Nearly everything you wanted to know about NFTs but were afraid to ask

Some non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have sold for millions of dollars, and experts expect the market will exceed the billion dollar mark by a couple of hundred million within 2021. What is this thing that is creating new markets and has captured the attention of creators, collectors, and crypto-enthusiasts?

An NFT is a specific type of digital asset. The token refers to a virtual entity. Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of tokens. However, cryptocurrency is by definition fungible. It is meant to be mutually interchangeable with other forms of money. In contrast, something that is non-fungible is truly one-of-a-kind.

It brings to mind the descriptive phrase in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, “unique in all the world” that the prince applies to his rose as distinct from all others. In contrast Gertrude Stein declared there is no difference among roses: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

Money in all its forms, including digital tokens is the interchangeable rose. But an NFT is a token immortalized as something distinctive

 Read more in  NFT Explained: How to Make, Buy and Sell Non-Fungible Tokens

Marketing opportunities in Clubhouse

What’s in this article:
Audio platforms have exploded over the past year – Clubhouse is one of the best-known names
Clubhouse allows brands to connect with their customer through the engaging power of live events on a virtual platform that keeps the focus on the content of the words and ideas rather than looking good on the screen

With so many social media platforms out there, how do you select which one is a good fit for your B2C brand? The answer is the one that delivers an engaged audience, which may just be an audio platform.



Read more in Why Marketers Are Jumping on Audio Platforms

First and best are not the same for holiday marketing

Snapchat already announced the launch of its  holiday resource hub for marketers in early June. to get marketers to start thinking December holidays before summer has even arrived, it offered an eight-page long US Festive Shopping Season 2021 Handout guide.

Within the handout, it offers some very flattering statistics for Snapchat. For example, “89% of Snapchatters are interested in try-on AR experiences.” While that number could well be arrived at through a selection of people loyal to the platorm, that doesn't mean that Snapchat would be the best vehicle for most marketers.

In fact, as Retail TouchPoints reports, Snapchat has the smallest market share for social shopping:

“Facebook and Instagram are the clear leaders in the social shopping space: 34% of those surveyed purchased on Facebook, and 23% purchased through Facebook-owned Instagram. All other platforms, including Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok and Snapchat, were in the single digits.”

Snapchat garners just 2% of purchases through a platform where TikTok and Pinterest garner 3%. Snapchat only goes up to 3% for the category of “clicked ad and later purchased” where TikTok and Pinterest garner 6%.

Read more ins Snapchat plans for December Holidays in June

What you need for imaginative play

"Timeless Toys. Endless Possibilities" is the title of the first-ever marketing campaign for Melissa & Doug. Of course, the brand believes that its toys are the key: “When playing with a Melissa & Doug toy, imagination runs wild — a toy broom isn't just a broom, it's a rocket ship heading to the moon.”

It’s a nice idea, and there is something, indeed, timeless about low-tech toys. However, in truth, even a real broom or even a stick that fell off a tree or an empty box left from another purchase could also serve as a rocket ship for the kid with imagination.

In fact, if imaginative play is your goal, less is more. It’s when you can’t buy everything you want to play with that you are forced to improvise and get more creative.

Read more in Toys Powered by Imagination

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2020/10/now-you-can-revisit-your-childhood-on.html

The Value of Zero: Accuracy and Trust

Data-driven marketing has always focused on getting as much information on your customers as possible through various channels. As privacy grows increasingly important and tracking becomes increasingly limited, zero-party data (ZPD) is on the rise.

Conventional marketing wisdom has always been that the more you know about your customer, the more effectively you can target them. For that reason, marketers have always been trying to get their hand on as much data as possible, relying not just on their own first-party data but even paying for second-party and third-party data. 

To clarify terms, here’s a rundown on the differences in data sources.
First-party data

First-party data is what a business receives directly from a customer typically as a result of purchases, subscriptions, or points of contact. It can be the result of what a customer actively fills in on a form or passively shares as a result of cookies that the customer accepts by using the brand’s site or the tracking that comes through use of an app.

While a complete record of information given by a customer is valuable, for businesses that haven’t had much time to gain a complete history, it may not suffice to inform truly tailored experiences. That’s why businesses will pay for access to additional information through second and even third parties.
Second-party data

Second-party data is first-party data acquired by another company that is then sold to a business that wants more information about its customer base. Drawing on the more thorough information can fill in more of the customer picture, but it’s still limited to what a single business has been able to gather on the customers, which is why some will pay a broker for data.


Third-party data

Third-party data is different from first and second party in that it draws on multiple sources of data that a separate company puts together into a single dataset to be sold to those in the market for that kind of customer information. Typically, the company in the business of delivering data will purchase first party data from a number of companies to create these data packages for others to buy through the data exchange marketplace.
Data drawbacks

While going from one to three increases your data resources, it’s not without its drawbacks. As anyone can buy third party data, what a business buys is not unique to it. As a result, it is very likely that all businesses competing for the same customers are working off the same data set.

