Tag: NFT

Hong Kong – Hong Kong-based game software and venture capital company Animoca Brands and South Korean entertainment company Cube Entertainment have announced the official establishment of their latest venture called AniCube Entertainment, which aims to build a music metaverse, and issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and ecosystem tokens based on the intellectual property rights of Cube Ent’s globally popular K-pop music artists and actors.

The partnership was first announced in November 2021, and also entails AniCube bringing Cube Ent’s artists to The Sandbox, a decentralised gaming virtual world and a subsidiary of Animoca Brands.

Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, said, “As a fan of K-pop and Korean culture, I am thrilled to contribute to AniCube, a JV that will guide K-pop music creators and fans in the open music metaverse and help them to enjoy true digital property rights and the other benefits of blockchain and NFTs.”

Meanwhile, Woohyung Ahn, CEO of Cube Entertainment, commented, “With the support of Animoca Brands, the music metaverse created by AniCube will be global and open, and will play a leading role in the global music industry to protect the rights of IP holders and content creators related to music sources. We look forward to the ways in which Cube Ent’s highly talented artists will help to build the open metaverse.”

New York, United States — OneOf, an eco-conscious NFT platform, announced it has formed a first-of-its-kind partnership with music industry conglomerate Warner Music Group (WMG) that will see the company create exclusive NFTs for a range of artists across WMG’s legendary portfolio of music content. OneOf mints NFTs that are up to two million times more energy-efficient than the competition, and are specifically designed with the music community in mind, offering NFTs from collectable and generative PFPs to music royalties, and IRL experiences.

Oana Ruxandra, chief digital officer and EVP for business development for Warner Music Group, commented, “Web3 is a massive leap forward in technology: it will expand the scale and scope of both human and machine interactions far beyond what we can imagine today. Partnering with OneOf, a leader in the emerging technology space of Web3 and NFTs, gives our artists an edge in more authentically building one-to-one relationships with their fans and winning in the new Web3 economy. We’re excited to see what’s possible.”

Meanwhile, Lin Dai, CEO of OneOf, commented on the unique partnership, saying, “From collectables to music royalties, NFTs and Web3 represent the pulse of consumer demand and an exciting future for the music industry. We are thrilled to partner and innovate together with Warner Music Group and use our cutting edge Web3 technology to bring their iconic labels and world-renowned artists to the next 100 million fans on the blockchain.”

With a legacy extending back over two centuries, Warner Music Group holds an extensive catalogue of creative artists, songwriters, and brands that are moving the culture worldwide. The company includes such iconic labels namely Atlantic, Warner Records, Elektra, and Parlophone – with a roster of superstars such as Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, and Lizzo.

OneOf, which was first announced in May 2021 and is backed by Quincy Jones, has established itself as the go-to platform for the music community. OneOf offers crucial solutions for artists and fans eager to explore the expanding world of NFTs without having to worry about high minting costs or the complexity of blockchain technology. 

In addition to Warner Music Group, OneOf has recently announced a three-year collaboration with the GRAMMY Awards as well as partnerships with iHeartRadio and MusiCares. Since going live in September, OneOf has launched record-breaking NFT collections with major and independent artists including Doja Cat, Whitney Houston, Alesso, The Game, Chief Keef, Pia Mia, and more.

Ready? Choose your characters

By now, the word metaverse needs no further introduction. First introduced in 1992 by American science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash as a virtual world where humans used avatars of themselves to escape a dystopian reality, it has since become a buzzword in Silicon Valley and in marketing.

As Mark Zuckerberg said, “The metaverse will bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists; to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centres; and to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited. A realised metaverse could be the next best thing to a working teleportation device.”

Sounds amorphous? There is no denying the immense market opportunity for businesses and brands in this space. Bloomberg Intelligence predicted that the market opportunity could hit USD 800 billion by 2024. In 2021 alone, we have seen a multitude of brands tapping into the metaverse to create brand experiences for their target audiences. Nike’s Nikeland and Ralph Lauren’s The Winter Escape were launched on Roblox, and Luxury Marketplace UNXD will launch a metaverse Fashion Week on Decentraland in March 2022.

With all the hype and potential surrounding this emerging evolution of the internet, how can businesses and brands be active and purposeful players with a first-mover advantage?

Move from corporation-first to community-first

The metaverse cannot exist without the participation of avatars ‒ the digital representation of ourselves. Avatars gather around communities that are formed around interests and ideas.

Brands need to learn to engage with existing communities and hand the power back to them. For example, brands gain more traction when they partner with members of the Roblox developer community in creating items and experiences, allowing communities to drive the creation and rewarding them for their efforts.

Blend the real and virtual with digital-twin experiences

A digital twin could be described as the digital representation of a real world entity that is synchronised with the real world. Simply put, they are digital clones of real world objects.

Digital twins will help businesses connect the metaverse closer to reality by linking virtual experiences with real world experiences.

For example, the blockchain-based game Upland allows users to own digital real estates that are mapped to real-world addresses. Each digital property’s value is also tied to an NFT. Now think of the possibilities in which your business or brand can create a digital replica in the metaverse to unravel new data, learnings, and predictions. For example, if you are in a retail business, having a digital twin of your store will help you in predicting your store traffic, queue time, top-selling products, and inventory planning, just to name a few possible advantages.

