3GEN: Part 1 – Building a Brand Agency to Help Understand the Potential of Blockchain Technology with Roberto Grande

At The Metaverse Insider, we had the pleasure of interviewing Roberto Grande, CEO and founder of 3GEN – a prolific agency out to help brands understand blockchain technology and build true, viable business cases around it. In this article, The Metaverse Insider summarizes Part 1 of our fruitful conversation. 

Building a brand agency that works so well with multinational brands  

Roberto Grande has a rich background which led to his decision to leave IP law and peruse his multinational brand agency. We asked Roberto how he began to build this agency and how he utilized his experience toward his current endeavor: 

“The truth of the matter was, I left IP law mostly as a function of the fact that I realized that I was not playing downstream of some really exciting deals and saw an opportunity to move closer to where the real action was happening, and actually crafting and designing some of these deployments of new technology, which is what again, I was papering back at the law firm.” 

From working with the team that took Christiano Ronaldo onto Facebook, to starting a new agency allowing further agencies to own or co-own the intellectual property that they developed with their clients, and working with the likes of Nike and Microsoft, developing campaigns – Roberto returned to his innovation roots:  

“I worked with companies designing brand innovation programs, where we would explore emerging technologies and deploy them to either drive brand innovation, process innovation, across everything from loyalty and rewards to moving the microtransactions from .com all the way into the messaging platforms, which was as you know, Facebook at the time.” 

Interest in immerging tech became an investment and a building passion 

With many brands entering the space during the 2021 hype cycle, the technology was seemingly left behind; tainted by the collapse of FTX and the deprecation of the value of Justin Bieber’s Bored Ape. This caused great turmoil from the media, questioning whether blockchain technology is just a solution looking for a problem. 

As a former IP lawyer, Roberto Grande was able to leverage his skill set to capitalize on the early 2017 NFT drop: 

“I traded crypto long before, probably around 2014. But for a recovering IP lawyer to see a net new digital asset class fall from the sky, was a pretty incredible moment. The epicenter of the NFT ecosystem was Hong Kong at the time, both from a Capital and Talent perspective. So, I sort of rushed to learn and invest in different platforms and opportunities there from marketplaces to what were the strategic presale tokens at the time – all the way through to then advising and founding projects in the space.” 

“Then around 2021 the intersection of my two endeavors came about as my brand clients began to reach out for advice around the deployment of innovation programs and started to ask about blockchain. And then 3GEN, our agency was born.” 

“So, my mission here, both as a builder, founder, and investor in the blockchain space, and an advisor on the brand side is to help brands understand the blockchain technology and build true business cases around it. Not just use cases that ended up being fodder for a PR cycle.” 

No one can move an audience as brands can 

As a blockchain native, Roberto has his reservations when his peers in the industry began to call regarding potential branded NFT drops – with his initial reaction being “please don’t”. However, this swiftly changed:  

“I saw that brands are the friend of blockchain adoption, in terms of when we look at all the opportunities that it affords. Be it again, it’s a bigger promise – not to get too heady, but the democratization of the internet or the emancipation of the consumer when you start to think about digital property rights, so data sovereignty. But even the Creator economy and all these new winner shares all promise. I think that no one can move an audience as brands can. For all of the engagement and adoption, the blockchain needs to realize its promise, brands are potentially our greatest ally.”  

What are the ideal brands for this revolutionary technological movement? 

It is evident there are some brands that will have an easier time implementing and porting digital assets than others. For the media and content space, the digitization of an existing asset is simply a natural progression:   

“When you look at apparel, or some of the way luxury brands have been able to extend, that’s an easy port. For many others, however, a PFP drop felt like a Frankenstein monster. And that was a function, I believe, of the fact that NFTs had been presented to brand marketers, as a product, not a technology. And remember, an NF T, at its simplest version is a block with a unique identifier, pointing back to its owner, and some metadata that points to a website. That’s it.” 

“The JPEG was the proof of concept for me, of the technology, but very far short of its promise. And so, I think we can start to show the brand community that the NFT ecosystem is actually a very familiar one.” 

With the deprecation of cookies and the end of behavioral data, this unique identifier for the customer is highly sought after for brands of all capacities. It is evident that there are many layers to which brands would benefit most from this technology. The top layer being those that can easily put their existing business into digitized assets or virtualized experiences – content apparel being an immediate example of that. Then the next layer down would be any brands that are currently intermediated from their end customer:  

“This is a world where we start to think of the NFT as the direct line of customer connection for brands that have never actually known their customer. The days of measuring your success by performance and attention will have to transition to collecting first-party data – driving deeper relationships, one on one with consumers, congregating them in communities, and with any luck, turning loyalty into advocacy.” 

This is interesting for brands that have a multiplicity of customer touchpoints that span both the digital and physical worlds. 3GEN is also exploring different deployments across physical environments; as they look to leverage location-based tech e.g., Bluetooth beacons, GPS, etc., to add a net new digital layer to physical environments – effectively gamifying these spaces. This could server as anything from a video to an AR experience for social virtuality:  

“When we think back to our NFT as an identifier, now all of a sudden, brands can use this membership, for want of a better word, to start to incentivize brand valuable actions across the entire ecosystem of customer touchpoints, be they physical or digital. We believe that NFT technologies that span physical and digital spaces are a real opportunity.”  

The importance of demystifying blockchain technology  

Blockchain technology is a poorly understood topic of discussion for the general population, yet a crucial technology for the future of many industries. Here is what Roberto had to say on the matter: 

“It’s partially our fault. People in the space were told we were crazy for so long, and we defended the fact that we were spending time or money in the space, you know, espousing not just the virtues, and the tech jargon became an automatic response. In order for not just brands to understand it, but consumers in general, we need to demystify it, and speak to the consumer experience that it enables, rather than front-loading our narrative with the technology.” 

“Look at it this way. The NFT is the enabling technology for the customer experience. Everyone in the world uses the internet and no one talks about HTML. So why in this instance, have we chosen to front-load the tech talk when it’s always been about the experience it enables.”  

“When we think about how to drive mass adoption, onboarding needs to become frictionless. Web 2, Web 3, it doesn’t matter. The wallet infrastructure needs to again, become invisible and meet people where they are, allowing registration with Web 2 credentials – and custodial solutions being the default. The majority of newcomers will not forgive a brand on the basis of not your keys, not your crypto.” 

“As we approach the market, seeking to hold hands and bring all these people in so that they can, in fact, understand why we’ve been so excited about this for so long. We do need to meet them, meet them where they are, both from a language perspective and from a tech sophistication perspective.”