he started investing in collecting he's a huge collector of

physical items as well and it just makes sense to him this sort of psychology of collecting he then launches be friends in May of 2021 and I think that was like a watershed moment for Vayner and for Gary because we always test things with Gary first right whether it's like a new ad format on Tick Tock or you know a new social media tactic Gary is like our ultimate experimental guinea pig and I've just seen the success and also learning all the lessons that sort of came along with be friends really solidified our conviction that this was going to be massive so you know a month after that happens June of 2021 we decided to announce Vayner nft which is a consultancy focused on helping Enterprises launch their own nft projects from there like within a few

months I was like nfts are just the tip of this fear this is just the beginning of the rabbit hole and in fact this rabbit holds a lot bigger and it's like actually like this tunnel to the next evolution of the internet so you know in the past two years we've sort of evolved our position to be broader and more expansive and sort of cover how Enterprises can understand navigate web3 across a variety of mediums so that's how I got in and that's why I you know sort of continue to be interested and so Vayner 3 is mainly working with is it Fortune 500 Brands like large Brands I assume in helping them with their sort of web3 activations I have two questions the first is kind of what is your elevator pitch I guess to these brands of why they should be thinking about

web3 and building a strategy but before we do that I'm just curious what it's like to work for work with Gary vaynerchuk can you give us any sort of behind the scenes interesting information about this yeah absolutely so I've actually been working for Gary for five years I definitely thought this would be a one or two year stint where I'd get to know agency life and move back to the corporate side I you know didn't really see myself as a person who would be like working at an agency for a long time because I'm like a good corporate citizen I'm a good you know I would say well I honestly thought it would be here for a year or two and I'm coming up on five years and I was actually reflecting on this recently with each year I feel like more and more bought into our vision and the potential

of what we're doing at Vayner you know it's very unusual because a lot of our peer-set or competitive set they're all publicly traded companies and we are not we're a private company and I think that allows us this amazing flexibility to take some like bold risks which in a lot of cases have paid off some cases they haven't but in a lot of cases they have and working for Gary is just this world of Limitless potential because you know if you have an idea and you have conviction you can go execute it Gary will be super supportive he has I think the CEO of 40 companies so he doesn't have a ton of time to be in the weeds he's probably not a micro manager is more of a macro manager I think if you're the type of person who likes that you know ability to have accountability

and ownership it's amazing it's obviously a very inspiring person and you know just in the day-to-day he's such an incredible leader and mentor and personally I learn a lot from so I feel very lucky that I've gotten the chance to work with him so much over the last five years and even though we're almost 2 000 people around the globe it really is a small business like single founder owned which is pretty unusual for a company of our size and you know having worked with like really grown up in Vayner with like a bunch of different sort of people I think we've got this like really amazing Dynamic of strong bonds everyone points in the same direction and like this level of trust that's really unusual for an organization like ours yeah imagine it being so inspiring to work with somebody

who not very often is the leader of a company the CEO the one that you take risks with right usually that's the spokesperson who has to play nice and only you know say the right thing and here's Gary saying that he's going to draw these V friends and put them out and then sell them the courage to do that must be so inspiring it is and also just this belief that like we can do anything when I wanted to move to Asia for personal reasons Gary completely supported me I started our business in Singapore and then expanded that to like five other markets he actually due to covet has not even been able to be visiting any of those offices physically but he completely backed me up so far to me 100 when I wanted to move back to the us to start this web 3 thing he backed

me up 100 and having like an executive sponsor who really has her back those ideas of course we'll set you straight when you need it but who like is open to taking those risks is super rare and super inspiring and it's definitely the reason that I had have decided to say a painter for such a long time I love it so let's move into the I guess elevator pitch to Brands I mean obviously they have at least seen you guys kind of write the Playbook launching V friends and I'm just curious what's their thoughts on this at least originally when you first were talking to them I'm sure things have changed over the last year or so but what's kind of your pitch them on like why these brands should be thinking about a web 3 strategy and then I guess talk about what's their

reception to it at all been yeah so I'd say our sort of target market and who are the best fit for is really Enterprises so it tends to be Fortune 500 companies governments large associations things that are operating in a pretty like significant scale and sometimes it's brand driven but also sometimes it's corporate driven if that makes sense like from the parent company who wants to understand all this in 2021 the first time they were hearing about this stuff was through I think we sort of put our flag in the ground very early and they were like what is an nft and like you know why should I think about this and like wherever people go Brands follow it's an attention economy so you know Brands need to go to things that people care about and I think at Vayner we've paved the way for this like many

