[00:00:00] Donny: Brands are navigating the new Web Three world, and with it comes an opportunity for experimentation, innovation, and engaging consumers in entirely new ways. But where do you start and when? In this new season of the Brave Marketer Podcast, we’re talking Web three marketing and how to market in the Metaverse.

[00:00:19] You hear from marketers, from top brands and agencies who will help us leverage this exciting moment in time and take our brave marketing moments to the next. Hosted by Brave Software and me, Donnie Devork. You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Marketer Podcast, and this one features John Hook.

[00:00:38] John is the C M O at Player Ember, and they’re a creator monetization platform to help games studios, brands, web three artists and N F T Collections monetize their product and services. Previously he was c e o at boom bit group Cro o at Houma Games, and the co-founder of Odyssey. John is also an active angel investor in the gaming sector with [00:01:00] investments covering mobile games, studios, web three games and platforms and gaming tech.

[00:01:04] I think you’re really gonna like this episode because we discussed making blockchain invisible to attract more gamers and removing the blockchain infrastructure as a barrier. That’s something that comes up a lot that users don’t need to know that this game or this product is running on the blockchain.

[00:01:19] We talked about creating content specific for specific social media channels and accommodating their algorithms. Advertising on Twitter versus marketing on tech, TikTok, and then gaming in the metaverse, how they experie. Is changing for the players. But before we hop into today’s episode, we wanna highlight our rave pick of the week.

[00:01:35] Every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign, and this week we are choosing Capital One shopping. They ran a push notification program designed to drive downloads of their shopping extension. The campaign was strategically time to take advantage of the holiday shopping surge, and we utilize Brave’s device level anonymous ad matching te.

[00:01:54] The campaign generated a click-through rate of 9% with very efficient conversions. And with [00:02:00] no further ado, here’s this week’s episode of The Brave Marketer.

[00:02:03] John, welcome to the Brave Marketer Podcast. How you doing today?

[00:02:11] Jon: I’m good. Donnie. Great to be here. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah,

[00:02:14] Donny: we’re excited to have you on. For those who don’t know play Ember, can you just give us a general overview of the.

[00:02:20] Jon: Yeah, sure. So, Ember, we still are and started off life as a mobile games company, making mass casual games very successful, a hundred million downloads, 5 million d a u, amazing team and developers.

[00:02:32] And then about a year ago now, Hugo, co-founder and our gaming genius. And I just started scouting around web three, trying to find sort of our home and more importantly, what we thought the problem was specifically for our players and game. and that’s where we sort of built our M v MVP for our web three sort of infrastructure division and hit the fundraising trail.

[00:02:55] Got some pretty brutal feedback, but ended up closing the round. And now our Web three infrastructure [00:03:00] division is a, web three monetization platform for creators, mobile game studios and brands. Got

[00:03:06] Donny: it. That sounds amazing and amazing. On the 5 million d a u, how did you acquire those, users?

[00:03:11] Jon: Well Hugo is one of the best free-to-play developers out there. He’s published hit games with Voodoo Lion Studios, quali, boom, bitt, and he’s just a genius. He just really understands players and particularly mass casual games that really are more about sort of, Pop culture and yeah, has the ability to design just amazing catchy mechanics that then dialed in with sort of really cool themes that might be trending on Netflix or TikTok.

[00:03:36] And then, you know, the team alongside that, are really solid when it comes to like monetizing those players. So yeah, harnessing all that knowledge in our you chat web three chapter.

[00:03:45] Donny: What’s the most exciting thing you’re working on right now, John?

[00:03:47] Jon: So I think at the moment it’s bringing our vision for Web 2.5 to life.

[00:03:51] So we have three pillars. We have the web three infrastructure piece, the monetization layer, the sdk, the smart contracts, et cetera. [00:04:00] We have the application layer, so our mobile games and just making more amazing games for our players. And then the third pillar is this mixture of sort of social community and like a creator commerce level.

[00:04:10] So really trying to bring them all together within a single mobile game is super exciting and challenging.

[00:04:15] Donny: What makes it challenging? Like why is it difficult?

[00:04:18] Jon: Well, they’re these folks called Apple and Google. you might heard of them. never heard that have some, I’m not harsh on them.

[00:04:23] I’m super supportive of them because I, think they have a really key role in this ecosystem, but I never thought Apple for one second. As a public company worth billions of dollars, they’re just gonna say, Hey guys. Just go nuts, just go crazy on all this N F T web three stuff. Just knock yourselves out right in the face of obviously some noises the S E C are making, et cetera.

