I decided to buy this piece for two different reasons: the first is because I already own a piece related to Banksy, and I wanted to create a mini-collection featuring his work. Secondly, I want to remember the period from 1990 to 2010, which was quite special for live music in Italy, thanks to venues like the Vox Club of Nonantola—the closest to my home, where I had the chance to see a lot of live music.
About the Blur poster
Original 2003 poster used for the Blur concert at the Vox Club in Modena. The poster features Banksy’s famous “Think Tank” mural at the center, making it a very valuable heirloom.
The rarity of the image, created specifically by Banksy for Blur, is highlighted by the fact that the artist always refused to make commercial works. Banksy defended his choice:
“I’ve done a few things to pay the bills, and I did the Blur album. It was a good record and [the commission was] quite a lot of money. I think that’s a really important distinction to make. If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial. Otherwise you’ve got to be a socialist rejecting capitalism altogether, because the idea that you can marry a quality product with a quality visual and be a part of that even though it’s capitalistic is sometimes a contradiction you can’t live with. But sometimes it’s pretty symbiotic, like the Blur situation.”
The album’s cover art sold at auction in 2007 for £75,000. [source]
About the concert venue
The Vox Club in Nonantola was born from the ashes of another venue renowned for music, the Mascotte. Part of the CCCP concert, held in May 1988, is available online (part 1, part 2).
Opened in 1992, Rolando Rivi himself, the patron of the venue and head of Studio’s, has always emphasized that ‘the Vox Club not a disco, it’s a concert club. The disco activity serves to ensure continuity for the venue and its programming, but the purpose of the Vox is live music’ [source].
In fact, for 20 years the Vox Club has been a landmark for live music, hosting not only all the most popular Italian artists of the moment, but also many international artists. Among others (thanks to Marco Z. and Federica N. for helping me with the research): Bob Geldof (1992), Nick Cave (1993, 1994), Stone Temple Pilots (1994), Jamiroquai (1994), Counting Crows (1994), Bjork (1995), Paul Weller (1995, 2005), Bush (1995), Shaggy (1995), Blur (1996, 2003), Sonic Youth (1996), Skunk Anansie (1997), The Wallflowers (1997), Korn (1997), Counting Crows (1997), Ben Harper (1997), Radiohead (1997), Robbie Williams (1997), Portishead (1998), David Byrne (1998), Massive Attack (1998), Eagle-Eye Cherry (1998), Goo Goo Dolls (1999), The Cardigans (1999), Morrissey (1999), Bush (2000), Jarabe de Palo (2000), Richard Ashcroft (2000), St. Germain (2000), Morcheeba (2000), Calexico (2001), Kings of Convenience (2001), Air (2001), Travis (2001, 2003), Oasis (2002), Queens of the Stone Age (2002), Stereophonics (2003), Interpol (2005), Bloc Party (2005, 2007), Arctic Monkeys (2006), Alter Bridge (2010).
While this is a short piece about the Vox Club, I hope to dive deeper into this piece of music history related to music clubs: stay tuned.
The collection
In 2023, I began collecting photographs (primarily) that have a story to tell. The enthusiasm from the few people I shared the idea with encouraged me to make these stories public. I have therefore decided to also publish these “stories” on my website, so that they are not exclusively accessible via the QR code I offer to my guests.
In February 1967, the Rolling Stones decided to leave London for Morocco while awaiting a verdict on drug charges against them, following a party incident at Keith Richards’ house.
February 11-12, 1967: Keith Richards holds a weekend party at his home Redlands, with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, George and Patti Harrison, art deal Robert Fraser and others. Tipped by the News of the World, the police arrive on the premises (when the Harrisons are gone) and conduct a search for drugs. The police confiscate pills from Mick Jagger’s coat, heroin belonging to Robert Fraser and cannabis resin. [source]
However, if they hoped to escape their problems by leaving, they instead encountered issues that would forever change their story. According A Continuous Lean, which wrote a fantastic article about this trip, “the original plan had been for Jones, and Richards to be driven through France and Spain to meet up with Jagger in Morocco, but once Jones became sick he was forced to be hospitalized in Toulouse, France. Pallenberg and Richards forged ahead though, and with Jones temporarily out of the picture the two fell right into each others arms, starting a relationship that would last for the next twelve years.”
Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones in Morocco, photographed by Michael Cooper.
The situation sparked tension within the Rolling Stones and ultimately led to Brian Jones, the band’s original leader and the one who named the group, being replaced by Mick Taylor in June 1969. Mick Taylor was later replaced by Ronnie Wood, who is currently a member of the band. Tragically, Brian Jones drowned a month later, under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
After Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were formally charged (May 10, 1967) with drug possession (Mick) and allowing premises to be used for cannabis use, respectively, Keith’s conviction was overturned, while Mick’s conviction was upheld, though his sentence was quashed (July 31, 1967). [source]
In an interview in 2017 about the bust, Mick Jagger said “The Stones were good targets. We made good copy. It was the idea of degenerative moral standards. They were looking for scapegoats for some sort of generational lifestyle.”
About the photographer
Born in 1941, Michael Cooper became particularly close with The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, for whom his most famous works were produced (the staging of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper ́s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover was set up in his studio). An intimate of The Rolling Stones during the band’s earliest years, Michael Cooper chronicled the group’s rise from the blues clubs of London to international stardom. Referred to as the band’s “court photographer” from 1963 until his untimely death in 1973, Cooper at one point lived with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, cultivating the sort of comradeship that allowed him to capture some of the most unguarded and honest images taken of the Stones during their first decade. Very few, if any photographs had been printed in a commercial fomat by that time. [source]
The collection
In 2023, I began collecting photographs (primarily) that have a story to tell. The enthusiasm from the few people I shared the idea with encouraged me to make these stories public. I have therefore decided to also publish these “stories” on my website, so that they are not exclusively accessible via the QR code I offer to my guests.
So, CMOs’ budget for martech is sinking: is that bad news? I don’t think so, as there are a few good reasons behind this trend.
First, as Gartner says, budget for CX and digital commerce technology – and martech mostly falls into these categories – shifted to become a strategic priority at most companies. CTOs and CIOs looking to modernize their stack is HUGE news both from a brand and a consumer perspective as it generally means a concrete step toward a better omnichannel. In this context, the main challenge for marketing and IT departments is to join forces and present a solid business case together.
Second, companies are increasingly relying on agencies and third-party services for their marketing operations. That’s because the lack of internal resources and expertise doesn’t allow them to get the most out of the expensive tools they licensed. But filling the gap between the potential tool capabilities and what it’s actually being used inevitably leads to one thing: a better user experience.
Published on MarketingCharts.com in June 2022 – Data Source: Gartner
It took over 10 years (and counting) for martech to become a thing, but it seems like brands are finally getting “serious about CX data and technology”, fulfilling Forrester’s wishes from 2020.
This post will explore how we got here and what’s coming next.
Have you been in martech for years and are now feeling lost among a sea of acronyms? Hopefully, I will help you get in the loop for 2023.
Are you a marketer and this martech thing still feels like a buzzword? No probs, I also receive dozens of emails-I-never-asked-for presenting the latest tool. But if you are open to rethinking how your company engages with its customers, give this read a chance.
Are you an IT person? Within companies, there’s a huge need for people capable of navigating the extreme complexity of the CX tech stack. With marketing technologists now being called “business technologists” and the hype around no-code and low-code tools, you know how much technology is changing: your colleagues from business departments need your help more than ever.
This post will help you understand how Martech became a key driver of corporate transformations.
2014: The rise of Martech
At this point in time, e-commerce sales accounted for less than 10% of turnover. Marketers couldn’t keep up with the fast-paced scenario and were frustrated about being at the bottom of IT’s priorities.