many many times over from you know Gary adopting like Google AdWords very early to us helping set up most of our clients like Facebook and Twitter pages 10 years ago to you know being very early to tick tock and YouTube shorts I think that's probably one of our strengths as veners we're super agile and super consumer focused so we're like okay great this is you know attention shifting here let's learn about it and in 2021 I think people were interested in nfts and they were interested in it as a way to drive relevance and drive sort of consumer talkability a lot of kind of focus on getting in the headlines but not thinking about this as like this very long-term game and you know it's set on our website since the day we launched that like we're thinking about this for

the long term we don't really do sort of project-based work we tend to work with our partners on you know an annual like retainer basis oftentimes like for many years so we're not you know the right fit for a flash in the pan you want to get a headline in adage you sure that'll come and that's great eight but we were always very singularly focused on Guiding our clients to think about this as the next evolution of the internet and as a longer path and you know a lot of folks have approached us after seeing our work which is always flattering and it's always amazing and at first it was about nfts and then it was about like what is web3 and now it's really about like how do I future proof my business for this next iteration of the internet what is the consumer of you know today

and increasingly tomorrow care about and we always start with what web3 is we see it as the next era of connected consumer behavior and at Vayner at least we Define it more expansively than most sort of as representing a digital first reality for consumers at the Confluence of technology and culture and we see this as powered by an ethos of co-creation web3 is creating an immersive personalized and ownable internet so there's a lot in there but we see sort of blockchain as a huge driver but not all of it we see blockchain immersive experiences and advanced Computing all kind of orbiting and intersecting points but also sort of growing independently as three major drivers of what the next era of the

internet will be and you know I think clients come to us now because they're like What's Happening here today and what's going to happen tomorrow and how can we build our business to be ready to embrace that we're doing a lot of activations even a year ago and it sort of shifted into being a more strategic consultancy education and strategic work less so activations though that's certainly still a part of it especially given like the last six months of headlines which have you know been like the CFO killer for a lot of like more conservative companies and all of our clients like they have a lot to lose like them making like million dollars is honestly nothing if you're a 40 billion dollar company so I think a lot of our clients have taken our guidance around thinking about this as a consumer

engagement and insights engine and less so as a short-term Revenue driver we've seen how that plays out for a lot of other brands and it hasn't always been great so in 2023 I think people are really looking strategically to understand what's happening here and then design solutions that are solve their business challenges so one of the key substrates of web3 is nfts and obviously you guys believe that it was Vayner nft in the beginning Gary as you mentioned dove into nfts first and we really see that that is a very misunderstood substrate of the web 3 space so I'm curious how do you define nfts either to a Fortune 500 exec or to your mom what's your like base level

definition I think NF T's allow ownership on the internet and you know whether or not the term nft sticks it might it might not I think owning a digital asset that's verifiable on the blockchain is going to be like fundamentally huge especially as digital wallet adoption grows right now it matters to a certain subset of like really dedicated people like the three of us are part of that but that isn't something that has yet really hit like mainstream Consciousness I think when that ownership layer hits mainstream Consciousness being able to prove that you own certain assets on this immutable Ledger is going to be quite transformative so we're huge Believers in this idea of digital asset technology

you know particularly on sort of evm compatible ecosystems but potentially others as well we believe in a multi-chain future I think the sort of branding and the wrapping of those you know we've been experimenting with new ways to communicate to consumers in a way that can be positive if you look at what Reddit did which is the most successful brand program ever probably the most successful nft program ever with over 6 million unique wallets created what's really interesting is when they did consumer research to understand what redditors thought about nfts they were like God no please no these are a scam but you call them collectible avatars and you give something that redditors care about which is the ability to customize their snoo they love it so I think that we're going to increasingly see Brands and Enterprises developing digital asset or

digital collectible or digital ownership products that aren't going to be called nfts even though the fundamental technology will be the same as what we've been talking about it sounds like your thought of web3 is kind of the next iteration of the internet right it's these new sort of immersive experiences that are more than just nfts right that are kind of metaverse Worlds and so many other things and it's kind of where we're all going to spend our time it sounds like you're saying I'm curious you know in 2021 most brands were coming to space just launching nft right a collection of entities and it's like whatever this really does we don't really know but when you talk about or you think about these brands in this kind of like long-term strategy maybe staying high level here like what is that can you paint a picture for me like

it's not about hey we just want to launch this collection and get a group of people in a Discord I think I think you guys have something much bigger and so what is it that you guys are trying to accomplish or these brands are trying to accomplish with web3 if that's consistent amongst all of them I'm not sure yeah I think broadly our partners are looking to solve business challenges so how can technology enable them unlock these business challenges one thing I you know constantly need to tell people is it's not our job to evangelize or be web resell it it's our job to help our partners solve their business challenges through understanding what web3 technology can unlock so sometimes that might be like brand awareness sometimes that might be engagement it might be focus groups it might be community building it might be future proofing but