[00:04:40] so, I think that’s a challenge. And the knock on effect of that is then you’re having to be a little bit hacky about this sort of mobile web two experience and then this sort of web three blockchain on chain world that at the moment, Bit buggy in terms of user experience. So that’s definitely a challenge.

[00:04:56] But there are workarounds and you know, the more games we submit to the app store, [00:05:00] the more direct relationship we’re getting with them now to understand exactly, where the gray areas are and aren’t, I think still a challenge, which is why we launched this is players right. Because in this little crypto Twitter bubble that I’m definitely part of where we’ve got all these buzzwords and we all know what we’re talking about and we think we’re really clever cuz we can bridge change and set up all these wallets, most of our players who just love playing games know nothing about blockchain or tokens or wallets.

[00:05:23] So I think that’s definitely a challenge, but for us, a huge opportunity to really, I kinda use the phrase, make blockchain invisible, right? Mm-hmm. , how can we basically enable them to play the same game they love playing, have an extra motivation to do so. But that’s about it. They don’t really know about anything else.

[00:05:39] Not that we are hiding it from them or, trying to ju them in any way. I just wanna make that clear. it’s just infrastructure. It’s just technology. Why do they need to worry about that? Just like in mobile games? Why do they need to understand like the Unity game engine to play a game? Yep, totally.

[00:05:51] Donny: So this podcast is all about marketers coming on and explaining us their brave marketing moment, a time in their career where they took a risk and it [00:06:00] really paid off for them. So what’s your brave marketing moment?

[00:06:02] Jon: For me was kind of quitting my job. So at the time, was working at a very stilled, successful media agency running their mobile division.

[00:06:10] And a friend of mine were at Mobile Congress and the early days of mobile when there were just sort of ring crazy frog ring tones and mobile websites and all of our. You know, clients were talking about, you know, mobile advertising, where do advertising, you know, after a few sort of sangrias, we were like, Hey, maybe we should do this.

[00:06:26] Maybe we should set up a mobile ad network. how can that be with the naivety and of youth? So literally the next day wrote a business plan at like my mom’s kitchen table and. Quit our jobs and started pitching all the brands we knew about this amazing mobile ad network that we were building. That’s amazing.

[00:06:43] Without that amazing journey, both just literally learning just by building and also just the privilege of doing it with still a great friend of mine who I respect greatly would not be doing play today. Yeah, and what was that net ad

[00:06:56] Donny: network?

[00:06:57] Jon: It’s called Odyssey Mobile. It was, uh, acquired [00:07:00] by, FundWare who make enterprise mobile applications in the US for like US airports and Kaiser Permanente.

[00:07:06] So yeah, just really grateful to the, the team we had at the time and all the advertisers and agencies that came on that journey with us. That’s amazing. How

[00:07:13] Donny: long did you do that for?

[00:07:15] I

[00:07:15] Jon: did that for a total about four. Great. So kind of starting it and then the, and then the exit. But yeah, with, without that, just that whole experience.

[00:07:24] And there were some amazing folks at, at Funware that never had a board meeting. , like, never, never had to do that kind of stuff or, you know, go pitch to VCs. So yeah, some amazing kind of mentors at at Funware that had built. Enterprise software companies that taught us a whole bunch about running a business and proper tech marketing and how to market infrastructure.

[00:07:45] It was, yeah, a really enjoyable experience.

[00:07:48] Donny: That’s amazing.

[00:07:49] Jon: So

[00:07:49] Donny: let’s talk about like, you know, mental health. It’s a big deal in gaming. It’s a big thing in the US and the world right now. And especially everyone being under lockdown and covid, you know, why do you think [00:08:00] mental health is so important?

[00:08:01] Jon: I mean, I think it’s the most important thing. I don’t think you can, you know, function as a, you know, as, as a person without your, your sanity. And like you said, in gaming, just, you know, I had a friend reach out a few weeks ago that was just totally burnt out because they’re just in this sort of games publishing just machine where there is just so much pressure to find that next hit.

[00:08:22] And he. Totally burnt out, and it’s something I’ve always been very dulled into personally and also for the teams that I’ve built, which is you can only be successful if you are, you know, really motivated and right in yourself. So, you know, people have lots of different words for mental health, whether it’s mindfulness, whether it’s like fitness.