But martech was ready to help, and it boomed quickly, supporting a wide range of use cases with marketing automation at the top of the list and focusing more on the dream of hyper-growth (a.k.a., lead generation) than customer needs (like tailored emails and enhanced personalization).
With martech, marketers saw the possibility to make themselves autonomous from IT staff or external partners for the simplest tasks: pop-ups for lead generation, like the one above, were now a matter of minutes with tools costing a few dollars per month. More advanced marketers started to make their email marketing strategies more sophisticated, for instance by introducing automated welcome journeys.
It all sounded cool and exciting, but with marketers blinded by shiny new tools every week, the growth of the martech tech stack was chaotic and siloed, with IT people not realizing the impact the cloud was having on marketing ops —and marketers, too.
Chief Marketing Technologists were “change agents, working within the function and across the company to create competitive advantage”, said the Harvard Business Review in 2014. But, you know, easier said than done.
2018: The dawn of Customer Centricity
In 2018, martech took up to 29% of the average CMO’s budget; it was top of the list, followed by labor, paid media, and agency fees (source: Gartner). Marketers understood that growth is nothing without channel-specific and data-informed CX initiatives.
Martech image related to CX – FIT RECCOMENDATION?
All businesses agreed that a better customer experience only comes with a proper customer data strategy. And this translated into reality. In 2018, CRM – the backbone of customer centricity – experienced “the highest growth of any application software market, becoming the largest enterprise software market, with a whopping $48.2 billion in sales” (Gartner, 2019).
CRM image. Caption: “At best, this means a new CRM strategy means a first step into omnichannel strategy, centralizing online and offline customers and purchases into the same platform.”
2021: The dream of CDP
Data, data, data. Over the previous years, everyone craved data to enrich their cool data visualizations. But these were hiding a big underlying problem: Most of the time, data didn’t turn into action. To paraphrase the famous tweet by Dan Ariel, data-driven marketing was like teenage sex: everyone was talking about it, nobody really knew how to do it, everyone thought everyone else was doing it, so everyone claimed they were doing it.
Not only were brands unable to extract actionable insights from the data they had, but due to a fragmented martech tech stack and the lack of internal expertise, even basic tasks such as email marketing segmentation were not accomplished.
By over-simplifying the concept, we could say that CDP is an evolution of CRM .A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a piece of software that combines data from multiple tools to create a single centralized customer database containing data on all touch points and interactions with your product or service (CRM is just one of the sources); that database can then be segmented in a nearly endless number of ways to create more personalized marketing campaigns. The reference architecture above is from realstroygroup.com.
On average, marketers use only 42% of the capabilities in their martech stack, Gartner found, based on a survey of 324 marketers in May and June. This is a marked decrease from 2020, when marketers reported that they used 58% of their tech stack. (Gartner, 2022, source)
While common sense would suggest starting with small wins to validate a personalization strategy, Customer Data Platforms became the cool new kid in town, considered by 69% of marketers “as the key to realising their organisation’s customer experience vision” (Martech Alliance).
Covid definitely accelerated digital transformation, but it also led to more pressure on CMOs to prove the impact of marketing efforts. CDP fell right in the middle: it had a huge impact on CX but involved a big effort both from a license-cost perspective and a marketing ops one. Wrong timing?
2022: Martech is now mature, but what about brands?
Not surprising, though, as the best in-store experiences are based on very accurate rituals. Most of the time, I can’t seem to find the same level of accuracy in online experiences, as you may have noticed from this post.
However, something in the way brands operate changed. Whether it’s an increase in sales through omnichannel (for B2C) or automation (for B2B), or operational efficiency through centralization (for marketing) or tech consolidation (for IT), understanding and leveraging martech is key in most use cases.
And now, here we are.
Circling back to the first chart of this blog post, Gartner’s prediction from a few years ago now translates into CX and digital commerce, which have become “enterprisewide strategic priorities”.
