[00:00:00] Intro: Marketers everywhere are getting creative. They’re being asked to do more with less, and they are rising to the challenge. In this new season of the Brave Marketer Podcast, we are exploring advertising in a brave new world, the challenge and the opportunity of changing consumer preferences within a volatile economy.

[00:00:23] Posted by brave software, the makers of the privacy respecting browser with a built-in ads. Form that rewards users for their attention. With the basic attention token, you’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Marketer Podcast, and this one features Robert Lund, who’s the co-founder and chief creative officer at Studio T b D.

[00:00:45] With a background in advertising, branding, creative development and design strategy, Robert has been leading creative endeavors and departments at some of the most prominent agencies in the creative industry in both Europe and in the United [00:01:00] States. You’re gonna love this episode because we discussed navigating advertising regulations while marketing a cannabis company.

[00:01:08] We also talked about how advertising differs in Sweden, which is where Robert has spent most of his career and found out what works there that just won’t work in the US, along with ways that cannabis and web three can come together and already. But before we hop into today’s episode, we wanna highlight our brave pick of the week.

[00:01:28] So every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with Brave, and this week it’s Nord Pass. They’re leveraging our privacy respecting opt-in, push notifications to drive highly qualified people to their Nord Pass. Business product page. Now, this is a secure entry point solution managing passwords for businesses in a trusted environment.

[00:01:51] Nord Pass is finding their audience with Brave’s cookie list interest matching technology and driving Clickthrough rates over 6% for [00:02:00] their unique audience. And now for this week’s episode of The Brave Marketer.

[00:02:05] Donny: Robert, welcome to the Brave Marketer Podcast. How are you doing today?

[00:02:10] Robert: Thank you so much. I’m doing pretty well.

[00:02:12] Donny: How about yourself? Good, thanks. So for those who don’t know, studio T b D, can you just give us a general overview? Absolutely. So Studio T b D is we call ourselves a creative collective and we basically design cannabis experience and we make web three initiatives. So we have one foot in cannabis in hand, and one foot in what’s called web.

[00:02:35] Got it. so how do you combine cannabis and web three? Well, that’s the million dollar question. The way that we have done it is that we have started with. One very, very simplistic N F T initiative, which is our membership, N F T. So if you’re a holder of our membership, N F T, you get 50% off all our products in our own stores [00:03:00] forever.

[00:03:00] that is basically what we promise, and we’ve already started as we are in the market and you can buy our products online. We have already started delivering on that promise, and then we have obviously a big elaborate plan of what we want to turn that membership NFT into, but we’re not talking about it.

[00:03:17] And the reason. For that is as many people can figure out for themselves, is that in the world of Web three there is a ton of promises and not much happening. So when we basically were in r and d and early production of our products, cuz when you make physical products, you have a lot of time on your hands before they hit the market cuz it takes.

[00:03:39] A ton of time to develop it, to make sure everything is correct, et cetera, et cetera. So during that time, me and my partner basically dove headfirst into all things crypto because. My background’s obviously a creative, whereas his background is from the hedge fund world. He used to be a hedge fund trader, so he was really deep into crypto, you know, during sort of unis [00:04:00] swap, sushi swap kind of era.

[00:04:02] And we were talking about it like nonstop. When we were waiting for our products to finish basically. And we realized that if you have a startup in 2021 as that were, you should probably be into crypto or web three. One way or another. It was a little bit to us, like if we had a startup, I don’t know, let’s say 1997 or 95, you should probably be on the internet as well, if you had a startup back in the.

[00:04:31] Mid eighties, you should probably have a take on computerization in some sense. So we sort of view that the same way and we’re like, we can’t just start this company and launch our products without understanding who we are in terms of Web three. So when we were developing our cannabis products, we basically started developing our Web three plan as well and decided that we have to be web three native from the get.

[00:04:57] Got it. So you have the NFTs and [00:05:00] you said you have cannabis stores. Where are the stores located?