I think it's not like a one-size-fits-all approach it really depends on the organization their objectives and their willingness to commit into this space some and a lot of times people are just like I want to learn I want to do an experiment okay cool why don't you do a collaboration let's find the right partner for you to collaborate with so you learn but you're also not kind of making these you know perceived promises to a different web free community I think we you know start with a business challenge we look at defining that audience are we looking to reach web 3 natives which I think will be less and less of the target we've seen a lot of Brands narrowly focus in on web3 natives as the target if there's a scarce luxury item or something of that nature I think increasingly we'll see Brands looking to engage their

actual core consumers and their actual Target markets which probably makes more sense for them completely then we design a strategy that like works for them like over whatever that sort of time Horizon is by understanding like how we can mesh like what their target consumer is interested in and what the brand stands for and what web3 technology unlocks like that little Trifecta I think is where the magic happens so when you're sitting down with a new brand and trying to wrap their help them wrap their head around web3 is there any particular use cases that you're most bullish on that you find yourself referring to and using as examples yes there are several that I'm super excited about let me kind of like break into what those can be first I think

this idea of building a stronger direct consumer Community is really interesting I think that the next like unicorn brand the next glossier the next RX bar the next whatever will actually be built like Community up when you talk to web3 Natives and you talk to just normal people They are interested in co-creating with the brands and the companies that they care about so I think leveraging like whether it's a pass or it's a voting mechanism or something like that that you're actually soliciting feedback like directly from this group can build this like really strong aligned incentive model we see this with sort of like web 3 natives all the time with how bullish they are on the projects that they care about setting is their pfp going out of their way to share it on social like they're

almost like these built-in evangelists I love this for sort of building the Next Generation like direct to Consumer community and I think that you get this like utility and value for membership where like the web tokens are serving as ecosystem incentives and then you also get this flywheel with feedback and input so I think that this you know combination of deeper insights and data collection married with Community Live marketing is going to be massive so I bucket that sort of d2c community as a big opportunity this is a little bit of the second one I'll say is a little bit of a buzzword in 2023 but I think loyalty and rewards a lot of people are trying to crack that you know Starbucks has the most successful digital loyalty app potentially like for any brand but certainly within the qsr category yeah

and the fact that they're leaning in here they're trying to unlock that by creating this incredible reward system I think we're going to see a lot of that I think there can be new ways to earn these positive Network effect Dynamics could be linked to core Rewards or Commerce and then I think it also offers enhanced brand storytelling and sort of like earned potential which can can enable some of the stuff we were just talking about like really using your consumers as like Grassroots advocates and then the third use case I'll talk about is net new business models I think this is true in the world of nfts and Beyond if you look at ROBLOX is something I always point out there's a thriving Economy based on Robux and I know that's not a decentralized platform but they have 100 million users and these kids are growing up thinking of

digital assets first as having value that's a pretty significant departure from like how previous generations have grown up right you know kids don't want toys for their birthday anymore they want Robux so they can buy a digital thing and I think every brand will need to be leveraging this sort of digital first reality to create digital first products the sense in fashion and I think we're going to see it in cpg and I think we're going to see it in financial services and all these other categories but using web3 to sort of create these net new business models is going to be essential for Brands who want to be ahead of the curve I'm curious to chat about the community-led growth because I think that is it's something we've talked a lot about we actually released a podcast

about this last week and Dove deep into it but the thing that I'm curious here is I think what we are seeing the community growth side is coming more from the web 3 native brands right now and not so much coming from the Enterprise brands or the existing large companies so do you see large companies eventually doing this I guess dot swoosh is an example they are trying to do this with the virtual co-creation and we're not exactly sure I think dotswitch is a lot of speculation about what it's going to be in their current program is not even web3 it's more like post on Instagram and get people to load and it's web too I guess that's one example of a large Enterprise that is trying to do the community-led co-creation are you seeing that in the Enterprise side are

you more seen on the web3 native side I see more of the web creative side as well it's actually something I pitched to probably all of our clients I'm like let's so one thing that's really common in Enterprise world is Acquisitions in especially let's focus on cpg in cpg there's a lot of innovation Acquisitions where like you'll you know these companies will acquire a startup or a smaller business because they have all these distribution power but they don't have this Innovation it's easier to innovate at small places my picture what I see is a huge opportunity is for a cpg to actually launch of this sort of community-led brand instead of just like waiting for a startup to do it and then acquiring it which is like what Nike did you were talking about Nike Nike acquired artifact in late 2021 and sort of bought

