[00:00:00] Donny: Yeah, no industry changes faster than modern marketing. Great marketers need an edge. Great marketers need to be brave. The brave marketer podcast provides an opportunity for each guest to share a story where they exhibited bravery by taking a risk. They made a dramatic impact in the market. Our guests are marketers from top brands and agencies who share the exact strategy.

[00:00:30] Tactics they used in their brief marketing moment. We then dive deep into topics like ethical advertising, consumer privacy, crypto marketing, brand safety, and navigating a future without third party cookies, hosted by brave software and me Donny. Head of sales outbreak together. We’ll get a backstage view of the brave marketing moments and creative mindset work that shaping today’s most influential brands.

[00:00:55] [00:01:00] Yeah.

[00:01:01] You’re listening to a new episode of the brave marketer podcast. I think you’re gonna really enjoy this one. We’d like to end the season with somebody internal and talking about brave and what’s going on. And this one we’re going to really focus on NFTs. We’re going to have Luke milks. He’s the VP of business operations at brave.

[00:01:22] And prior to brave, Luke was the director of ad ops at O eight O and has an extensive background in startups and in publishing. And he’s been working very hard with the brief community on launching exciting partnerships that breathe. So you think you’ll enjoy his But before we hop into today’s episode, we want to highlight our brave pick of the week.

[00:01:41] And every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with brave. And this week we’re choosing Axion and their revolutionary staking platform And users can now use bat to stake. Axion so check that out and they ran a sponsored image with us and our push notification.

[00:01:58] And the impact was that they had [00:02:00] 63 million impressions with the sponsored images and an 18.6% CTR on their push campaigns.

[00:02:06] Luke: look out for that case study

[00:02:08] Donny: and that’ll be live on brave.com very soon. So with no further ado, here is our episode with Luke milks.

[00:02:22] Luke welcome to the brave marketer podcast. We are, are so excited for you. As I was mentioning in the intro, this is a special episode for us. We’re thrilled to have Luke milks. And he’s going to talk a lot about crypto and NFT and all things brave, and it’s a great way to end the season.

[00:02:39] So Luke, doing

[00:02:40] Luke: today doing well. Thanks for having me on Donnie.

[00:02:42] Donny: Yeah, appreciate it. what’s the most exciting thing you’re working on right now?

[00:02:46] Luke: Oh, gosh, I think, we have a couple of things that are pretty exciting right now. We’re all working on kind of this, brave wallet, upgrade.

[00:02:52] That’s going to be available for desktop and mobile. It’ll really on-ramp a lot of people to crypto. And then, we’re working on the advertising side too. We just [00:03:00] introduced a brave, news. Yeah. a week or so ago. And, been exciting to watch that,go out to the masses.

[00:03:05] Donny: great. So you know that this podcast is called the brave marketer because everybody has a story in their careers. Where they took a bit of a risk, and they were brave. do you have brave marketing moment that you can share with the audience?

[00:03:18] Luke: Sure. Yeah. This one’s kinda tough, cause her a few of them, but I think that even just going back, like I started working with brave back in March of 2016 and I was, in advertising, as a director of ad products there and he saw what brave was doing and they were the first to kind of like really try and tackle like privacy from, the route and also allow for business to be business and operate on the web. And no one else was really doing that. And I’ve done a bunch of startups in the path and, seeing them crash and burn.

[00:03:46] And, I always told myself that,to go back to the startup. environment would require having kind of team of people that were as nutty as I am that, we’re all committed and that’s what I saw it brave. So, you know, say like my brain marketing moment was one [00:04:00] launching off joining this team, early,

[00:04:02] And then,the other thing would be around what we did around the token sale, for bat, which is your kind of marketing. with this future could be, back in 2017 and you have a white paper and had a product and Brennan was out there basically, doing every interview he could do and doing all these AMS and lots of things to tell people the vision for this.

[00:04:22] And you’re really selling the vision, the fact that so many people just were rushing to, be a part of that. when we did the token sale was, all that kind of lumped together. they’re both like really high risk things, good gig in advertising to come join this thing.