Also since the establishment of GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, marketers have had to respect consumer-set boundaries for the collection, use, and sale of their data.

The rise of such legislation has shed more light on privacy issues that has created pressure for platforms to stop enabling data collection without users’ knowledge. That is the story behind Google’s resolution to phase out third-party cookies and Apple’s new iOS setup for informed consent on apps.

The new frameworks don’t only curtail marketers from using data obtained from outside sources. They can even limit some first-party data that businesses have obtained without informed consent by tracking consumer behavior with cookies, pixels, or cross-device identification (XDID).

That is why a couple of years ago, we started hearing about zero-party data or ZPD. The term has been credited to Forrester, which presented it in Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing Report.

This approach has gained momentum over the past couple of years. AW360 predicts that a quarter of CMOs will be looking to implement ZPD in 2021.
The zero-party solution

As both zero-party data and first-party data take in information directly from the customer, there is some overlap between the two. The crucial difference between them is that zero-party data only includes what a customer knowingly and willingly shares.

That means that customers are in full control of the information they share with the business. They are willing to give their data if they feel they can trust the brand and are getting something of value in return.

Read more in  Zero to Hero: Providing Personalization & Privacy

The Pause that Refreshes Marketing Relationships

The old-time tagline for Coca Cola makes a lot of sense when applied to marketing, particularly for a holiday that they don’t want to be thinking about right now.

 

I just got an email from ShopRunner that really got my attention far more than anything I’ve ever seen in a marketing email. The subject line was “Skip our Mother’s Day emails this year.”

With so much clamor to sign up for emails, some of which have already pushed Mother’s Day marketing in mid-April, this subject line really stood out. So even though  I delete most of my ShopRunner emails automatically, just as I do most marketing emails, I clicked this one.  It showed me thsi: 

 

Pressing pause took me to a landing page that showed this:

It’s not like ShopRunner is giving up its raison d'être to promote brands that participate in its program.

As it says, the pause on Mother’s Day communication doesn’t mean that it is pausing all marketing messages. In fact, right under the banner acknowledging my pause were two banner ads for products it is promoting now.

It’s only offering to pause one specific marketing theme. It's actually a smart move not to push their Mother’s Day marketing in the face of people for whom it is just so much spam.

People can have any number of reasons not to have to deal with a bombardment of Mother’s Day messaging. They may find the messages to be irrelevant or, even worse, a sad reminder that they’ve  lost their mothers or their position as mother to children who are gone.

The move is smart because it offers to lessen email fatigue and reduce the irritation of spam. We all get more marketing message than we can even think of responding to. Certainly, customers who recognizes which occasion they'd rather not hear about would appreciate the consideration of a brand sparing them from that onslaught.

Really, this is such a great idea that it should be applied to all occasions typically taken up for marketing, like Father’s Day, graduations, back to school, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, etc.

Related: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2021/04/why-less-is-more.html

http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2021/01/7-ways-to-grab-customer-attention-in.html

The Ad that Delivers What Women Want

 "What does woman want?" That question  perplexed that father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud. It continues to puzzle marketers today, as we saw in What Women Want to See in Ads.

 The truth is that the answer was set out well over 500 years ago in one of the legendary knight stories, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell: Spoiler alert: when the knight was given the choice of having his otherwise hideous-looking wife beautiful at night or during the day, he lets her make that decision and  was rewarded with beauty 24/7. 

But that insight of 1450 has been lost over the generations as marketers seek to push on women what they want instead of empowering them to make the decision for themselves. But one swimsuit company got smart about it and so has seen a very positive response to its ad on Facebook:

We proudly want to introduce ModLi.

A different kind of swimwear.

Sometimes - the usual bikini/one-piece is just perfect. Whether you are sun bathing, in a hot-tub with friends, going to the beach with your partner, etc...

And for "other" situations in life, ModLi is perfect.  Playing with your kids on the beach, going to the pool with family, swimming, water sports, or just walking on the coastline.

Benefits:

- Sun Protection (UPF +50 Reducing harmful rays by 98%)

- No wardrobe "Malfunctions"

- Comfortable "It's like the difference between wearing work clothes and sweatpants"

- Lab Tested Fabrics

- Designed by professional designers with customer requests in mind

The ad served on Facebook garnered 6.7K reactions, 683 shares, and 1.2K comments, a sample of which you can see below:

The large number of likes on many of these comments indicate that they do accurately reflect the feelings of many women. They like having  the option to choose if they wish to cover up or not without being judged for those choices. 

Read more in  The Answer to What Women Want in a Swimsuit Ad