[00:08:42] But yeah, for me it’s a big part of how I find that that balance, you just need some time. Just to switch off from everything you are doing, whether it’s, you know, building a company, working, you know, family life. And I, you know, I religiously stick to that and do my best just to make sure that, you know, all [00:09:00] of my colleagues and just friendship group, but mentally they’re doing okay.

[00:09:03] And I, I honestly think, you know, web three is another level. Like there’s gaming and there’s web three where there’s just this incessant demand every day to be online, be available. on every single platform you can think of. Discord, telegram, you name it. So I think the pressures on you mentally in Web three are even bigger than in, in, in gaming.

[00:09:22] So yeah, me mental health is, you know, extremely important to me. Yeah.

[00:09:27] Donny: Back into the marketing area, how are you thinking about marketing via web three channels? How do you guys promote your company and the games from a marketing perspective and then, you know, in the web through world as. Well, maybe the

[00:09:38] Jon: contrarians, we think about it a little differently because most of our, well, all of our audience are in the app stores and they’re very web two versus web three.

[00:09:46] Certainly the first wave of gaming has been built on this on discord with this whole sort of whitelist mint. Meta and yeah, just trying to focus all your C P A marketing in into Discord, you know, with really very little metrics [00:10:00] beyond, you know, how many NFTs did you sell? There’s no, there’s not this beautiful sort of like funnel and metrics and analytics that you get in web two that.

[00:10:08] Really, we’ve always run our web two gaming up. So for us, that’s a real challenge when it comes to what we are doing. So we are still, it’s business as usual in terms of game distribution for our, our mobile games. That hasn’t really changed. There’s some fluctuation in terms of like the performance of ad networks.

[00:10:23] When it comes to this concept of community and where do we build it? In web three, you know, we are investing heavily actually in TikTok because that’s always indexed very well with our audience. So we are playing around there with the concept of actually, you know, outside of followers and you can argue followers.

[00:10:41] Are a proxy for a community, but we are actually playing around with, for our audience, trying to build this, this following on, on there as well as Twitter. And then no doubt with sort of the web three business side, when you start thinking about, you know, IDOs obviously nowhere, nowhere soon given the, the current markets.

[00:10:58] But I don’t think you can get away with doing [00:11:00] an IDO and having investors. An interest in your, your token without having, you know, an active discord community. But at the moment it’s a very web two focus on sort of, you know, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter as well.

[00:11:11] Donny: Got it. How’s advertising on Twitter changed at all?

[00:11:15] Has it? I think

[00:11:16] Jon: our, our, our focus at the moment, so the, the, again, there’s the sort of classic web two advertising when I think about advertising. For Web three, I don’t think it’s changed that much. I just think it’s the classic influencer model that you’ve always had on Instagram. You know, when you look at a lot of these sort of like web three creator projects and gaming projects, there’s just an army of sort of web three genuine influencers.

[00:11:39] Like there’s like the affiliate, let’s call them chillers that then form part of this. Yeah, like Web three marketing machine on Twitter. I don’t think Twitter’s unique in. You know, as there’s been so much competition for the space, there’s sort of CPAs in that classic discord model. I mean, we don’t do it, but talking to friends of mine, I think early on it was pretty low.

[00:11:58] But now those [00:12:00] kind of CPAs are no difference to the sort of cost per installs you see for mobile games. So yeah, I think really the same on any channel now marketing, it’s always kind of content is. Is really important and particularly short form content, given how quickly people roll through feeds and, you know, suspect that this is the route that TikTok are going now as well.

[00:12:19] Mm-hmm. actually maybe the other way from really short form content to actually more like, you know, minute long content that we’re experimenting with. So yeah, it’s definitely a challenge trying to dial into each unique platform and their algorithms and the type of content they’re looking for to make sure that, you know, you are feeding the machine and getting the, you know, the engagement that you want.

[00:12:38] Absolutely.

[00:12:39] Donny: So there have been a lot of meaningful partnerships and activations that have happened in the Metaverse environment so far. What have you seen, what excites you, what, what intrigues you as far as those partnerships and what people are doing? What brands are doing in the metaverse?

[00:12:51] Jon: Sure. So when, when I think about the metaverse, I think, you know, for me it’s been around a long time.

[00:12:55] It’s, it’s called roblox. It’s just a beautiful world where [00:13:00] you’ve got a huge community just creating together. You’ve got a community currency and you’ve got loads of brands there, like live streaming concerts. It’s just a world of entertainment. So for me, it’s, you know, the metaverse is not a, not a new concept.