[00:04:35] That’s, working very much against the grain. And then also like just how new, the token sales the token omics, in the token economy you was at the time in 2017 though. give you two.

[00:04:46] Donny: Yeah, no, that’s totally good. And as you should, you saw, an amazing opportunity early on, you took a risk when there was a very small team.

[00:04:55] And, your ability to work on the bat white paper and really [00:05:00] be at the Genesis of our entire ads product, which is now three products. And back then, it was just an idea of dues to do push notifications. And now we have push notifications and sponsored images on the new tab and brave news ads, which is like our new native ad unit.

[00:05:13] And you coming up with, the ideas from the star and being there all along is really amazing. So now I want to switch gears a little bit. it seems like everybody and their mother literally are talking about NFTs and,maybe we should start with just talking about, And FTS are, if you want to, describe it.

[00:05:33] And I’m part of a couple of different, crypto chains and I have a friend and he’s talking about he’s a musician and can create a piece of music. He could make it an NFT and then make himself the owner. And then, let’s say it gets used by somebody on YouTube. The money made from the video could get rerouted to back to him to pay royalties.

[00:05:57] And then he could sell the piece of music, but [00:06:00] maintain 50% of the publishing rights and get a commission on the resale. So like, that’s just an extreme example of what’s happening with the NFTs, but why don’t we take a step back and want to, in your own words, explain what an NFT is.

[00:06:13] Luke: yeah.

[00:06:14] So like when you’re looking at crypto, most people are familiar with fungible. It’s like Bitcoin or bat or Ethereum where one bed is one bat and then, you can swap a bat with me and, everybody’s happy. And the idea with non fungible tokens is you’re creating a token for that’s representative of something, that is unique and a single issued item.

[00:06:34] So I have a Mona Lisa painting, or I make a run, a modal use of paintings, and they’re represented by these individual tokens on the blockchain. It’s almost like having set of tickets for a movie theater and then having an arcade with interchangeable tokens is non-refundable tokens, in the background.

[00:06:47] so the cool thing around this is, a lot of the focus is a brand around, the art side of it, people talking about, buying JPEG. Christie’s, having, auction house, for these large, NFT, big ticket, NFT items, et cetera. [00:07:00] there’s a lot of other things that you can do just like in the example that you gave, around rights management.

[00:07:04] I think the cool thing about crypto in general is very empowering and it’s putting the power back in the hands of the creators, And with NFTs, you can program it. rights management and they have these different, protocols around. basically, you know, as long as this is sold, I’m going to get a credit back for it, a percentage of it back, and puts the power back into the hands of the artist.

[00:07:24] And it also disintermediate us, the creator economy builds up and people are much closer to their followings than they used to be. It gives the creators that ability to basically. Have more control over their art and to auction it out or use these new models and new distribution models and new ways that haven’t been done before.

[00:07:43] So it’s a more fair representation of things, but it’s also something that’s unique to a user. if I go and buy, that record, it’s my record and I can go sell it again. If I want, I can hold it there, but it’s mine and not something that’s. like on Spotify, it’s going to be, stream and gone.

[00:07:58] This is something that, can be [00:08:00] tied to something in real life. Like it could be tied to a vinyl record that could also be attached to the nit. There’s a lot of uses cases for these things and we’re just scratching the surface of it right now.

[00:08:09] Donny: Yeah. I think the keyword is unique, that the token is unique and it’s just for one person. The first time I saw NFTs was actually for sneakers and it was people that were collecting sneakers, but didn’t want the sneakers shipped to their home because they may have been living in a small apartment and didn’t want, and then a room for a hundred pairs of air Jordans and their apartment.

[00:08:30] And so they could actually own a token, an NFT that represented those sneakers. And it was unique for those sneakers and unique to them. that was my first,

[00:08:42] Luke: the intensity, right? Like proving that what you have is authentic you can verify that on a public blockchain, that’s that’s pretty much as good as it gets as far as like making sure that Jersey that you’re going to buy or those sneakers that you’re going to buy are actually what they are claiming to be, you know, from the seller.