Still, as I said at the beginning, with an increasing pressure on proving the impact of expensive experience programs, the only chance for CMOs, CIOs and CTOs to succeed is 1) to partner on shared business cases and 2) to build new engagement models with external partners to deliver against shared KPIs.
What’s coming next?
With over 10k martech tools, picking the right one is still complex, and the 2015 Rjmetrics’ research that said that “companies justify their lack of public pricing based on solution complexity because there are too many factors that go into a price” is still valid.
A summary of the above, matched with the number of tools mapped across the years on the martech.org landscape
Navigating the martech offering will remain complex, and the key differentiator will be integration capabilities, as true personalization at scale will only be possible through a composable tech stack (Yes, even if you choose to go with Adobe or Salesforce). This is already happening with CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) moving to composable CDPs, CMSs (Content Management Systems) moving to composable content architectures, and DXPs (Digital Experience Platforms) moving to composable DXPs.
If you don’t know what composable means, there are tons of articles to check out. These are a couple I would suggest if you want to know more about these topics:
There’s still a short-sighted vision around composable, and this Linkedin post from Sana Remekie explains why
Projecting the ROI of a composable stack is currently quite hard, and I think it will continue to be. But when it comes to innovation, following your gut should be allowed. Hopefully, once we leave recession times behind, intuition will become the true differentiator for brands.
“Are you intentionally omitting web3?”
No, I’m not. A few ideas come to mind when I think about the intersection of martech and web3, which I hope to write about soon. If you are curious about it, sign up below (no, no newsletter; just a little email almost as short as a tweet to report updates) or keep an eye on LinkedIn.
I met Max Koziolek and his start-up Spectrm a couple of years ago, when I was still at Benetton Group. Max immediately struck me as one of the brightest people I had ever met and his martech – an enterprise platform to create and scale chatbots and digital assistants – looked and still look promising the same way.
This is enough to make you understand why I did not hesitate to accept the invitation to participate in One to One: the Conversational Marketing Podcast, an initiative of the start-up itself, in an episode entitled Zero-Party Data and the Future of Marketing.
I did my best not to give obvious answers to ultra-discussed topics; if you want to listen to my 20-minute chat with Benjamin Gibert you can do so on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.
If a reading is more your style, well… scroll below the video version.
[Question] Could you define “zero-party data” for us?
[Answer] I could say it’s the data that you own, but I don’t like this definition as it’s pretty tech. Instead, I prefer to say it’s the data the users are sharing with you somehow explicitly by interacting with your brands’ touchpoints, whether it’s a website, a store or, why not, a Web3 experience or your Discord community (and believe me, if you are still not into Discord, you will be impressed by the number of opportunities it can offer in terms of user data enrichment).
[Q] Why is zero-party data so important today?
A: If you expect me to say it’s important given what is happening around cookies, sorry, I won’t. There’s a lot of debate around this already, and I won’t bring anything new to the table. To me, zero-party data is important because, as I was saying earlier, it’s somehow explicitly shared by the user. That means brands should care about it more then they care about other forms of data, because as users are proving some kind of trust sharing these data, they are supposed to get something back.
However, I’m a tech guy and I feel I’m not the right person to discuss about engagement strategies. The only thing I would say is that there’s too much talk about how to collect more data and too little about how to distill and activate it in a meaningful way for the users.
[Q] Can you please elaborate on this point, and suggest some approaches you think work well to distill and activate data to provide value to users.
[A] Some weeks ago I was reading a research that was saying that over 99% of marketers will achieve the single customer view by the end of 2022. This is bullshit, and sorry for being so explicit. That won’t happen, and those kind of headlines are only good to stress out marketers.
Likely, best scenario is that it will take years to achieve a single customer view. You can do it, I’m not say you shouldn’t. My only recommendation is to go for a phased approach: start with choosing a small subset of user data and activate some basic personalization, the rest will come.
