Ad-Vantage

This is an open invitation to marketers and advertisers everywhere. It's an invitation to the greatest marketing opportunity since AOL CDs—minting your advertisements.

Ads are high value, memetic, well distributed pieces of media. They are so effective that companies pay billions of dollars to ensure they are seen. They have never been able to be collected or owned in and of themselves.

Minting ads represents a step function change in how we, as a society, can value these pieces of media. This untapped potential and large scale memetic property leads me to believe that, if minted and brought to market correctly, ads are barrels of onchain activity.

Minting ads represents a generational arbitrage opportunity for marketing teams everywhere. Teams can create new value by doing what they've always done. Marketers can mint their ads or campaign materials on Zora, alongside Youtube, IG, and Tiktok, as an additional way to monetize the creative work they're putting out and create deeper connections with their audiences.

It's free to do, takes five minutes to set up, doesn't require a crypto wallet, and can capture more value from the work. It's really all upside for marketers.

Why should marketers mint their advertisements:
1. Minting ads is an easy way to monetize and recoup spend on creating and placing ads.
2. Minting allows brands to capture existing demand and natural tendency to collect.
3. Minting creates durable channels for rich, downstream audience engagement.

The next million mint meta will be advertisements.

One frame that I've been exploring, personally, is that ads are a big brand version of 2021's Disaster Girl and Nyan Cat memes, which helped break NFTs into the internet zeitgeist. Potentially triggering statement, but ads are some of the most resonant pieces of media.

They compel us to take action and take up interests we might not otherwise care for, tapping into some otherworldly essense. They're magic. And over time, they can create deep connections between brands and consumers.

Why would I collect an ad?

For any collectors asking themselves 'why would I mint an ad'...there's an infinite amount of reasons. People will mint them because they find them funny, moving, or inspiring, and want to express their enjoyment through engagement.

Others will mint them to redeem a free taco or a discount on their next chicken sandwich. Or the loyalists will mint to show their support for their favorite brand or team. There's endless reasons. Then there are some people who will just genuinely want to collect them.

We should give people that exact opportunity. These incredible pieces of media need to make their way onchain and into a context that reveal their true value. This is something that crypto is uniquely good at.

So, traditional marketers and brand teams out there, this is your opportunity to reprice and revalue the incredible work you do. Your success is usually contingent on how many goods the ad sold downstream, but what if we could just sell the marketing itself.

The ad is the artwork. Mint your ads.

Mint them to archive your work and earn more money from your marketing initiatives outside of product sales. Mint them to better engage your audience. Mint them as an easy way to make your entrance into crypto.

Still not convinced, keep reading.

Ads Get A Bad Wrap

Let's be honest, no one particularly likes ads. They show up at the worst times, interrupting the best part of a game or a show, or annoyingly popping up in social media feeds next to our favorite internet personalities—cheapening the experience and reducing the excitement.

As a result, people are paying premiums left and right to skip ads where they can. Even influential companies are parting ways with their advertising partners, or vice versa depending on which way you want to slice it.

All in all, advertisers are getting a lot of critical attention.

At Scale, Commercialized Art

Yet despite this, ads are still some of the most iconic pieces of media. In many ways, advertisements are at scale, commercialized art. Or, at a minimum, they lean into the memetic and artistic properties of their themes and characters.

What does that look like in practice?

Taco Bell leaned into the meme that is Pete Davidson in their latest series of breakfast taco ads. It's effectively an at scale, widely distributed Pete Davidson meme. Kim Kardashian leaned into the meme that is sexy, sultry Kim Kardashian in the Skims Nipple Bra ad. Each of which took the world by storm, reaching virality in a seeming matter of minutes.

Here's a handful of names that you might know:
1. Flo from Progressive
2. Jake from State Farm
3. Mayhem from AllState

And there are memetic jingles that you can't get out of your head like Liberty, Liberty, Liberrrrty or That's Why Nationwide is on your Siiiide. This is all cool, but where is the arbitrage opportunity, though? And what's this have to do with minting?