[00:08:56] Right.

[00:08:57] Donny: And so now you see literally [00:09:00] hundreds of thousands of NFTs for sale. In these markets. Can you give an overview of who are the main players in the markets? And why are people spending anywhere from $10 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars. On what looks like to our moms is JPEGs or digital

[00:09:21] Luke: art, Yeah. you, right now, you’ve got a lot of, big marketplace players that were around, early on that have really grown, like the open seas of the world, where, the marketplace where you can go. By these things, a lot of it is around giving artists the ability to earn some interesting money.

[00:09:37] But it’s all been around this crypto audience set is, pretty crypto rich and, you have these collector types where, you know, oh, I could have number 1 55. Crypto punks, right? Like where I could have this one of a kind thing, and people turning those into their avatars on Twitter.

[00:09:52] And so you get this early on. It’s like a lot of this kind of collector mindset around it. and a lot of people that are very much on the tech side of things [00:10:00] that would be collectors and they’re just like, Anything else, you have some people that are in art collection because they love a great piece of art.

[00:10:07] You have some people that are in it because they are buying art that holds value and they could see that to returning greater value over time. So it’s kind of a neat way to take if you’re going to be encrypted for a while. So any way to take that crypto and put it into something, that is, crypto centric that you own and that’s yours and represents you so you can get credit in the community, but also.

[00:10:26] it’s very much branching into new areas. we worked with a couple of different, vendors on this front where, things like access control, like the music example is one thing, but also, you could do time restricted, subscriptions to, publications and things like that.

[00:10:40] Like access control becomes a really interesting use case, especially for us. Browser where, you’ve got people that are going and paying for publications on a monthly cycle. You could say, Hey, here’s a break pass where you get an NFT and it gives you access to X, Y, and Z things. So there’s a lot of interesting use cases from a browser.

[00:10:58] And a lot of this is, the [00:11:00] mainstream folks that are getting into it now or doing it, for the art, because you have a lot of really interesting artists that are coming on board and doing it. Things and any multimedia can be put into an NFT, as long as it’s up to a certain size, you could have video, you can have, just be like Jack on Twitter or just, JPEG of his first tweet going out and signing for millions of dollars.

[00:11:18] So it’s new medium that gives you an opportunity to, have something unique and ties back to the blockchain.

[00:11:25] Donny: Yeah. yeah. It totally makes sense. And let’s talk about the investing side of it, and then let’s talk about the marketing side of it.

[00:11:31] So first the investments. people are obviously buying these NFTs because they think they’re going to go up in value, but there’s also a supply and demand out there where it feels to the person outside looking in that there’s unlimited supply of these NFTs. And so if you have an unlimited supply, it’s not like, you know, Bitcoin with whatever those 21 million, if you have unlimited supply, how can the value.

[00:11:56] Increase. Why would somebody buy it, hold onto it and sell it for

[00:11:59] Luke: [00:12:00] more? this is something that people should keep in mind too, is, if you buy an NFT from Joe Schmo that is just getting into this thing, and you spend a lot of money on it, it might not have been the greatest idea.

[00:12:10] Right? Like it’s just like anything else. If it’s an artist that is known. Um, and is doing something unique or special,just like with any other piece of art that you invest in, you’re hoping that comes back and there’s another variable that’s interesting with the crypto markets, because like when the markets are up, everybody’s on it.

[00:12:27] When the markets are down, it’s either a long game or a really short game, because a lot of times people will buy these things pretty quickly and flip them around or people will hold onto them for a long time. Like we’re seeing now, like there are some crypto kitties from the original mint that happened, a couple of years ago that are, significantly higher in value.

[00:12:44] So it really depends on, who the artist is or what the project is. That’s putting them out. Is there a demand for this NFT is art cool enough that people want it right? And so these aren’t really necessarily new concepts around, and investing in value and things like that. [00:13:00] but, It’s a craze, right?