[Q] What role do chatbots play in collecting zero-party data?
[A] One of the pillars of customer centricity that I like the most is “being where your users are,” and we know that people right now are not necessarily on your website. They might be on the social media scrolling your feed, on Google searching for the nearest store, or on Discord interacting with your community. That means a very basic “chatbot strategy,” if that makes sense, will allow you to be in the right place at the right time, allowing users to chat with you. You can help them to discover and buy your products or get some support 24×7 simply by leveraging NLP or having them interact with a guided workflow.
On top of that, it’s all about creativity. Think about quizzes and surveys: all of these were cool ideas to enrich your user data, but I feel they are a bit out-dated, and there’s some space here for chatbots.
Back to your question, whether it’s product discovery, customer support, or gamification, any kind of chatbot potentially generates data that will be available to activate on other channels.
[Q] What are the top 3 pieces of advice you have for other marketers just getting started with zero-party data?
[A] Again, if you are asking me for concrete advice on what to do with zero-party data, I won’t make you happy. I’ve been both on the client and agency sides, and I see that the main issue is not about technology or data but individual mindsets and organizational complexities.
That being said, here are my 2 pieces of advice:
First: everything changes fast and you can’t predict, but you can prepare. So, my first tip is to embrace ambiguity and don’t be scared to test. The role of a marketing technologist is to help businesses create a significant impact on customer experience introducing small wins within a longer-term roadmap or vision.
Second, as I was saying, no matter how cool is the new tool you adopted, it’s all about the people. No matter the size of the company you are working with, collaborate with people around you. Marketing technologies and data do accelerate innovation, but it all gets most effective when collaborating. Think about Customer Data Platforms: the hype is waning because they should enable a connected experience across multiple touchpoints, but the way they are currently introduced creates a more siloed approach.
[Q] Do you have any recommendations for how to reduce the silos? Or what are the dangers you see in this siloed approach?
[A] The danger I see is simple. An experience which is not coherent across touchpoints could affect your users trust, especially after they have chosen to share personal information with you. The best in-store experiences are based on very accurate rituals and most of the time I don’t find the same level of accuracy in online experiences.
Recommendation remains the same: collaborate with other departments. Marketers themselves don’t have the skills to implement platforms that are truly omnichannel. Thanks to some emerging technologies, there’s an interesting hype around Composable Customer Data Platforms: I would look here rather than out-of-the-box solutions.
On the other hand, I often hear of IT departments that want to modernise and implement marketing-oriented solutions, however most of the time this happens without a cross-functional group of work, and there’s no chance for these projects to succeed.
[Q] Five years from now: as the world becomes more focused on privacy, what will the future of marketing look.
[A] Marketing techniques are now too aggressive. I feel like marketing will become more gentle. I don’t know what “gentle marketing” means exactly, but as I said, I feel people are getting tired of hyper-personalization. They may react negatively if they receive ads based too closely on purchase history or location data.
The shift in public perception of data privacy that happened in these years because of multiple data breaches could be just the beginning now that Web3 is getting bigger. Did you know that only 20 minutes of a virtual experience generate almost 2 million pieces of data? Huge, isn’t it?
When I took my first steps into the world of NFT I was surprised by the huge amount of work behind a successful community, so I decided to share what I’m learning along the way (more posts on specific topics will follow). Please reach out if there is anything inaccurate or if you are looking for something that has not been discussed here.
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Running an NFT project is kind of like running a business. While it may sound like an easy task, there’s a lot of work involved. It doesn’t just come down to the artwork collection – you also need to focus on other key elements and factors, such as the marketing strategy, the community, the long-term vision, and so on.
That’s why today I’m not going to focus on the artsy side of NFTs. Instead, in this article, we’ll discuss a series of elements that are vital to growing a community and ensuring the success of your project. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Yep, a website sounds prehistoric thing nowadays, but you simply can’t avoid it. It’s still marketing 101 and your NFT project is no exception to this rule.