[00:05:03] Robert: So that’s, slightly complicated because of regulations. So we have two different types of cannabis products. So we have the classical type, which is cannabis infused beverages that are in California. So they’re inside the closed regulation loop of the state of California, not allowed to leave state across the state line.

[00:05:22] They have to be. You know, every part in the chain from the agriculture part of it to the actual retailer has to be a licensed entity. So, That’s its own sort of thing. And then we have hemp to ride edibles as well, and we’re making more hemp to ride products as well right now that are federally legal.

[00:05:44] So those products can be sold online and in basically any convenience stores. So we are in around I hundred, 1,020 stores right now in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, and one of the Carolinas. So just, it’s just opening up as well. [00:06:00] And, we also sell them on our website, which you can find@tbdproducts.com.

[00:06:05] And if you hold one of our M NFTs you get 50% off all purchases forever on our website. And when, you know, when the day comes for us to open physical concept stores, that deals can be there too.

[00:06:17] Donny: Got it. And how much is an n ft going for? Right.

[00:06:20] Robert: You can still mint them. I think we’ve put in like a price ladder.

[00:06:23] So the first 500 were 0.06 e. I think there’s like three or four five left on that price level. Then the price shoots up to at least a double, so right now they’re 0.06 E and you can still mint it. That’s great. And the reason you can still mention it is that we haven’t done any kind of marketing for it whatsoever.

[00:06:41] We talk about it a little bit on our Twitter account, but we’ve decided that until we actually have something to talk about, we’re not gonna do any marketing for it like this is, you know, it’s for the people who know who we are, for the people who are interested in our products, for the people who interested in the company.

[00:06:55] And if you find us, that’s how. A few hundred people have already minted it. That’s how that has happened. It’s [00:07:00] just organic growth. So we’re gonna keep doing that until, you know, it blows up, I guess.

[00:07:05] Donny: That’s great. And so what’s the most exciting thing you’re working on right now?

[00:07:08] Robert: Ooh. There’s a lot of things like, because we have this, you know, one foot in each camp, I would say that we’re constantly, or I am, cuz I’m on the creative side of things.

[00:07:19] So I am constantly knee deep in just developing everything. So we have. A lot of plans for the web three side of things, and we’re building things for that right now. Most of the expression of that, at least early, is going to be in physical product, so we’re working a little bit on that. We will have some news coming out within a month or so, and then on the cannabis side, especially on the hemp side of things, we do a lot of product development.

[00:07:43] We’re just sampling. Our first vape pen, our first disposable vape pen, and we are also working on some other interesting stuff when it comes to that. So Studio TBD is basically like a, think about it as a, basically a brand creative agency. We’re gonna create more and more brands that make sense and [00:08:00] fit together and can also hook into all the web three things that we’re doing.

[00:08:03] So I have a notebook filled with ideas and you know, we’re basically attacking them one after the other when it makes sense.

[00:08:11] Donny: Got it. So this podcast is all about like a brave marketer moment, like a time where you had to take a riskin your career, in your role or for a campaign. What was your brave marketing moment?

[00:08:20] Robert: I don’t know. I have a few different answers here, but I think I’m gonna go with what I’m doing right now on the cannabis side of things. Cuz like in general, I feel that being brave in the sense of, The role of a marketer is like severely overvalued. so I left the creative industry because, The business sense wasn’t really there.

[00:08:43] So you either like did smaller and smally things just to keep the client happy, or you took like humongous super risky bets and tried to win winning pitches or moving a brand or whatever. And a lot of those bets, as far as I’ve seen it, are like they’re not really rooting [00:09:00] reality. they’re not really rooted in business sense, which is also whya lot of parts of creative industry actually lost ground to management consultants and other industries because they understand business in a way that a creative industry does not.

[00:09:13] So what we did, we knew that we had like a very interesting product and it’s gonna get a little bit technical. Basically since 1970 when, or 1969, summer of Love, Woodstock, all that, right? That’s sort of when cannabis exploded into the global pop culture consciousness. And since then, the potency of t h C in the plant has gone up with around 700%.