[00:13:01] You’re going to get everybody jumping in on a craze. And it’s wanting to be cautious around if you’re putting big money into something and hoping for a return,you should want to do it. And think of it as a long-term thing around crypto and Y like being part of something like this from the early stages you know, just like an old baseball card has value, right?

[00:13:18] Like it’s a similar principle. Teased. It’s the cream rises to the top and the stuff that is a higher value over time. you buy that as an NST then. Cool. but I think, the other appealing thing is that there’s a lot of other use cases for these things that are on the horizon or are just starting to come out.

[00:13:34] that, that will be interesting, you know?

[00:13:35] Donny: Yeah. I think of NFTs as the way I think about stocks, right? what are the Warren buffet way? what do I use on a daily basis that I would want to own? Warren buffet may eat McDonald’s and drink Coca-Cola and that’s, what he buys as far as, stocks go where you and I may be really into Tesla.

[00:13:53] And, before we launched brave talk, we were using zoom all the time. And,maybe somebody is [00:14:00] a big Snapchat user or whatever it is, and those are the stocks that they end up buying. And I think about the same thing with NFT. Where like using my sneaker example. If I’m not really into sneakers, I’m not going to buy that NFT.

[00:14:13] but people should buy what they’re really passionate about. And when it comes to artwork, people should buy from, artists that they know. And or if they don’t know the artists like a piece of artwork that they would put up in their house, not just saying, oh, I’m just going to buy this random NFT.

[00:14:30] I don’t like the art. I don’t know anything about it. I just think it’s going to go up in value because that may not work out.

[00:14:36] Luke: Exactly. And there can be other like elements of it too. It’s like my wife and I have a picture frame that has all these different concert ticket stubs that we’ve gone to over the years, and they fade with time.

[00:14:47] But like literally those could all be NFTs. And they can have sentimental value too. and that’s, what’s so neat about this. the variety and application. It’s not even really well-known because these things are still new and [00:15:00] it’s still not the easiest thing to even buy.

[00:15:02] But once you get past some of these next phases where it becomes fast, easy, and cheap to use NFTs, I think you’re going to see them everywhere. And you’re not even going to necessarily know that they’re there. It’s like those,centers that you can just near-field sensors where you can tap your phone against it and it’ll do something, You don’t know what’s underneath that sensor, but you know that if you put your phone there, it’ll take you to a link or whatever, like people are using email and they’re not talking about okay, the email protocol that’s underneath.

[00:15:26] They’re just using the email. I think NFTs are just going to, it solves a lot of problems, especially for marketers too. If you think about it, and you want to generate a promo that has. Thousand amount of these NFTs available. You can have an individual NFT. And then like in our situation where we’re always concerned about privacy, right?

[00:15:43] Like you could serve a private ad that is linked to an NFT for the campaign, and then not have to go through all of the tracking and privacy issues, but know that what you’re getting when somebody uses that in Ft is something that’s unique and authentic because. It’s an NFT and it’s not just, a [00:16:00] JPEG from Google that everybody can go pull down, like it’s verifiable.

[00:16:03] So there’s a lot of applications for this stuff that, are going to be blowing up beyond this whole art craze thing. And that’s where I’m most excited around this, as you know, and this has been done in blockchain gaming too. A couple of big blockchain gaming companies. And, they’re already using NFTs for things like skins and games.

[00:16:21] So if you want to go buy a blacksmith’s shop in this game, you can buy an NFT of the land deed and actually own a piece of the game, which is, or hold a representative piece of the game. it’s interesting because, in gaming, Somebody goes and buys a whole call of duty set. Then the next game comes out.

[00:16:38] Then they have all that value that sunk in the last version of the game that they have to, spend again with a new thing. But these teas, you can actually have something that can go from game to game. So there’s a lot of like really interesting applications out there for entities. And right now it’s in this early stage where people are proving that these things are of interest, and you see all this activity like right now today, if I look [00:17:00] All of the transactions on the Ethereum network and, open, see is accounting for something like 20% of all of the network transactions that are happening right now, which is huge.

