ABOUT ANDRE: Linkedin | Admiral Media | walletads.io

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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🐫 How the type of product impacts the channels selected.

🌹 Challenges and experiences with crypto-influencers.

🌓 Challenges in Web3 specific channels.

🍱 How the strategies changed for peak vs non-peak crypto products.

🛍️ All about walletads.

🔐 A wallet ID is a unique identifier.

KEY QUOTES

What worked while selling out the NFT collection.

The basic understanding of the audience is that you have to build a community, you have to interact with the community, you have to have a Discord channel, you have to reach out to the thought leaders in Web3, and so on.

So this is basically something we started with. We reached out to Twitter influencers. We reached out to Discord channels, we tried to partner up with Web3 blocks, and so on. However, our attempts to do this had little success and we lost a bit of money. Then we tried to apply our basic understanding to digital advertising and started Twitter and Reddit ads. To my surprise, this worked really well. Within two to three weeks, we sold out the NFT collection and made a profit of around a million euros.

The messaging for crypto products is different.

The messaging for crypto products is different from promoting other digital or real products. 

We had to learn the language and acronyms, like WAGMI (We’re All Going to Make It) and understand how raffles worked. 

It was challenging, but we were able to learn and adjust our messaging to the crypto-native language. 

The value proposition for these products is often the product itself and its roadmap. Will there be additional items or a game developed on top of the avatars? The Bored Apes are an example of a successful product with their released game. When the team, roadmap, and community management sound good, people understand that there is value behind it and may want it for potential gains in trading later. This is where the value proposition lies in the crypto space.

The demand-supply chain of NFTs.

The dynamics are similar to that of gold in the market. Sometimes people invest more in gold, sometimes they sell gold.

With NFTs or any other tradable product, the same things happen.

Some people believe that a certain NFT collection will have more value than the others and they will start investing and trading those items. They will brag about it and share it with other people and this will make more people believe the same thing and invest.

This will automatically increase the value of the NFT. It’s about the belief in the product when it comes to arbitrage trading.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shamanth Rao:  

I’m very excited to welcome Andre Kempe to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Andre, welcome to the show. 

Andre Kempe:  

Thank you very much Shamanth. Happy to be here.

Shamanth Rao:  

I’m excited to have you because we’re going to talk about something that’s very much emerging and changing. You worked on an NFT project that was sold out and you have a lot of experience working with crypto and Web3 ads, which is something that I and many others are curious about. I’m excited to hear your perspective from within the trenches.

In Web3, there are mainstream trading products like Binance, Coinbase, etc.. There are also Web3-specific products like NFTs. So in your work with marketing Web3, or NFT products, how does the type of product impact the kind of channels that you tend to use?

Andre Kempe:  

I come from a digital advertising background so we basically promote many different products on Facebook, Google and so on. It could be for e-commerce apps, lead generation campaigns, B2B products etc. I was recently asked to help with promoting an NFT collection.

I was new to the space but quickly realized that while the purchase process for digital goods is different, it’s still an online experience for the user where you have to enter your payment details. There must be some way of tracking conversion success. So there must be a way to promote this on the standard channels that we were used to.

However, the Web3 audience has different preferences and wants to distinguish themselves from the traditional Web2 world. They try to avoid classic advertising channels and are heavy on Discord as a communication channel. So they try to find different tools and mechanics to interact with each other and this affects your classic marketing strategy very much. 

When it comes to Coinbase and all those crypto trading apps, you can still advertise them on TikTok, Facebook, and Snapchat and you will have success with that. But NFTs are still a small niche market. There are only a couple of 1000 people that really own a Bored Ape NFT for example. 

Here, the basic understanding of the audience is that you have to build a community, you have to interact with the community, you have to have a Discord channel, you have to reach out to the thought leaders in Web3, and so on.

So this is basically something we started with. We reached out to Twitter influencers. We reached out to Discord channels, we tried to partner up with Web3 blocks, and so on. However, our attempts to do this had little success and we lost a bit of money. Then we tried to apply our basic understanding to digital advertising and started Twitter and Reddit ads. To my surprise,this worked really well. Within two to three weeks, we sold out the NFT collection and made a profit of around a million euros.

Shamanth Rao:  

I guess with channels like Discord, Twitter or some of other channels, it can be much more palatable to the crypto nerds. 

You talked about crypto influencers on Twitter and some other channels. Obviously, a lot of these channels are very new. What are some of the big challenges with using them? What have been some of the more challenging experiences with these? 

Andre Kempe:  

One issue we faced was the difficulty of identifying the people behind certain Web3 accounts due to the anonymity in the space. 

When you run a business, you have to make a proper accounting for a million dollar revenue. If you want to invest 20,000 on an influencer, you want to have invoices for these kinds of things. You want to know with whom you’re dealing and you want to have a guarantee that this person is really promoting you and so on. So this is where it really gets a little bit challenging in the Web3 space. 

Unfortunately, we learned the hard way and lost money by transferring pre-payments to popular Twitter and Discord accounts that ultimately did not do the job or disappeared.

Shamanth Rao:  

That’s scary! But that’s part of the challenge with starting in a space that’s very new just now. 

I believe you also worked with channels that are specific to Web3. I recollect you had some specific challenges with the channels. Is that something you’re able to chat about? 

Andre Kempe:  

Promoting crypto products through regular advertising channels can be challenging due to the regulations imposed by those channels. For example, TikTok doesn’t allow crypto and Facebook only allows certain types of crypto products. Approvals are not easily granted for investment-related products. 

You may be able to start some campaigns with a small budget, but at some point, the channels will block you, preventing any further promotion.