[00:09:41] So what people smoked. In Woodstock in 69 was somewhere like 5% T hc and 5% C B D in the plant. Today, when you go to a dispensary or your premium drug dealer who sells you cannabis, that cannabis is anywhere from like 29 to [00:10:00] 45% T HC and 0% C P D, and that’s actually a big problem. So everybody has been talking about a lot of horrific things that the war on.

[00:10:09] Has brought with it, right? We all know a lot of it, but one thing that’s never mentioned is what has the war on drugs done to the actual plant? And it has increased the potency of the plant with 700% and reduced the CBD B levels to nothing, which is a huge issue because C B, D and TC works together. So there is studies coming out all the time now that shows that if you use products with only t h.

[00:10:37] It comes with certain side effects. And if you’ve ever smoked weed, you’ve probably felt them yourself. You can either get drowsy or you can have, you know, a tiny panic attack. you get socially awkward, you don’t wanna talk to people, you sit in the corner, So if you mix t h C with C, B, D, cbd, B D, curbs, those side.

[00:10:57] So basically what we have done is that we’ve created [00:11:00] edibles and drinks and now vapes as well is coming that has way more CBD than th hc. So in our products we have two different skews in the edibles and drinks, which is mellow, which is four milligrams of T HC, combined with 25 milligrams of cbd. B D.

[00:11:16] And high, which is 10 milligrams of TC combined with 20 milligrams of sleep, which gives you a way more relaxed experience. But what it also does, it curbs the side effects of long-term. So there’s studies coming out that shows that the long-term side effects are also not there if you mix tct b D.

[00:11:37] So the ratio products that we have, which. It’s still like a small niche in the market is what we believe that the, is gonna be the big mainstream part of the market of tomorrow. So I guess that, you know, just deciding on those product properties comes with some sort of bravery because it’s not going after the [00:12:00] consumer.

[00:12:00] That is the majority of today’s consumer is going after the consumer of tomorrow. But then when it comes to the actual branding of it, we felt. You know, we don’t wanna do a half measure here and like, alright, we have a new counter product, but let’s make sure that we look a little bit like the traditional cannabis product.

[00:12:19] So we took that as far as we could too. So we basically tried to create a mainstream brand in an industry that doesn’t have a mainstream rap. So I would guess that that’s, you know, you could call that braid. Some people call it stupid. A lot of people call it stupid.

[00:12:34] Donny: What would be the brand name of that brand?

[00:12:37] Robert: Well the brand is called T B D cuz we take T, HC and CBD and we just smash it together.

[00:12:42] Donny: I like that.

[00:12:43] Robert: Yeah. It’s the most simplistic thing we could think of.

[00:12:46] Donny: But it also sounds like you’re like, The name is coming. TBD. To be determined, to be honest.

[00:12:50] Robert: Yeah. Yeah. the cool thing is actually that when people have tried products, basically what they’re saying is that, well, it sort of makes everything a little bit tb d cuz you [00:13:00] can still function, you don’t get as high, so you don’t function.

[00:13:03] You can use the product and you can do other. so I think like what has happened over, I don’t know the year or so of been in the market is that the name has actually grown on us because it also makes everything a little bit t d.

[00:13:18] Donny: Got it. That makes, complete sense. And so you’re not doing any marketing right now, but you’ve had a lot of marketing experience in your past, so can you talk about some of the marketing initiatives that you’ve worked on and the success of.

[00:13:29] Robert: Oh yeah. I grew up in Sweden, so I’m from Sweden, so I, started my career in Stockholm at an agency called Forcement and Bold Force, which I mean, you’re still pretty famous. That agency was like the best agency in Northern Europe by far, and I lucky enough to get to work there.

[00:13:46] I worked with some amazing people. We did a bunch of stuff. In like 2009, 2010, when social media had gone from like a fringe thing to something that everyone was doing, [00:14:00] mostly Facebook. At that point, we happened to be. In that market when, I don’t know, use the generated content and like all those like social media hacks happened.