[00:17:08] When you think about how big, the Ethereum is. right now it’s in this early stages. Once these things become fast and easy, which I think if you look at what Tezos and some of these other blockchains are doing even polygon on Ethereum,there’s this stuff, isn’t stuff from, for years out, this is stuff that’s happening now, and it’s a competition.

[00:17:26] On top of, and around Ethereum to see you, which one of these, takes, hold and goes forward. But yeah, it’s an exciting time for NFTs right now, for sure.

[00:17:34] Donny: Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen any good, marketing use cases of it?

[00:17:38] Luke: Taco bell did a campaign where, I think you could get an NFC for drive-thru. if you brought in the promo code or something like that,

[00:17:44] I think that, there are going to be a lot of interesting cases with,ticketing and live events. I went to conferences. there’s a it’s I think it’s a POA P. it’s like a popup token and you can actually get proof of attendance protocol. So you can go to an event, you [00:18:00] prove that you were at the event and then there was like a record of you being at the event, right?

[00:18:03] so there’s all sorts of interesting, marketing hooks that are available now, but also some interesting stuff coming on the horizon too. Yes,

[00:18:10] Donny: that’s so interesting because, I used to work closely with Jeremy Epstein and, never stop marketing and we. Basically, I think it was two plus years ago, he had this idea of a crypto Salesforce type CRM.

[00:18:24] And that was a huge part of it that you’d go to conferences. Everybody would have a unique token that token would automatically get permission to put that person’s information into the database, which was the CRM. and it’s great to see that actually companies are doing that two plus

[00:18:38] Luke: years.

[00:18:39] It’s awesome. if you look at how many problems there are with, ticketing and things like that, where people are scalping stuff it sounds a lot like 2017 all over again, but that’s just because it’s the next level of that.

[00:18:51] It’s okay. Now, we’ve got this base layer with Ethereum and with these other blockchains where, we were talking about that, maybe being something in [00:19:00] 2017, now it’s here and Like I think the best model marketing, hook I’ve seen with entities was a visa buying the NFT.

[00:19:07] I think it was three Bitcoin worth of Ethereum that they spent on it. And I think they got so much attention from that for buying this NFT that I would put that on the most interesting one I’ve seen so far, but, but yeah,it’s a cool time.

[00:19:18] And I think, it’s just a matter of, more and more adoption, but that’s what you’re seeing now. You’re see. PayPal is taking crypto, like Venmo, Twitter has been doing NFT drops. That’s another interesting one. It was a, I don’t even know if many people even realize that they did this.

[00:19:32] Like one morning, they basically did a limited issue of NFTs and put them out there. So if you were on crypto Twitter, you probably saw it, but otherwise you probably didn’t where they was giving away, NFTs. and it’s going to be really interesting to see what marketers do with them, over time, because, it’s a pretty versatile, token type and there’s things you can do with it.

[00:19:49] And, we worked with this partner called ether cards where they made it. So you could have like programmable traits into,NFTs. So they could program their NFT so that it could include a bat bonus for every fifth and [00:20:00] FTE that you use or, have these different things.

[00:20:02] So it’s a multi-purpose token. So I can go use this token to get into a concert and then every. Concert ticket would have a backstage pass that would be loaded on it. So there’s pretty cool things that you can program into these tokens that, more and more developers and engineers are going to be putting out in the market soon.

[00:20:20] And I’m interested to see how agencies and, and brands directly,go forward with some of these things too, because some of the stuff’s been pretty creative, but I think it’ll even get more and more creative as we go. Yeah,

[00:20:30] Donny: you it’s a nice segue to my next question, which was how is brave getting involved in the NFT market?

[00:20:35] Luke: Yeah, like I said earlier, we did some strategic partnerships with the gaming side of things, mainly because they were doing gamings and eat, grab bag on the crypto side because yeah. In game tokens, which, fungible tokens that are in the game that people are using like credits.