Tap into the rise of virtual status symbols and engage through collectibles

Image courtesy of Bored Ape Yacht Club

With the metaverse and NFT, status symbols begin to manifest themselves in novel ways in the virtual. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by four NFT novices turned internet rock stars, in which the price of the collection is 52 Ether, above USD 200,000. Adidas has also collaborated with Bored Ape Yacht Club, with Bored Apes decked out in Adidas Stripes. The entire 30,000 NFT collection was sold out in a few hours over two drops.

Brands can tap into the need for authenticity and exclusivity in the digital creator economy and offer limited-edition items or assets that can only be found in the metaverse. ​​Gucci offers The Collector’s Room on Roblox, allowing fans to collect rare and exclusive Gucci items in the metaverse. The creation of virtual products and goods will help brands drive deeper penetration, relevance, and fan-love, be it in the real or virtual world.

Source: blog.roblox.com

Connect through Gamification

The metaverse presents a huge opportunity to redefine engagement through play and a huge component of that lies with gamification. The integration of technology from augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, presents a whole new way to connect and engage with avatars in the metaverse.

The ability to gamify your marketing will align your brand with the play-to-earn gaming models that are gaining massive traction in the mainstream.

For example, Axie Infinity was a breakthrough success in the blockchain-gaming world.

Players on the platform earn tokens by winning battles with their ‘Axies’ against other players. These special tokens can then be sold for fiat money ‒ real cash. But to get an Axie, players have to buy one on the exchange or breed them from existing Axies.

Source: Axie Infinity

For another example that is closer to home on how gamification can apply to marketing in the metaverse, here is a metaverse gaming experience developed by digital marketing agency Lion & Lion for virtual social platform Status-K, where social media, tokens, and real world rewards were integrated.

Source: www.lionandlion.com

Keep on experimenting

At the time of writing, we are still in the very early stages of the metaverse coming into its full potential. There are still quite a few roadblocks on the pathway toward a bona fide metaverse. For example, interoperability. For true interoperability to happen, cross-metaverse bridges need to be enabled, so that millions of users and communities can migrate their avatars and virtual possessions across the metaverses regardless of platforms or corporations.

While these are guiding insights and ideas on how brands and businesses can navigate better in the metaverse, there will always be paradigms that will be disrupted and created. Marketers need to constantly experiment and stay ahead by understanding technology and being open to fresh creative suggestions. The metaverse will allow entertainment, gaming, marketing, retail experiences, and social interactions to converge and evolve in brave new ways and even set the stage for new businesses to arise.

It is an exciting time for both business owners and marketers to explore this space and to constantly rewrite the playbook through unceasing experimentation and invention.

To end off, I will leave with a parting note and reminder from the book Ready Player One by Ernie Cline, “As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

This article is written by Cheelip Ong, chief product officer and regional chief creative officer of Lion and Lion Digital Group.

The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT. This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to have your thought-leadership published on the platform.

Hong Kong – UDomain, Hong Kong-based blockchain solutions provider, has announced a rebranding to reflect its position as a pioneer blockchain solution provider. It has now changed its name to just ‘UD’ and has launched a new branding visual identity and website.

Founded in 1998 in Hong Kong, UD has been a major cloud and cybersecurity solution provider in the Greater China region. Presently, UD aims to help businesses grow by leveraging innovative blockchain technology and providing a one-stop solution that includes consulting services, technical development, and business matching to solution deployment

The company said the rebranding strategy aims to represent both the expansion of products and services of the company from domain services and cloud and security solutions to blockchain solutions, and to mirror “its vision for the future”.

Its new logo is a gradient midnight blue background with “UD” on it, which has been designed to exhibit a strong and distinctive brand image through minimalistic style. The new website, UD.hk, meanwhile, will prominently feature the company’s focus on connecting business to the world of blockchain and metaverse and helping enterprises enter web 3.0. 

The rebranding move is also accompanied by a series of new blockchain offerings to provide strategic business insight and technical support for blockchain projects. The rollout includes blockchain consulting services, NFT solutions, blockchain domain & validator, business crypto wallet, and tokenomics development.

Bangkok, Thailand – SQUARE44, a Bangkok-based branding and packaging design agency, announced its launch into metaverse with a new division called CRPTOSQUARE. The new division will specialize in helping brands and marketers connect to the metaverse space as well as with NFT-related projects.

As the first brand design agency entering the virtual world, CRPTOSQUARE is also among the first of Thai businesses that have established an actual virtual presence in the Metaverse by investing in land and opening a virtual office in Decentraland, one of the more well-known digital worlds that are currently in existence, overseen by the nonprofit Decentraland Foundation.

Mathijs Aliet, founder of SQUARE44, said that while the utilization of the NFT concept’s potential is still in its infancy, the agency sees many standard and unimaginative applications flooding the market.

“It is important that brands put strategic thought into how they enter the space as rushed projects might do more harm than good,” shared Aliet.

Aliet adds, “The way brands interact with users in the space will dramatically change — many other opportunities will emerge, but it is very likely that the projects that garner most interest initially will be focused on helping businesses connect their physical brands with the new version of the digital world. All things related to the Metaverse are moving with unprecedented speed, and a first-mover advantage is important for many brands.”

With the launch of CRPTOSQUARE, SQUARE44 developed a roadmap for introducing brands to the opportunities of the Metaverse. A sample of services includes single or half-day Metaverse Branding Workshops which provide an introduction for marketing professionals into the world of new opportunities. In addition to workshops, another major direction for CRPTOSQUARE is the development of NFT-related projects, where CRPTOSQUARE intends to support clients in the development of branded NFT collections that have a long-term vision, roadmap, and utility.

To get into CRPTOSQUARE, brands must enter Decentraland.