[00:14:11] So we did a lot of that stuff and some things that we did got a lot of recognition and that’s how I ended up in New York because if you do something in the creative industry that gets a lot of recognition, recruiters and talent agents starts calling. So yeah, we did some stuff that won a bunch of awards and stuff.

[00:14:29] It’s helped me end up here where I’m at. Right.

[00:14:32] Donny: Got it. Was there a certain company that brought you over to New York?

[00:14:36] Robert: Yeah, it was, I started at McCann actually in 2012 when they were doing one of their numerous like recognition when, you know, all these big networks, they’ve, at least traditionally, they’ve done that from, you know, the year cycles of, I don’t know, seven, eight years.

[00:14:52] When they go, all right, we need to boost our creative chops. Now let’s hire a bunch of people that have recent success in the creative [00:15:00] field, and you. then I’ll let, they hire a lot of new people and then there’s new hype and then, the wheels keep turning. So I was a part of one of those like re ignition creatively sort of processes, which was super interesting cuz I got to see the American corporate model from the inside, which was a huge culture clash for me as a suite and as a creative.

[00:15:22] But I learned a lot.

[00:15:24] Donny: How was it different then in Sweden versus,

[00:15:27] Robert: Oh, there’s in a lot of ways, first of all, like in Sweden, at least, I don’t know how it is now. I think the creative industry in Sweden is like in a bad downturn, just like it is here. But at least when I worked there, you had a lot of trust from the clients.

[00:15:42] The clients were basically, they brought you briefs. If you and your team basically felt that, well, this brief. Doesn’t really point to the correct solution because advertising might not be what you need right now. You might need something else. Then you could easily go and present something completely different [00:16:00] instead, like, well, we think your problem is actually this, and here’s the solution to that.

[00:16:04] And that could be anything. It could be like, let’s, revamp your loyalty program. Let’s, uh, restructure your customer service. you need a rebranding of this product line, or you need a new product line, or you need to change the message from fighting against this to finding that, whatever that might be.

[00:16:19] That usually worked really well. Whereas like here, Is way more siloed. So if you’re an advertising agency in America and you come back with something that’s not advertising, it’s very rarely that the client’s gonna buy it and also you usually, especially if you’re in a network agency, then all of a sudden you’re stepping on someone else’s toes.

[00:16:38] So if you bring, let’s say a PR idea, then you’re stepping on the PR agencies in that networks to, which is not very popular. So that was like a huge thing for me. It was like, all right, so you basically only want me to do advertis. And that was not really my strength. My strength was to basically do creative problem solving regardless of what it [00:17:00] was.

[00:17:00] Sometimes the best solution to our problem is advertising, but many times it’s not. So that was like, it sounds crazy when I say it now that I did not understand that at that point, but I didn’t. And so that was like a huge thing. And then just, you know, the way America works and the language. Americans use language in a completely different way from how sweets use language.

[00:17:21] For example, in Sweden, we use language to make sure we’re on the same page, whereas, like in America, use language as a weapon or a strategy or like a game. That was also something like, you know, the words because in Sweden we’re really good at English, but we don’t understand English at all. Like we, can to understand the words and the technical meaning of those words.

[00:17:39] We can put sentences together, but we can’t speak English cuz we have no idea. How Americans use language.

[00:17:47] Donny: Have you found that like the separation between creative and media has combined more over the years, but you, or do you still feel like it’s in silos?

[00:17:55] Robert: Well, I think that what you’re sort of scraping on there, I think is the, one of the biggest [00:18:00] problems that the creative industry has.

[00:18:01] And I think that is, you know, when it comes to the media buying side of things, like back in the day, let’s. During the creative revolution of the fifties, right? You sold media and then you added creative. So all the agencies were media agencies, and then they had a creative department who filled in the media.