[00:20:49] And then you’ve got, land deeds and things like that with entities that are already in use. And then they also were using,liquidity pooling in defy. So you have defy NFTs and, traditional tokens, all working together. we [00:21:00] played around with that for awhile.

[00:21:01] we’ve also been looking into using it for access control for being able to do, subscription. Just the content paywalls, things like that. what we’re really looking forward to with this new wallet that we’re introducing, pretty soon on desktop and mobile we’ll have native and if T support and the ability to transfer NFTs, from wallet to wallet.

[00:21:18] and so having that in the browser is super interesting because. You could do things like create, retention rewards for people that are staying with the browser version. So every time we have a browser version, we could mint an NFT for that version. And then if people are interested in collecting that kind of thing, they could collect it through.

[00:21:34] So you can have all these like community rating systems where people are getting achievement unlocks, and they’re actually tokens. They can go sell on a secondary market if they want. So is this a gamification element of it? It’s like super interesting for a browser because what we were dealing with the entire internet here.

[00:21:50] other tech companies in, in products are, pretty narrowly focused, but with brave, it’s oh, everyone’s online most of the time. And whether I’m focusing on one thing over here, [00:22:00] I might see something over there or, from the browser, like we’ve been looking at this, we have over a million content creators that are verified with brave, and most of them, are not aware or maybe they’re just learning about NFTs.

[00:22:12] We have an opportunity to. Tap into that creator base and show them ways that they can use NFTs to bring value to their business. And then also go after content creators that are making NFTs and have this really great, platform through brave ads to add, to discovery and let people know about their art or let these marketplaces advertise certain drops that they’re doing, et cetera.

[00:22:35] So you kind of have a neat option to access people at different times that other companies might not necessarily. That advantage with,we’re thinking about this, on the art side, we’re thinking about this,also very much on like how can we make a really tightly integrated experience with these tokens where you could use them to access a bunch of publishers or you could use them to access to, live events in real life, things like that.

[00:22:57] Donny: That’s great. so why don’t we switch gears for a [00:23:00] minute and talk a little bit about you and the brave back community. and we know that’s the driving factor in making bravest success. So can you talk about

[00:23:08] Luke: the community work that you do? Yeah. Yeah, sure. and it was interesting.

[00:23:12] I fell into it, when we were doing a token sale because these token projects, the community is such a big element of it because they helped to rally one in supporting the project and then two and, helping to let people know about that project. And what you have is people.

[00:23:26] We’re we’ll buy these tokens and,they are buying a vision and they’re buying something they can use in the platform and what we’ve done. Braves open source, right? Like we have a really great developer community that contributes and engineers that contribute through GitHub. and that ethos goes through to our support and to just how we interface with the public.

[00:23:46] like myself and Brendan, Donny, you, other people are out there. And like whether it’s LinkedIn or Twitter or Reddit or other social media channels, answering questions from people like very engaged with the audience and what we’re doing. And this is what [00:24:00] Brendan’s really big about.

[00:24:00] It is. You’ve got to really listen to those lead users that are using the product early. And what you want to do is build up a community of people that are really inspired by the mission and want to be a part of it. And they very much are a part of it. when we’re doing on the privacy side, tends to, especially early on break, a lot of the web.

[00:24:19] And you have people that are reporting sites that are broken. You have people that are helping. create artwork to, get this into schools, get this into, local communities that you wouldn’t typically access to. It’s really kind of like a movement. You have to have a really strong community and that community is.

[00:24:37] They’re going to let you know when stuff isn’t working and if they don’t like something and you hear enough volume around that, and you’re like, okay, like it can help to drive things in a different direction. And when you’re a startup, like brave is it’s really important. like right now, especially because at the same time that privacy is hitting the zone.

[00:24:54] You also have, big tech has been really innovating on making like [00:25:00] contactless things and making convenience really at the forefront. So even if you can prove something out on privacy, it’s not about competing on privacy. It’s about competing on convenience. Privacy and doing that while you’ve got all these big tech companies that are also like, trying to figure out how to get her into this privacy, you know?

