Kick off your Web 3.0 strategy

Hi everyone,

Welcome to Issue #6 of Sports 3.0

🙏 Thank you to all the new subscribers over the past week. Not subbed yet? Join hundreds of smart, sports industry innovators by subscribing here 👇

I love hearing your comments on the newsletter so thanks to everyone who has taken the time to fire over feedback on Sports 3.0 🙏

First a question 🤔

I'm looking for a show of hands here.

Would you have any interest in a sports industry community channel (e.g a Discord/Telegram/other) where you are able to discuss trending topics, chat about innovations, learn from others etc?

Now, lets talk Web 3.0 strategy

Last week I ran a poll via LinkedIn asking whether my followers, made up of brands, team and athlete representatives have Web 3.0 strategies in place.

I must stress, this was a small poll, but 76% of respondents did not yet have a Web 3.0 strategy in place.

And from conversations and DMs I get weekly, this isn't a surprise.

So today we're going to talk about how you can start thinking about your own Web 3.0 strategy.

Why you need to start thinking about Web 3.0 strategy

Undoubtedly if you work for a rights-holder, brand, athlete or agency, you will have or will be discussing NFT and Fan Token proposals.

You may be fed up of hearing Web 3.0 tech has the potential to have a significant impact across sport...

..and you may not have a need to launch an NFT project or Fan Token this year, or even next year but....

...If any of the below areas touch your sports property, you should at least be establishing your position.

🚨Spoiler🚨 It's likely at least one of the below areas will be of interest to you - by the end of this you may have some use cases you may not even realise were possible.

So, was I right? Let's dig into each area a little further.

Fan engagement

In my view, there are two fan engagement routes which will make the most sense when it comes to the Web 3.0 world: Memberships and Fan Reward.

Membership programmes are clearly well established without Web 3.0 tech.

You could explore using NFTs as a means of access pass, but it may not be an immediate priority if your system works well.

Fan Reward systems however, are perfectly placed as a genuine use case for Web 3.0 tech.

There are some cool examples of how this could work 👇

Owned fan token initiatives are perfectly placed for reward programmes, and as a means to create an owned internal economy.

For example, Content Creator Joe Pulizzi has his own creator coin called $TILT, which is available on Rally.io.

For holding Joe's $TILT coin, you get a series of benefits such as membership access, giveaways etc, but one aspect I really love is holders can submit their own content articles for Joe's media channels, and if accepted, you get rewarded in $TILT to the equivalent of $250.

So imagine this equivalent in Sports. Through having a reward system set up around your own Fan Token, you could reward fans who create the best UGC around matches which you then use on Tik Tok. You could even reward fans to translate your content around the world or moderate communities.

You can effectively reward certain fans for deep engagement.

And you reward them in your own coin which can then be spent and kept in your internal ecosystem.

Other reward systems could also be based on attendance. Fans collecting all Proof of Attendance Protocol's (POAPs) NFT's across a season can easily be identified and rewarded accordingly.

You could also do this for international fans by the way. Those who grab their POAPs on every broadcast could signify the fans across the world waking up at an unsociable hour to watch your even live - and you'll be able to identify and reward them easily through NFT technology {More info on POAPS can be found in Issue #4}.

Merchandising

We spoke about this in depth in last weeks newsletter, but Digital Fashion is rumoured to be a $50bn market across the next decade.

As part of exploring your Web 3.0 strategy you want to be thinking about what does this mean for your brand.

Don't just look to replicate and digitise existing products. Research, predict and be creative around what your fans may be excited about.

Collaborations may be the way to go to get a flavour of the space.

Adidas' Into the Metaverse NFT, their first foray into the Web 3.0 world, was formed as a collaboration across a number of existing NFT projects and NFT influencers such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and G Money respectively.

By owning the NFT you get access to exclusively redeemable physical merch.

Gucci also collaborated with NFT project 10KTF in their 'Gucci Grail' drop to imagine an exclusive line of virtual product which dressed NFTs from 11 select collections.

Imagine as an initial foray into the world, you collaborated with a NFT project to issue iterations of your new jersey to dress select NFT collections.

Partnership activation 

There two reasons why having a Web 3.0 strategy is critical for partnership activation:

1) Many of the brands you will be working with will either already have their own Web 3.0 strategies, or will be working on it and asking for yours.

2) You can actually create new rights inventory with the tech. NFT's can be sponsorship assets in the same way signed shirts are. I wrote about how you can actually increase the value of your signed shirts in Issue #3 here.

Aside from the above, Web 3.0 will also make partnership rewards for fans (discounts/giveaways etc) so easy because of the incoming widespread use of digital wallets.

Participation 

Of course a huge element of sport is about inspiring participation.

Luckily Web 3.0 can help. Move to earn covered in Issue #1 of Sports 3.0 is a concept which incentivises and subsequently rewards exercise.

With examples such as STEPN and OliveX gamifying running, and using currency as rewards.

Revenue generation 

Web 3.0 should not be treated as a silver bullet to new revenue generation. As hopefully you now understand, there are a raft of opportunities for Web 3.0 products and engagement tactics for fans.

Getting them right with a long term lens will be more lucrative in the long run. The revenue models can vary, we'll break these down further in future newsletters.

There are obviously also more tangible immediate opportunties for revenue generation. Rights-holders, athletes and brands are awash with quite lucrative potential deals at the moment.

It's music to the Commercial teams ears.

BUT

You should not be signing any crypto or NFT deals without understanding your Web 3.0 strategy.

For any sports entity without a clear view and strategy around Web 3.0, heres what is going to happen:

1) You will make decisions based on financial incentives vs what is right for your fans

2) You may leave yourself open to valid scepticism as to why you have entered the agreement

3) You will probably overlook whether this is a piece of your strategy you should own as a team vs license

4) Worst-case - you essentially optimise purely for the highest revenue deal - the partner goes belly up. Your fans lose out and you suffer reputational damage.

Hopefully, this convinces you to build out your Web 3.0 strategy - I look forward to seeing what route everyone goes down 😁

🚀 Level Up

Hungry for more? Here are a few further things I've hand curated this week that I think you may be interested in:

📖 Read... If you like this newsletter, you'll also like Sporting Crypto written by Pet Berisha. Pet covers a variety of news each week across the Crypto space and its a great read.

📺 Watch...Today is Ogilvy's wonderful Nudgestock Virtual Conference which focuses around Behavioural Science and featured the brilliant Rory Sutherland. It's being streamed live on YouTube and therefore will be able to be watched back on demand if you aren't reading this on Friday morning. I'll be watching over the weekend!

It will be fascinating.

That's all for this week!

If you enjoyed this insight please feel free to share with like minded friends and colleagues.

Thanks & see you next week, Richard Johnson

P.S use the buttons below to vote for your feedback on todays issue. It helps tell me which Sports 3.0 content is useful to you 👇

😐 It was ok