As a tennis fan, the first project I invested in was The Ballman Project, and even though my passion for the sport has played a major role, this happened mainly becase the website for Stan Wawrinka’s NFT project caught my attention immediately. Agreed, also the BAYCwebsite it’s simple and to-the-point, but my wallet wasn’t ready to mint an ape.
Let’s dig deeper into the essential components of a proper website for an NFT project.
1.1 Description of the project
The description should explain what your NFT project is all about and why it’s worth the money. It should reflect the heart and soul of your project and your vision in a concise and engaging way.
It’s no place to be generic or vague. You should clearly and briefly state all the relevant details —what the NFT is, how much it costs, and where people can buy it— while capturing your readers’ short attention span.
Unlike The Ballman Project website and other projects with one-page websites, The Cool Cats website homepage is fully dedicated to a concise and inspirational description of the project (linking to a very articulated Hub for those who wish to go into detail)
1.2 Roadmap
Just like any regular business, NFT projects should set out key milestones, short and long-term goals, and marketing strategies to support their vision and mission. All that information is mapped out on the a roadmap which should conveys the project’s long-term value.
While it’s important to draft an ambitious roadmap, you need to make sure your goals and strategies are doable – otherwise, you might end up losing credibility.
Let’s circle back to the Ballman project. Ever since I minted my first player over a month ago, I’ve been waiting for things to happen. The first airdrop was only partially accomplished, and the community is getting anxious.
Unkept promises and frustrated users are becoming a bit of a trend now (we’ll cover this issue in an upcoming post), so don’t go too over the top. Set milestones and goals that you can actually achieve and exceed expectations instead of falling short.
The Roadmap section from the Cool Cats website. Adding dates is a double-edged sword: your project’s credibility grows a lot, but as soon as you miss a deadline managing your community frustration will become critical. Some projects are postponing (or even worse, removing) dates from the roadmap after communicating them: instead, you can choose to be a little more general as in this example.
1.3 White paper
Some title this section Whitepaper, others find more creative ways (as the Cool Cats – Cool Hub), but regardless of the definition, for those project which are more than a short-term speculative collection, this is the cornerstone of your project’s presentation.
It tells people all they need to know about the project: its goal, its vision, an overview of the team, logics of gamification, information about drops, traits and rarities (more on this in a next post) and so on.
It is relevant for the credibility of your project, so it is not something you can take lightly.
In fact, the white paper for the Ballman project really managed to get me hyped. And that’s what you should aim for with yours. Your project’s white paper should catch people’s attention and spark their interest in becoming part of the adventure.
Have you read any cool white papers recently? Ping me, I’d love to take a look!
For a tennis fan, The Ballman Project‘s whitepaper is an extremely engaging read as it explains in technical detail the mechanisms behind the matches and tournaments in which the players you have minted will be able to participate and how training will affect their careers.
1.4 Team
The team behind an NFT project is a major factor when it comes to credibility and engagement. Some people even go as far as to say that when you’re investing in an NFT project, you’re actually investing in the humans behind it.
The thing is that if you want your project to succeed, you need to convey a certain level of transparency. People need to trust you. And in most cases, they will only trust you if you share your team members’ names and experience, as well as any other critical information you feel comfortable divulging.
While it’s true that many NFT teams remain anonymous, transparency can actually make or break a project. If your team and founders have a track record and relevant experience, your project will look a lot more inviting for people looking to invest. Take the Ballman project, for example: having Stan Wawrinka (you know, that guy who won 3 Grand Slams during the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era) as the founder makes the project sound a lot more trustworthy.
The team section of Pudgy Penguins website. When there are no celebrities like Stan Wawrinka who show up it’s a good thing to add your team bios as well as links to social profiles for those who want to investigate further.