that capability for their organization we're going to see that a lot of times over we're going to see in the beauty in the like fashion the financial services sector like companies are just going to acquire in I think the opportunity is actually to create a net new innovation brand because it's so hard to do that with a big brand already right everybody knows it there's awareness I think it's easier to be like okay great we're gonna launch this net new brand that's a new thing in a new category that's adjacent but that isn't like leveraging the core brand that's been developed over centuries because there's also like Risk to it what if it doesn't work what if it bombs and you know you cannibalize like your golden egg which doesn't make sense so I think the opportunity would be for a big Corporation to launch a net new

brand that is sort of community first versus trying to retrofit in one of their like existing top performers because I don't think that would really make sense you know there's this one organization called TYB founded by Thai Hang and I love like they're trying to do that I don't think it's really hit yet um but you know they have this product called joggy that I think is pretty aligned to what we're talking about and I think that we'll see some corporations taking the leap to actually develop this in-house of course it's just like waiting to acquire like the top performers if is there any I guess brands or projects that you've worked with vayner3 that you can share and just give us a case study on you know what you guys have done and maybe it's the ones that maybe you're most proud of or

have been the most successful and just kind of walk us through like what you guys have done and what you guys saw from that or maybe if it's not what you have done what's coming from you guys I would just love to hear some more actual case studies yeah for sure I'll maybe mention our first client we're like very public with they've been very like down to activate and azerbush has been a Vader client for 12 years when we were like hey there's this nft thing they're like let's do it you know they're a really Innovative company everybody loves beer they're like like you know have a really Creative Marketing team and we went out with them as sort of our first client we launched in November of 21 with Budweiser Heritage cans well first they you know took our advice and got this domain beer.eath which is kind

of like an iconic moment and you know purchases Tom sacks Budweiser rocket that is their profile picture that kind of like signals the world like they were in the scene you know from there launched the Budweiser Heritage can small collection of just under 2000 1936 pieces which was great as the sort of keys to the budburst we've released this road map which showed all the different things that were happening from physically producing beer.ed cans to you know doing Partnerships with Dwayne Wade with zedron with FIFA World Cup there's so much that we sort of packed into last year doing a nft Beer Fest at their St Louis headquarters I think that's one that has just continued to evolve and just before this I was gonna call their team we're talking about who we're leveraging AI to do really cool new

stuff that sort of intersects web3 so I love that example because they've remained committed and sort of like flexible through all of the different changes that we've seen in the last 18 months so that's one I always love to shout out other partners I've done a lot of work with have you know we've worked with diagio we've done a lot of stuff with their different brands more in the direction kind of maximizing some of their sponsorships and also you know for anyone who's familiar with the spirits industry there's a crazy gray market for like high-end spirits and wine actually if you've ever seen the movie sour grapes like that's a real consumer challenge like accessing these high-end spirits and liquids is really hard like you need to know someone and go through a broker and it's this whole thing and then is it even real and or is it like

counterfeited so we've done a bunch of different stuff with them with limited edition bottles from their ghost and rare series with Johnny Walker to his partnership they just did with Vandy the pink and we actually have something really cool coming up with Crown Royal for the Super Bowl I know you guys are both Canadians so yeah two Canadians this idea of a gratitude chain that I would highly recommend everybody checks out really nice sort of web3 initiative that anchors to what the brand stands for is appealing to both web3 natives because it's all on chain and also you know normal people who may want to Express gratitude for the people in their lives so giagio is one that is also sort of near and dear to our hearts I also throw out PepsiCo so PepsiCo has many different brands under their

umbrella we've done you know a bunch of different stuff from Cheetos to Pepsi Blue to you know many of the other sort of brands in there and then there's a lot kind of coming as they've really invested in building out their own web3 team really evangelize this through their organization and and set up the appropriate kind of guardrails to make sure that they are they're set up for success in this next iteration of the internet so PepsiCo is another one that we love Doritos is part of PepsiCo but Doritos is launching something in the metaverse was that with you guys as well I remember that wasn't like really driven by Vayner but tangentially yes we do work with their sort of Center of Excellence on it I think you'll see a lot of sort of PepsiCo Brands doing things whether it's you know Mountain Dews done stuff