[00:18:19] But that was in a world where the only way to actually do communications was to buy media, broadcast television outta home, whatever, right? And in that world, it made sense to have creative solutions for the media. And what happened over time is that obviously everything sort of split, so they became creative agencies and then media agencies, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:18:43] But today, broadcast is not king anymore. Our home is not king anymore. Newspapers are not king anymore. So the way that I’ve been thinking about it is that I actually think that there is a case to be made. The business model of the [00:19:00] creative industry doesn’t work. Because if you look at what companies that become successful over time, yes, there are small agencies that they blow up and they become super famous for something they did or a few things they do.

[00:19:12] And over time that sort of maybe grows and get bought up and then fis out and get merged with something, whatever, whatever. But if you look at the companies that are actually successful year over year, over year, over year, very few of them are working without a huge. Media department, and when I say department, I mean agency like WPP or I, PPG or whatever.

[00:19:34] They have loads of media agencies and then they have creative agencies at the top. And there was like a period from, I don’t know, the eighties, nineties naughties, where the creative agencies could generate a lot of value. And the media part of it was like, well, you get that too. So it’s almost like the.

[00:19:52] Like shifted from you buy media and get creative and then it shifted. Like you buy creative and then you buy media. But [00:20:00] now when we’re in a completely different world, I see a lot of evidence that that business model is broken. It doesn’t work anymore. And if you look at big agencies, they’re downsizing, they’re merging, they’re doing anything, they can’t survive.

[00:20:11] But I think it’s gonna be tough for them because it doesn’t really make sense to have hundreds of people with high salaries sitting in rooms. You know, discussing nothing forever to fill in the media square.

[00:20:25] Donny: Yeah, I completely agree. It was like media and then you fill in the squares and then it was the other way around, and now it has to be working together.

[00:20:32] You know, it’s gotta be one and the same. You can’t have it in silos. I completely agree.

[00:20:37] Robert: Yeah. So you spoke a

[00:20:38] Donny: little bit about. NFTs, you didn’t really talk about DAOs, but like how do you think that they’re gonna change the startup world forever?

[00:20:47] Robert: Well, I think, I mean, that’s a huge question, right? We, we wrote a white paper on that subject that is 27 pages long or something. But I do think that the way that blockchain, [00:21:00] the capacity the blockchain has to generate value. And to collect people at the same time is something completely new, and I think that that will change everything.

[00:21:11] That’s a little bit why we started our own NFT program the way we did, because we’ve seen a lot of things happen in the world of Web three n NFTs, right? Where a few of them are successful. If you look back five years from now, I think even fewer will be successful because what they have done is like they.

[00:21:30] They have really capitalized on the properties that blockchain has for capital formation and for creative delivery within the same token that has value connected to it and the ability to round up a bunch of people together, but then actually, what is it? Right? Nobody knows. It’s like there’s a lot of really, really well funded companies now that have hundreds of millions of dollars, but they don’t have a product.

[00:21:59] [00:22:00] And you could say that the NFTs that they’re selling are products. Maybe. I kinda disagree. I don’t think it is. I think a lot of these projects that are really valuable right now and has been for the last few, couple of years, they are, if you look at it, but just cold, hard, statistical eyes. What they are technically is that they are pre-product startup.

[00:22:24] That are super well funded and has a huge community that are supporting them, but how long will that community support them if they don’t bring a, you know, a viable product to the market? And maybe some of them will, but I guarantee you some of them won’t. So this is an issue that we saw. All right? It has the capacity of capital formation.

[00:22:43] It has the capacity to bring a lot of people together. It has the capacity to create an ambassador program from the get-go, which is completely new because you started company 10 years ago. It took you like seven years before someone said, you know what? Now it’s time to actually kick off an ambassador program.

[00:22:58] Like it takes time. You have to be famous [00:23:00] first. So here, the ambassador program is created immediate. So when we saw that and we were like, okay, what is wrong with this picture? and the way that we saw it is that, well, these companies don’t have product. So we had a product. So instead of like, Focusing our attention to bring a ton of capital together on the blockchain and to bring a ton of people together on the blockchain.