Memes to Ads

Back in 2021 and 2022, when NFTS first took the world by storm, it was memes that drove a lot of the early success. Some notable ones include Doge, Disaster Girl, and Nyan Cat. These memes carried an inherent value to the collector because of their wide distribution and ingrained notoriety in internet culture.

Similar to advertisements, these memes had never been availed to pricing and valuation opportunities. In other worlds, until 2021/2022, people could not buy these memes. But when they could, thanks in large part to crypto, we were all shown the multimillion dollar value that had been hidden in these artifacts.

Big Spender, Big Earner.

The only media with a seemingly parallel level of distribution throughout culture to internet memes are proper advertisements. And, this is not by accident. Companies are spending millions of dollars to create and market advertisements.

Many of them are generating 2-3x multiples on their ad spend in the form or revenue, but could probably be getting even more. Bringing ads onchain to mint is a generational arbitrage opportunity for marketers around the world.

Here's a quick breakdown that shows some of this spend and it's return.

There is new value to be made in the form of mint revenue for companies that are bold and innovative enough to bring their advertisements onchain. How so?

By bringing the ads onchain, companies can sell the ad itself rather than the products featured in the advertisement. It's the purest form of direct advertisement sales. Something that has not been available before.

What does it mean to mint and sell the ad? It means to put the ad onchain and make the ad itself a collectible piece of media for the audience to mint. Literally just mint the ad as the open edition and share it on Zora like you would Instagram or Youtube.

A Working Example—Zora's State of Mind

We've done this for ourselves at Zora and with partner teams throughout our ecosystem.

For example in 2022, we commissioned an artwork for a mural in New York City. That mural, an advertisement for Zora, cost us thousands of dollars to produce and place. Traditional marketing teams would measure the ROT on this in the amount of clicks, downstream sales, or new user signup the campaign generated.

We measured the ROI of this campaign in the amount of mints generated by the ad, and the results were impressive. The State of Mint mural which cost us thousands of dollars to create made us hundred of thousands of dollars in revenue, simply by putting the ad onchain and making it available to mint.

Here is a quick summary of the stats:

1. 11,129 Mints (engagement)
2. 7,300 collectors (audience)
3. 123 ETH or ~$130k in mint revnue (direct ad sales)

We've extended this model to brands and teams throughout the space in the form of the commemorative open edition which has driven millions of mints and subsequently millions of dollars in value to marketing teams throughout our space.

The numbers are quite compelling, just check out this summary on commemorative mints here. It's actually become a core part of many teams' go to market strategy.

Zora and our partner teams have been able to achieve this success and we don't, at least not yet, have the iconic brands, celebrity endoresements, and massive budgets that traditional advertisers like Nike or Apple have.

As a basketball fan and a fan of commercials, I think a lot about the iconic Kobe System commercials, including those with Kanye West. Those are pieces of history that deserve to be collected and cherished. They've also been viewed millions of times giving me an indication that they probably would've been minted a lot too.

Use It or Lose it

When i think about how companies have come onchain so far, I have a genuine appreciation for their willingness to meet crypto where it's at culturally. It's cool to see those companies spin up dedicated crypto or Web3 teams, and partner with studios to create Web3 strategies and floating 3D membership cards or digital merchandise.

They've built out entire new platforms and experiences, but overlooked the generational opportunity that exists for bringing their iconic media onchain.

These teams are already producing multi-million dollar iconic media. said in short, I think they can do more with what they already have in house. There's incredible talent at these companies. They work with world class studios to product incredible assets.

That's what they should be bringing onchain.

Close

So big iconic brands, I am once again, asking you to mint your ads. Bring them onchain. It's a chance for you to make more money from your marketing and better way to engage your audience. Easy way to make your entrance into crypto.

Mint this.