How Web 3.0 Will Change Brands Forever
By: Jade Darmawangsa
Tags: Brands On Social Media, The Creator Economy, Web3, Creator Economy, Cryptocurrency

I had a meeting with the CMO of Nike early this month, and during the meeting, they asked me the hardest question I’ve heard: “Jade, what do you do to prepare for Web3?”

It caught me off guard. For one, we’ve entered a time where you can do productive work at your bed, invest in shitcoins, and throw all your marketing dollars at some 16-year-old TikToker. And two, Web 2.0 enabled digital connection to consumers and kickstarted the creator economy. However, that still isn’t enough for the evolution of the internet.

Enter Web 3.0 — the newest phase of the internet revolution. The industries hit hardest by the COVID19 pandemic include clothing, footwear, and goods; how will the emerging shift align with the recent impacts of the global pandemic? The good news is that consumerism is on track to recover but at a slow incline.

WTF is Web 3?

In Web3, developers don’t build and deploy applications that run on a single server or that store their data in a single database, instead of on blockchains, decentralized networks of many peer-to-peer servers.

How Will Web 3 Change Brands?

Web 3.0 is more than just the physical future. Web 3.0 and Crypto go hand in hand. The shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 has the same effect on companies from Nike to small businesses that it does your local coffee shop. Everything will be impacted, it’s just a matter of the scale at which businesses will experience and adapt. A Costa Rican-based cryptocurrency called Verdes Coin is dedicated to promoting environmentalism and good climate change behaviors, and there are only around 2,000 people invested in it. And in using this coin, people can exchange recycling for food, which in turn builds a community around this coin. In the US, Dogecoin is huge, with a billion-dollar market cap. However, in the same way, Web 3.0 doesn’t adapt based on company size. Companies adapt to Web 3.0; the scale at which may vary.

Why is Web 3.0 important to brands as big as Nike or Redbull?

Sales don’t happen if you don’t have a community and culture around your company. As two big shifts occurred — first being the COVID-19 pandemic — apparel and clothing companies experienced a loss of consumers… When brands experience that sort of impact, they adapt to certain cultures.

In the creator economy, Web 3.0 will give creators a fair way of making money that we haven’t seen in previous years and provide longevity to an exasperated industry. Instead of making money through merchandise and creator funds, influencers will break out from saturated markets and begin working with tokens or cryptocurrencies. When you diversify your income in several layers, you have a steady and more reliable source of income, sometimes working fewer hours and focusing on other forms of content.

The biggest challenge for brands heading into the new phase of Web will be navigating what to do when consumers spend less money on buying products and more on community ownership.

In Web 2.0, brands monetize by selling a product, where they’re paid for a shoe, sock, or service on a regular basis. In Web3, brands will monetize through the issuance of a social token or NFTs, with non-fungible tokens acting as digital media ownership.

What Can Brands Do to Stay On Top of This Shift?

The best thing brands can do leading up to this new age of the internet is to partner with a DAO. A DAO stands for a decentralized autonomous organization, meaning they aren’t controlled by a single institution. Partnering with a DAO not only removes a middle man from revenue streams, but it requires reflection on the community surrounding the brand.

Brands need to keep these three questions in mind:

What kind of work do you want to incentivize your consumers?

Who are your current community leaders?

What rewards does your community want, aside from the product?

Depending on the brand’s mission, they want to collaborate with something that stands for their same values. They need to have the answer to the question, “what does your brand stand for?”. Understand the culture around the brand and go from there to make sure the target audience has the same goals and values that they do.

Examples

Jamm Session: a social token for crypto-natives who are experimenting with tokenized community tools to pave the way for new creator economies.

Global Coin Research: a social currency (cryptocurrency) that provides members high-quality and direct access in the crypto space, ranging from content and analysis on GlobalCoinResearch.com to community events.

Friends With Benefits: a community of crypto-curious creators exploring the future of web3 culture.

Web 3.0 isn’t far from the future, in fact, it’s already happening. That’s why I built CRE8, a GenZ focused DAO that bridges Web2 audiences to Web3 through educating and collaborating.

That’s why I’m building CRE8. CRE8 is a GenZ focused DAO that bridges Web2 audiences to Web3. Our goal in 2021 is to launch two projects within the top TikTok animators to encourage audiences to prepare and understand Web3.

What’s My Strategy for Preparing for Web 3.0?

My strategy for this next advancement in Web is to simply stay involved and educate myself through reading articles such as this one. It’s important for creators to absorb all of this information in order to prepare for new ways of monetizing and making money. When the time is right — maybe in the next five years — the majority of creators will have their own cryptocurrency, their own wallet, and be invested in a few communities’ or creators’ currencies. Until then, it’s useful to experiment and learn.

If you want to become more involved in the new world of Web 3.0, I recommend getting started with a community I started called CRE8 Club. We post job opportunities as well as send out an email newsletter each week with the latest creator economy news. CRE8 is also hosting an event this August called CRE8chella and speaking at other cryptocurrency events. And starting soon, we will even be launching our own coin called Nuts with Nutshell Animations. So we’re teaching creators, but we’re also implementing to adapt our community to the evolving economy.

This post is for brands who want to prepare for and navigate Web 3.0. Feel free to message me @jadedarmawangsa on Instagram and Twitter.