[00:13:14] If you look at, like multiplayer games, people have. Playing in their own metaverse, like connecting online in forums, playing with friends for, you know, a long, long time. I think the sandbox of, obviously with Anna Moka been pioneers of, of that along with Sebastian, you know, sort of an insane number of land parcels.

[00:13:31] You’ve got huge brands there. You know, made millions, billions of dollars. But they’re very early stages of the life cycle of what this Web three Metaverse could be. And then I think, you know, the problem is then you have some people giving the metaverse a bad name. And at times, I, I kind of feel it’s more of a vehicle or has been to raise VC funds, which is like, we’re doing a game, there’s a metaverse.

[00:13:52] We’ve got a token and, and we wanna raise loads of money. So I’m, I’m really not a fan of those, those kinds. But I think really with my gaming [00:14:00] brain on, I think it’s more, yeah, the concept of just sort of like multiplayer U G C I think where and how you play that is really down to the, the players, right?

[00:14:10] And the player choice, rather than defining that the metaverse is this thing that, you know, you have to log in with your wallet and it’s on a PC or a browser. Got

[00:14:18] Donny: it. Got it. What do you think are the biggest opportunities for crypto marketers right now?

[00:14:23] Jon: The biggest opportunities are, you know, kind of to reinvent the wheel a little bit because I think the narrative around crypto is, has not been the best of late due to a lot of mainstream news.

[00:14:33] So I think the opportunity is to really talk to your audience about really what they care about and the value that your product or service can bring to them. Right. So just really the basics that marketing has always been. It’s just we got a little bit distracted with maybe some of the. You know, the hype and we forgot about, you know, what’s I most important?

[00:14:54] And for us as a games company, the most important thing is it’s our players. So I think it’s just [00:15:00] continuing to communicate with them what, what they love, which is games, and show them the additional value that blockchain technology can unlock from them playing games. And then I think the other, the opportunity just with any kind of new cycle that comes along is, is trying to find new, exciting marketing channels to better connect with your players.

[00:15:20] Donny: And what are your strategies to increase mainstream adoption of your products?

[00:15:25] Jon: We have a distribution model in web two that works eg. A centralized point for players to find, discover, and download amazing games, and then a whole. You know, AD network, C P I L T V models to work around that.

[00:15:41] I think the exciting challenge is then really what we’re doing, which is layering on that web three element within a mobile game, and we’re starting to build out these new L T V models and the added value we can get from monetization to see how that then could unlock further. For, you know, the discovery and [00:16:00] playability of our games.

[00:16:01] So I think the big opportunity for us is, of course, always very open to new partners and ways we can distribute our games. But I think for our players, what we’re sort of obsessing over is just new experiences in the game that just augment the game they’re already playing without just shoving more ads in there.

[00:16:18] Provide something meaningful for them that by default unlock just really cool partnerships with brands and creators just for sort of experiences in games. So that’s really, how we’re thinking.

[00:16:29] Donny: Got it. And can you nominate another brave marketer to be on the show?

[00:16:32] Jon: Uh, a hundred percent. I, I, I’d love to, nominate another sort of Web three Crypto Pioneer.

[00:16:38] I’d love to nominate Quinn Campbell sort of VP of Growth at Sky Mavis Axi

[00:16:43] Donny: Infinity. Oh, that’d be great. That’d be, John, it’s great having you on the show. How can your users get in touch with you?

[00:16:49] Jon: Pretty active on, on Twitter at John Hook, no, H j o N Hook. You can hit me up on Telegram, meta Hook, or you can just, head over to play.com and check out what we’re [00:17:00] doing.

[00:17:00] Thanks Donnie. Thanks for having us along. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks

[00:17:03] Donny: for coming on the show. It was great. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of The Brave Marketer Podcast. Four quick things before you go. Number one, if you like what you’ve heard, it’d be really awesome if you’d rate us or write us a review on your podcast player.

[00:17:19] And if you didn’t like what you’ve heard, then don’t worry about it . Number two. If you would like to advertise to Brave’s 60 million users and have a budget of $10,000 or more, simply email us. Add sales@brave.com. That’s ad, S A L E s brave.com. And let us know you’re our podcast listener for a 25% discount.

[00:17:41] Number three musical credits. Go to my brother Ari Devork. And finally number four, go use brave@brave.com and we will see you next time on The Brave Marketer.