[00:25:17] Okay. Google is trying to, take a stance on privacy and tell you how they care about privacy, et cetera. It’s a very kind of strange climate right now, but having a community there, they rally things. They get things to friends and family. They gave you friends and families feedback. it’s a really important thing here.

[00:25:33] And like my, three quarters of my team. At brave. And, our were people that came in through the community and they were just volunteering to help with, various things and ended up working here. Yeah. that we take it like a good example, Tony, you Carlos, a bunch of these bunch of folks, right?

[00:25:50] like w it’s just because when you’re doing something that’s new and impactful and is risky. but the fact of the matter is it’s a really hard problem to tackle, or we’re doing something where incentives [00:26:00] are all aligned in the opposite direction.

[00:26:01] And we’re trying to say, Hey, you don’t need to do all of that. You can have. And you can have business and you can have, user first kind of principles all working together. And ultimately these are very close relationships that a user has with a brand even down to McDonald’s right.

[00:26:17] Like users are trusting that McDonald’s is going to not kill them when they put it in their body. whether that’s a slow burner nearby. It is what it is, right? but there’s this really high level of trust between people and brands and people and platforms. And, we’re trying to get everyone else out and then make it so that you can restore those first party kind of relationships in a way that can scale.

[00:26:37] And it’s exciting, but the community. We would be nothing without a community. I think, if you look at the security team on Chrome, on Google, Chrome is over a hundred people. And our entire company is a hundred and I don’t know, a little over a hundred people now and we’re doing, browser.

[00:26:55] Yeah. Token platform ads, all these other business lines that are emerging, that [00:27:00] doesn’t happen without a strong community. And, without listening to that community, like that’s the thing I really liked about coming to brave. Cause I came from, the advertising side of things, where it was very, black box and, don’t report stuff unless it’s really bad, things like that.

[00:27:13] And the thing I noticed coming to brave. People were excited to hear that things were broken because they want to fix them. And you’re going, and you could actually watch the whole process happen in front of you. And so whether that’s with messaging or whether that’s with marketing or with code in the browser, having that community around what you’re doing is so important because when it starts off, it’s like, We’re doing stuff.

[00:27:34] That’s poking the bear in a lot of ways too. And so the company reacts when challenged and after a while community, you just start to do that. And that’s really cool to see because you’re like, oh, Hey, like the message is resonating. It’s sticking. People are actually defending what we’re doing.

[00:27:48] That’s really awesome. and then, the kind of proof is in the pudding everywhere else. So I don’t know if you build something strong. And you have a really good community around it. It can really amplify that and accelerate growth in all of that. it’s a mission and [00:28:00] everybody touches the web and we want better privacy for everybody.

[00:28:02] That’s right.

[00:28:02] Donny: so big picture. What do you think is the biggest threat or most pressing challenge that’s facing the marketing and advertising industry?

[00:28:11] Luke: I think that it’s privacy is still big in there and antitrust, I think, but,what is it, what does privacy gonna look like?

[00:28:19] There’s a really clear definition of what user data is and privacy in there. It’s about where are they actually going to enforce a law here? you got big tech. That’s saying we’re private. Even if some of the things they’re doing are very much the opposite of that. what happens to privacy is important, whether that gets whitewashed, which is a real threat, or whether that,we’re able to be a standard bearer and help drive that in a better direction.

[00:28:43] I think the other thing,has always been top of mind has been,regulatory conditions around crypto and it’s gotten a lot more friendly, since, 2017 days where everyone was just. Sitting aside and waiting to see, oh, the U S regulators say this, and Singapore says that in Hong Kong says this.[00:29:00]

[00:29:00] Now it’s, you’ve actually got banks transacting in crypto is a little bit less scary of a thing. But even now, like with this, infrastructure pack bill that went in, there was a crypto clause in there, and these are written by people who were, that they’re not that savvy into crypto because a smart contract doesn’t know how to generate a 10 99.

