How Do NFTs Fit In With Marketing

All right. So today we are going to talk about where NFTs or non-fungible tokens fit in with marketing. So as of this recording right now, we're talking, uh, it's March 16th, 2021. And, uh, there's a big craze going on as of last week. There's a Beeple NFT that sold for $69 million.

So before we actually dive into it, do you want to first explain what NFTs are?

So let me explain. I was getting there. So NFT, Non-fungible tokens. And the definition here is it's a digital file whose unique identity and ownership are verified on a blockchain. In this case, a lot of NFTs are sold on Ethereum. And NFTs are not mutually interchangeable, see fungibility. That's what it means. That's the crazy word, right? NFTs are commonly created by uploading files such as digital artwork to, could be like different marketplaces such as OpenSea and things like that. It's very— basically the first NFTs came out in 2017, but in 2021, especially in 2020 actually, late 2020, we're starting to see a resurgence. So going back to what I was talking about last week, an NFT from an artist named Beeple sold for $69 million. And it was a compilation of pictures and it was digital art. And then there's other crazy stuff like CryptoPunks, right? There's like these digital pixelated images. And Neil can see my Instagram right now. It's like a pixelated image of me. I just went to— I had a designer put it together. But I think we should be asking ourselves a question that like, I do believe NFTs are here to stay. I do think we're going to see the bubble burst and maybe the next year or two, we're going to see like a big reckoning happen. But I do think long-term they're here to stay. Neil, what are your thoughts about how this might apply to marketing in general?

Yeah. So the way I look at NFTs is it's created a whole new way for people to monetize and make money. For example, Logan Paul, he went out there, he leveraged Twitter and his social platforms to say, hey, I got this image of myself. Do you want to end up buying it? And I think he generated over a million bucks. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Closer to, I think it's either $3.4 or $5 million.

Yeah. So that was a good amount of money. And what's beautiful about this is you can actually leverage marketing channels and monetize them by sending traffic to things that can monetize like NFTs. A lot of these guys are using their goodwill, their social audience, or just going out there and leveraging the community. What if you started running paid ads to some of these NFTs?

Yeah, it's still very early days right now. I do think the CryptoPunks are going to hold value long-term because they are the very first NFTs. So I think, look, people at the end of the day, human behavior here is people want to be collecting things, right? People want to look— there's— it's like a status symbol. You want to be the first one and you can actually see on the ledger, oh, Neil Patel actually owned this NFT of Eric Siu a long time ago. It's real. And then there's also a certificate of authenticity. So to be able to like, I think Gary Vee put this really well, to be able to call your shot and then you're the one that's always getting in really, really early and then people will see you on the ledger. You can become that kind of the guy that's able to predict the next big NFT. I just think it makes a lot of sense and it levels the playing field now where you can see a lot of these things on the open market. Again, there's OpenSea, I believe it's .io. You can go to crypto, I think it's cryptosmash.io. It shows you the latest NFTs and what's going up, what's going down. So I think it's very nascent right now, but to Neil's point, you can Look, Logan Paul did a drop. Steve Aoki, he went onto Clubhouse, he did a drop. There's a lot of these EDM artists going, and I think he did like a couple million dollars. There's another guy, Blau, he's an EDM DJ as well. I think he did a couple million bucks. And so it's very crazy right now, but it makes all the sense in the world. A lot of artists, a lot of creators, they can make a limited edition song, one of one, sell it for a lot of money. If I love, maybe I have an up-and-coming team member and then maybe they create an NFT, maybe I just like them, I can invest in that. Or Neil and I, we can actually take our very first Marketing School episode And make an NFT for that. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, I think his— someone bid $2.5 million for his very first tweet. Elon Musk just came out with an NFT yesterday. I think that the bidding right now is at a couple hundred grand. Neil?

Yeah. And then isn't Kings of Leon doing a soundtrack that's going to be an NFT?

Yeah. It's crazy. It makes all the sense in the world. I think it's— we're making use of the blockchain technology finally, and we're seeing practical use cases. So it's okay. We can take this podcast, we can take videos, we can take a lot of these things. I can take my book, I can take different logos from it, I can take different pages and I can make those NFTs too. So there's a lot of different ways to play the game and it's very early days. Again, I do think people are going to get destroyed in the next year or 2. And I think we're going to see 98, 99% of stuff go to crap, just like the dot-com bust, Neil.

And if you want more ways to grow, more unique approaches like NFTs, check out marketingschool.io/pro.

And if you want us to make an NFT, tweet at me and maybe we'll make an NFT. Catch you guys later.