1.5 Miscellaneous: other website essentials
1.5.1 FAQ
Adding a FAQ (“Frequently Asked Questions”) section to your project’s website gives you the chance to clarify some of the most common doubts your visitors and potential investors may have, especially in this early phase for NFTs and crypto.
You may answer general questions, such as:
What’s an NFT?
What does “minting” mean?
How do I get crypto to mint the NFT?
What’s the utility?
But you should also focus on more project-specific ones, like these:
Is XYZ involved in this project?
What’s the supply?
Where are the NFTs stored?
Do you charge any fees for transactions?
1.5.2 Newsletter
Not everybody will join your Discord server or follow your announcements (I was quickly overwhelmed and almost feel the lack of a good old weekly-digest – feel old yet? – for the communities I follow), so a newsletter can come in handy.
It’s a useful tool to keep your investors in the loop and let them know of any relevant news about your project and your team. So, don’t forget to add a newsletter subscription section in a visible area of your website and encourage people to join.
2. Project Data
2.1 Collection stats
Although OpenSea offers comprehensive stats to the NFT community, including the volume, the floor price, the number of items of hundreds of collections and so on, you might as well offer relevant data for your investors right on your website. This strengthens your credibility and fosters transparency, making the project a lot more inviting to potential investors.
Cryptopunks is doing an awesome job in this regard. They provide advanced stats that offer a greater overview of the health and performance of the project, such as the current lowest price available, their sales over the last 12 months, and the value of their sales over the last 24hs, among many other cool info also for those NFT passionates with limitated wallet (as me).
Part of the Stats section of the CryptoPunks collection. You can also find a chart with a list of the owners (the user with the most CryptoPunks owns 423, with a floor price over 200k USD) as well as many other data that you won’t be able to access easily on Opensea.
2.2 Rarity
One of the defining features of NFTs is that they are unique. While the value of your collection is mainly related to the hype around it, the value of each item depends on its traits (or attributes). However, as a owner you cannot browse through every single item on OpenSea to check how unique yours is; the same applies if you’re a potential buyer who want to know which item to mint.
If you don’t have the resources to build something similar to what CryptoPunks does in its website to let the users browse the collection, you might want to list it on an online platform that does the job for you. Rarity Sniper, for example, is a platform that helps people check the rarity of collections stored on Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains – all in just a couple of clicks. More than 1300 collections have been listed on this platform, so its appeal is quite obvious.
The top 10 NFTs from the Azuki collection according to Rarity Sniper. Are you ready to pay over 5m USD to get the 3rd rarest one?
3. Community
As I said, if you think launching a website and designing a collection is all there is to a successful NFT project, you’re way off. It’s no secret that an NFT project is as successful as the community built around it, reason why most of your daily routine will revolve around managing and engaging your community. And it starts long before the actual publication of your collection.
Your community will not just come up out of nowhere, but there are many ways to form one. You can get your NFT team to take an active role in sparking conversations about the project and the ecosystem in general. Or you can develop a gamified strategy and interacting with users with loyalty programs, treasure hunts, and trivias. But regardless of the approach you choose to start building your community, there’s one thing that should always be part of your strategy: Discord.
All serious and committed NFT projects, communities, and influencers have a well-set Discord server where their community can interact, and yours shouldn’t be the exception.
For those who are a bit out of the loop, Discord is a community-oriented platform to talk over voice, video, and text, and it’s made up of mostly private, invite-only spaces called “servers.”
An overview of the Discord server of The Ballman Project. On the left side you can see the list of channels with which the community can interact. Looks like managing this all is a massive work, isn’t it?
Let’s take a look at some of the main aspects of community building and growth on Discord.
3.1 Scams
Let’s start with the bad news. Despite all its benefits, Discord is not free from hackers and scammers looking to profit from your community. It’s a serious thing because sometimes, for instance, a scammer will impersonate a team member on the server, get them banned, gain administrator-level access, and deceive people into minting a fake NFT, which for your users means losing money. Sometimes a lot of money.