Gatorade is it one they did this really cool Player of the Year program and they'll be bringing up some cool stuff in 2023 so that's a good example of like really a huge conglomerate that's finding ways to enable their brands to play in the space and explore and experiment and one thing that I think is a big differentiator on a PepsiCo is all of these are free you know a lot of times I think web3 natives are concerned about Brands trying to extract value from the ecosystem and every single PepsiCo thing that you've seen has been all free all zero royalty really is a way for like the furthest thing from a money making Venture it's interesting to hear you dial in on free as an example my next question was going to be what are the sort of the Playbook items that you've seen be very successful so when

you talked about Crown Royal there's clearly a focus on you know for good right when you talk about Anheuser-Busch there's clearly a focus on being with it or web3 native and the beer.e what are those sort of Playbook items that you keep seeing working Playbook items like I see working is designing a program that is like first and foremost beneficial to the core like targeted Community I think web3 natives are it's great to have them part of it but that is not typically our core like target audience so being really thoughtful around the target audience and ideally designing to be attractive for both but definitely attractive for sort of the Brand's target audience second I love open editions I love free I love Brands letting the audience sort of decide the

quantity and I think that you know when you look at a lot of the brand flops it's like they didn't sell out they priced it too high you know these kind of things with an open Edition you let the market it's not the quantity and I think that's smart Time Magazine has done this in several cases it kind of makes it fun proof too you know because you know your brand going in the last thing you want to do is get lambasted for oh there's too much Supply there's too much price you know we saw how Porsche kind of like righted the ship by closing the mids letting the sort of Market decide the quantity I think that's super smart um and I love free as an entry mechanism because it shows you're like giving before you're taking and the last thing I'd say is like creating an authentic

entry and this is something you really need to be strategic about it's not like you can repeat the same Playbook like you need to be like okay great what does my brand stand for and who is a good collaborator for me we're actually just talking about you know brand partner of ours who's gonna do something at Becon and creating the right like moment it really needs to be like a creative hit right you know we just talked about Budweiser so just did a post on Twitter that was like them sort of engaging like Jack Butler's checks and like he responded and Frankie God's responded and you need to be like relevant to finding those like relevant authentic Community connections I think is critical and that I think is one of our superpowers at vayner's you know we put like bear paint together with Doodles and did something really cool at South

by last like it has to be the right fit and it can't just be like anybody it can be Crown Royal and doodles it has to be like why does this work and like why is it special like it's a paint company and they have their palette like it has to be the right sort of alchemy and fit so I think that's another thing that has really separated out Brands who found success in this space and brands have kind of been fumbling I like when you say about kind of customizing and innovating it's like we asked for the Playbook and it's like the Playbook is to innovate like the Playbook is literally to do something new each time and if you do something new and you try something that's different that hasn't been done before like that's how you win in the space because the space is still so new so

it's like we have to be experimenting otherwise what are you really doing right yeah and it's actually a very common question people like okay great like I'm sure you guys just rinse to repeat this Tech stock and actually we don't very intentionally don't even have of you know a Vayner Tech stock that we sell to clients because I fundamentally believe our value is in being unbiased Consultants like we've been approached by plenty of marketplaces and Tech vendors who are like let's do a rep share deal I'm like that's not how we work because we always want to do what's best for our clients solving their business challenges and I think that's really helped us like test a bunch of different stuff and also be thoughtful around what's going to work for each specific activation and not like what's the common denominator okay well we could keep chatting but I know that

we've got to wrap up the show because you've got another meeting Avery and we greatly appreciate the time but I want to give you a chance chance to give a shill and actually before I give you a chance to give a show I want to show you guys quickly because vayner3 has some of the best case studies and reports in this space you guys produced an amazing web3 report back in November we actually did a full podcast where we broke it down so thank you for doing that it's awesome you guys can go read the report and the podcast that we did in the show notes anything else that you want to share about vayner3 or where people can find you as well online shout out to my strategy team and Chris laquin who leads that for developing those materials and I'll also show us on

Twitter and Linkedin follow us on Twitter and Linkedin we are trying to be a force for good in this space and educate you know broader Enterprises on all of the opportunities that web3 offers us if you want to follow me I'm at averyacanini at LinkedIn Instagram Twitter all the places and thank you guys so much for having me on the show I really appreciate your podcast and I've Loved getting to hang out a little bit we really appreciate you showing up we got one final question before you jump off Avery if you had a billboard that 1 billion people were going to see what would you write on it vfronts.com marketer at heart marketer yeah well you know I think I would do that because Vayner 3 is really like a B2B organization and even when we grow like parties and stuff sometimes we don't

bring it Brandon is Vayner three because we're really for c-suite Fortune 500 it's like not for like average lay people but V friends is for everyone and I encourage everyone who's listening to this to join the V Friends Community on Discord if you haven't because I think that's a really fun awesome community that has been such an insights engine for us as we see like what works in the space awesome thanks so much Avery really appreciate your time take care bye guys thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will

lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one