[00:29:15] Like it’s still weird where the rubber meets the road on that side of things. If you look at what’s happening, even in like the centralized finance there, people or certain projects are starting to do, lobbying in Washington, DC.

[00:29:28] So I would say the politics of all of this are probably the biggest threat I see right now. I think there’s enough of a powerful message and enough proof points around Hey, I can be my own bank. look at what happened with GME, right?

[00:29:39] and, with GameStop like an AMC and all this stuff, there’s just a movement around empowering, pulling together, As a new investment class, right? that’s super exciting. I think those, the populous statements and proof points are there with crypto.

[00:29:52] I think that the regulators are still kind of,some are savvier than others. but I think between the politicians and the regulators, like how [00:30:00] that fits is probably a risk I would say. and then, you know what banks do, but banks seem to be getting on board. The idea of stable coins.

[00:30:06] And, know, you look at like El Salvador and other areas where, they’re big experiments or how crypto can plug into a, more traditional system. That’s great.

[00:30:13] Donny: And now how can people get in touch

[00:30:14] Luke: with you?

[00:30:15] uh, I’m Luke milks at Twitter. and, yeah, that’s probably the easiest way to get ahold of me these days. Awesome. thanks so much

[00:30:20] Donny: for coming on. Yeah,

[00:30:22] Luke: thanks for having me on Donny.

[00:30:23] Donny: Well, thanks for listening to our last episode of season two with Luke milks. And I thought that was a really great discussion about NFTs, which is a hot subject right now.

[00:30:33] And we talked about how NFTs are unique for every user and how both crypto brands and mainstream brands are using NFTs in their marketing strategies and the examples with taco bell and visa with $150,000 crypto punks by there’s just so many amazing. Bulls NFTs. And we just scratched the surface. This is the tip of the iceberg, as far as what is going to happen in the NFT space.

[00:30:58] And that was a [00:31:00] great time to really learn about it. And hopefully you enjoyed this episode as a little bit of a primer. If you’re not a hundred percent into, NFTs again, this wraps up our final episode of the podcast for. season two, before we launch season three and we’ve really had a blast.

[00:31:14] Some of the key episodes was we kicked off the season with Disney plus, and we talked about their huge growth. Then we had Chad Stolar from U M and then we talked about B2B marketing strategies with Natalie Mendez. We add an insider’s look at brave rich Rosenzweig. We talked to Bain capital and Darren Herman over there about the investments that they’re doing.

[00:31:35] Dylan Boyd from RGA talked about the work that they’re doing there. And then. That was the reason episode was with Proctor and gamble with P and G. So we’ve had some major, major brands, Disney, PNG, bane. It’s been a really, really solid season. So go back and listen to some of those episodes. We will be back in season three on October 18th, and we’re going to have guests from challenger brands, like three wishes, cereal, which I eat every single morning, each [00:32:00] horo, which is one of the biggest exchanges out there.

[00:32:02] Crunch base. If you’re into investments or startups, and we’d love to get your feedback. Minutes to submit some feedback in the survey below in the show notes, we would love to make seasons three even better than season one and two, even two minutes of your time. Clicking on the show notes, filling out a survey, read every single survey.

[00:32:21] really helpful constructive criticism is great and compliments. We love those too. And on a final note, if you have a brand, a product or service that you’d like to get in front of Braves, 34 million users, please email us ad sales@brave.com and let us know your podcast listener to unlock one of two.

[00:32:38] If your budget is under $10,000 a month, we’ll bump you up to the top of our self-serve waiting list. If your budget is over $10,000 a month, to qualify you for our 25% podcast listener discount. Again, that’s ad sales@brave.com and lastly, musical credits for all of our podcasts goes to hybrid brother Arielle Ginsburg he’s [00:33:00] recording some really, really great music out of Austin, Texas.

[00:33:03] So until our next season three, October 18th, or your September send the kids off to school and we will see you soon. Thanks.