You have to have really good relationships with the channels and you need to get around those blockers by either getting listed on those platforms, which means you need to adjust your landing pages, maybe even the mechanics of your product, or the mechanics of the purchase of your NFT or whatever. 

So there’s a lot of things you have to adjust to make the advertising channels happy, and feel comfortable that they promote your product. 

Shamanth Rao:  

Also given how hard it is to get hold of a human in some of these platforms, it just makes it even harder to get through some of these approvals, I would imagine. 

You mentioned the NFT project you worked on that was sold out within a couple of weeks. Can you tell us more about the nature of this particular project? And what do you think were the big reasons why it was possible to sell out this NFT project completely? 

Andre Kempe:  

Well, I think one reason for its success is certainly the time because this collection went live before the entire crypto market crashed. NFTs were at their peak at the time. Everyone wanted to have an NFT when you were dealing with crypto in any type of form. 

So it was relatively easy to launch a random product or random NFT collection and have some success with it. 

Additionally, the design of the NFT collection is also crucial, although personal preference may vary. The roadmap for the collection, including planned game mechanics and tradable items, is also an important factor to consider.

Shamanth Rao:  

And you guys marketed this NFT product via ads. So can you talk through what the messaging looked like for these particular ads? I think it’d be interesting to understand what kind of value propositions were focused on, what the results were, how did you measure the results, what was the performance like?

Andre Kempe:

The messaging for crypto products is different from promoting other digital or real products. 

We had to learn the language and acronyms, like WAGMI (We’re All Going to Make It) and understand how raffles worked. 

It was challenging, but we were able to learn and adjust our messaging to the crypto-native language. 

The value proposition for these products is often the product itself and its roadmap. Will there be additional items or a game developed on top of the avatars? The Bored Apes are an example of a successful product with their released game. When the team, roadmap, and community management sound good, people understand that there is value behind it and may want it for potential gains in trading later. This is where the value proposition lies in the crypto space.

Shamanth Rao:

Definitely! And they are investing on whatever is going to come down the road. That’s a big part of why people are buying their NFTs. 

I know the NFT project you guys promoted was when Bitcoin, Ethereum and a lot of the crypto prices were close to their peak or at the peak. Obviously, now it’s a different time. So I understand the NFT product you promoted and sold out was close to the peak market. 

So how does the marketing and the results of an NFT product change? And how did the strategies change for peak crypto products versus not peak crypto products.

Andre Kempe:  

Market dynamics naturally level out when there is less demand for a product. Providers will recognize when it is no longer profitable and may move on to more easy business. However, when there is an oversupply and little demand, promoting your product becomes a challenge. Having a long-term strategy and investing in targeted advertising can help. 

Alternatively, developing a unique product with promising gains can also help your product stand out in the NFT space. Despite the limited daily trade volume of a few million dollars, your product can still be successful.

Shamanth Rao:  

Certainly, yeah. The last time we spoke, you said something interesting which is, selling NFTs for arbitrage. That’s a very big reason why people buy NFTs, obviously. They want to invest in the roadmap, but they really buy it so they can resell it later, presumably at a higher price. 

You also said this strategy is almost always sustainable. 

Can you explain this and why this is the case?

Andre Kempe:  

The dynamics are similar to that of gold in the market. Sometimes people invest more in gold, sometimes they sell gold.

With NFTs or any other tradable product, the same things happen.

Some people believe that a certain NFT collection will have more value than the others and they will start investing and trading those items. They will brag about it and share it with other people and this will make more people believe the same thing and invest.

This will automatically increase the value of the NFT. It’s about the belief in the product when it comes to arbitrage trading.

Shamanth Rao:  

Absolutely!

Something else I would imagine is important in advertising is attribution and tracking. Can you tell us what the current state of tracking and attribution is and how you guys went about it?

Andre Kempe:  

We released our platform walletads where we basically promote NFTs in people’s wallets. So that’s basically something where we airdrop. That’s also another term from that space. We send free NFT art into people’s digital wallets and they will be able to see those in their OpenSea platforms or wherever. 

So people will log in on OpenSea, they will connect their wallets, see the ad, click on it, go to the website, buy the NFT that we’ve promoted, where they also have to connect their wallet. 

With traditional advertising, tracking is done through clickable links and UTM parameters. It sends you to your Google Analytics, and somehow you will be able to track that. With a promotion like walletads, we know the wallet IDs of users who click on the ad and convert to the NFT page. This linking between wallet IDs is similar to an advertising ID or iOS’s IDFA.

Shamanth Rao:  

Just using a wallet ID that has almost a unique identifier can be a good way to ban tracking and attribution.

Andre Kempe:  

Absolutely. For example, for a fantasy game, if they continued collecting NFT, avatar or people that are uploading their fees by connecting their wallets, Meta would have a huge portion of wallet IDs, which they then could match with people that are buying on other websites using the same wallet IDs. 

It’s blockchain technology, all the information is public. You wouldn’t even need to have a mirror pixel on your website or anything anymore, because it could just trace it on the publicly available databases. 

So Meta would have had a good chance to collect additional information from all Web3 users. The space will grow and it won’t die. So the future of attribution and tracking could be Web3.

Shamanth Rao:  

I am certainly curious to see how all of this shapes up. 

Andre, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground today. I find it fascinating to talk to folks like you, who are deep in the trenches and who actually worked on projects with Web3. So this has been very interesting for me to learn. 

But as we sign off and go from here, can you tell folks, how can they find out more about you and your work? 

Andre Kempe:  

I think the easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn. Connect with me and I’m always happy to chat about anything related to Web3 advertising, digital marketing and crypto. 

Shamanth Rao:  

Excellent, it’s a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show. 

Andre Kempe:  

Thank you very much.

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