[00:23:22] We just deployed our smart contract. We’ve been able to mint this for a while, but we haven’t really talked about, we haven’t put any marketing efforts behind it, but we have put all our efforts. Into developing and bringing our products to market because we need to be, the way that we see things is that we need to be a successful startup.

[00:23:41] The successful products before the web three part really kicks in and we’re starting to get there right now, right? So, like I said, we’re not over a hundred stores right now, and sales are going up, up, up. So now we’re starting to focus on, all right, so what do we do with this membership token? And we have had, you know, extremely elaborate plan.[00:24:00]

[00:24:00] For a long time, but we don’t talk about it. Cuz I feel that that’s another thing you get on the wrong side of your community, let’s say. But you start talking about, oh, in the future we can do this and that and that and that and that, and then, That sounds super good. But then four months go by and people start going, so where’s this thing?

[00:24:16] What are you doing? And all of a sudden now you’re, you’re behind.now you have to like bring small nuggets out to keep everybody happy and all of a sudden you have lost your trajectory completely. So talking about the creative industry, I actually think that what some people could do and potentially will do, Is space.

[00:24:33] To go back to the basics a little bit here, cuz there is a lot of crypto companies and web three companies that are in desperate need of really skilled communicators that can see what you have going on behind the scenes, figure out a cadence of messaging that actually fits with the reality. And a lot of these companies, they fail here.

[00:24:55] Like you can just go into any discord and just read all their announcements and go, [00:25:00] this doesn’t really make sense. So I think that the creative industry, when it comes to web three, I know everybody’s talking about, oh, the agencies are gonna build amazing things and they’re gonna drive innovation and do this, that, that, that and the other.

[00:25:12] I don’t think they will, I do not think that innovation will come from agencies. I think the innovations will come from founders and artists and coders and builders, and then the creative agency. If they wanna have a role in this, I think they should be doing what they do best, which is actually communication.

[00:25:31] And sometimes obviously design, but design is in essence communication when it comes to commercial design a lot. So going back to actually helping these companies figure out their message, figure out their brand. Who are you? What’s your mission? What are you doing? What does the pipeline look like? When can we say what?

[00:25:52] When is it smart to say what and when is it risky to say what that is? I think a lot of untapped.

[00:25:59] . It sounds [00:26:00] boring. I mean, it sounds really boring. Nobody wants to do it, but that’s where I think a lot of potential is for strong communicators.

[00:26:05] Donny: Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense.

[00:26:07] Good. Well, this was a good conversation and we’re happy to have you on the show. how can users get in touch with you? Well, the easiest way is to go to our Alpha webstore, which is tbd products.com, and go to the contact form. That’s also where you can buy our products. We’re working on the beta version of the website right now, so don’t be too discouraged with how bad it looks right now.

[00:26:29] In a few weeks, it’s gonna look slightly better. Thanks for coming on the show. Is there anyone that you wanna nominate to be on the Brave Marketer Podcast? Yes, actually, a good friend of mine called Matthew Gardner. He has a web three creative consultancy called Rums Sports, which I think is pretty interesting.

[00:26:46] They’re really focused on the fashion side of Web three digital fashion, which I think is kind of cool because that’s avantgarde and I feel like Web three and blockchain are, you know, in avantgarde mode. So fashion makes a lot of [00:27:00] sense.

[00:27:01] \Any last words for the listen?

[00:27:03] Robert: Go to our website, check out our products, and check out our N F T program.

[00:27:07] Follow us on Twitter studio TBD nyc and I’ll see you out. Sounds good, but only if you’re in California, right? No, the hemp derived products we can ship to, 36 states across the United States. Cause if it’s hemp derived, it’s federally legal. So because of our medium to low levels of thc, we can get under that bar.

[00:27:28] So our products are fully legal in, basically all of the US and we can ship it to 36. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Robert. I really enjoyed you having you on. Thanks for having me. It was a blast.

[00:27:44] Thanks so much for listening to another episode of The Brave Marketer Podcast.

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