TezTalks Radio #36: Andrew Klein of Sweet.io on the Future of the Metaverse
Come for the insights into Web3, stay for an excellent (pun intended) Waynes World analogy.
550 words, 3 minute read
In episode #36 of TezTalks Radio, the team sat down with Andrew Klein, VP of NFT and Metaverse Brand Experience at NFT marketplace . Andrew talked to hosts Marissa Trew and Stu Elmes about his background in building Web3 experiences for brands, what makes Sweet different, the future of the metaverse, and why the best question you can ask anyone curious about collecting NFTs is ‘what do you love?’
We’ve pulled out some key quotes below, and you can watch the full 50-minute conversation above.
What makes Sweet different?
Sweet started doing fan engagement tokens in 2017 […] but they pivoted in 2020 into the NFT space, and what they ended up building was something I immediately fell in love with […] What Sweet does is allow consumers to come in with kind of a Web 2.0 login, something that we’re all familiar with. Any Web2 app that you’ve logged in with, Google, Apple Pay, or Twitter. You’re one click away from collecting an NFT. I fell in love with how Sweet created NFTs with brands. We invite consumers and fans into experiences that are familiar, exciting, and entertaining, that they’re going to want to spend time in, and and engage with, not just transact.
What makes a great NFT fan experience:
We don’t want to do cookie-cutter experiences, we’re not just dropping rectangles. We want to create really long-form, connected experiences, and help brands build true community through holding these NFTs, giving [their customers] something special, something not available through other loyalty programs that they have. How do you purposefully and meaningfully engage people who collect your tokens? Not spamming them, but proving them with true utility that can unlock interesting things. We want to make sure that people feel excited about experiences and not just, like ‘yeah I collected it’.
I think a lot of the magic happens when you start using NFTs to access inner circles, where you’re getting access to special information, and meet and greets with celebrities or personas that could be somewhat out of touch, but by having these NFTs you could unlock these really cool experiences.
On the pandemic as a driver of Web3 adoption, and the future:
It’s unfortunate but I think that the pandemic was the catalyst that really revved the whole Web3 ecosystem into full speed, and if it wasn’t for the pandemic I don’t think we would be talking about this stuff for another two to three years. It was eventually going to come because […] we’re not just going to hang around in web 2.0 forever and look at our feet, we’re going to evolve and move forward. They will there will be a web4, sorry to tell you!
There’s always going to be some resistance to new things, but soon this is probably just going to be the norm. Think about the evolution of cellular technology, from 3G to 4G to 5G, we were all going nuts over 5g like ‘it’s game changing, it’s gonna completely flip the world upside down!’ […] and now it’s just an icon on your phone.