So, it’s very important to make sure your server is a safe space for your community. Putting the appropriate security measures in place will offer people a greater sense of trust and increase your project’s credibility.
On Discord, one of the fastest ways of securing your NFTs and preventing scams is by turning off Direct Messages, so you might want to encourage your server members to do so, among other methods to avoid scams.
As with Arcade Land, it’s common to be asked to turn off DMs when joining a new server (and I highly recommend doing so to avoid a daily dose of frustration similar to that caused by phone providers’ robocalls).
3.2 Verification gates
Still about safeguarding your server, verification gates and verification levels can help prevent unwanted bots and spam, as they refer to the minimum level of security that a user must meet to be allowed to send text messages in a given channel.
On Discord, there are five different levels of verification for users, ranging from “none” to “highest,” and each level requires the user to meet certain criteria —such as having a verified email on their Discord account or being present on the server for over 10 minutes, among others.
On the other hand, you can implement verification gates. For instance, you can ask them to react to an intro message with a specific emoji. This proves they have read the rules and introductory messages and are ready to actively participate in the community.
The most common verification gate is reaction-based: the user must click on a reaction to complete the verification process. Sometimes it’s require to react with a specific emoji (as per the screenshot above, from the Buildspace Discord server), sometimes a random one will be enough.
3.3 Channels
As you can see from the video overview of The Ballman Project’s Discord server, you can create channels for the community to interact, you can create technical channels for handling support tickets or checking NFT ownership, and much more. Some of these channels will be covered in the next posts, some not, however the best suggestion I can give is to join some of these servers (no, you don’t need to own an NFT, that’s just to unlock unique benefits or experiences) and try yourself.
Here are some you can start with.
3.3.1 Readme / Official links / How-to channels
These channels may seem to duplicate the information on your site, and to some extent they do. However:
a user may join your Discord server through an invitation and without having seen your site first, so a readme channel offering him some information about the project is important (you can always refer him to the site for detailed info)
a user may want to interact with you on social media, access the collection on Opensea or need support, so a channel with official links will make life easier for them
the how-to channel could be read-only (becoming a copy of the faq section on your website) but it could also be an open channel in which you encourage solidarity among peers
These channels do not require a particular effort but on the opposite they can be relevant for your users, so when in doubt, why not create them?
Usually the links channel is not active and only serves to allow the users of the community to have the main links at hand, as is the case on the Dolly Noire Discord server.
3.3.2 Language-specific channels
Not everyone speaks the same language. And while English might be the preferred language to run an NFT community, you can take things to the next level with language-specific channels to cater to other people’s needs.
Language-specific channels provide you with the chance to expand your community and welcome other perspectives to the conversation while internationalizing your project.
Choosing which language-specific channels to create will depend on many factors, including server insights, community demands, and the current state of the market.
With more than 8000 members interacting on The Ballman Project‘s Discord server, the language-specific channels are highly active. Each of them has a native speaker moderator.
3.3.3 Interest-based channels
You can set a channel on your server for pretty much any topic you want or any topic your community shows interest in. The best approach to creating interest-based channels is basically paying attention to your community and the topics they most care about. They will be thankful if you provide them with a space to discuss that specific topic, and it will show you are listening.
As you can see from the Arcade Land Discord server you can also add emojis to your channels.
3.4 Roles
One of the cornerstones of Discord servers is the possibility of creating roles and assigning permissions.
You can create administration roles such as “moderator” and assign certain permissions to them – e.g. moderating and deleting messages, banning other members, and so on.
Or you can create roles that enable your users to do something specific. Probably the most important role you can create for your users is the “holder” role, that is, a role that will be assigned to every person who holds an item of your NFT collection. And there’s a lot of room for creativity here: you can grant holders specific permissions and perks to show them how special they are.
Once again you can give room for your creativity in defining roles. For example (image on the left) on the Discord server of The Ballman Project moderators are “referees” (and NFT owners are “players”). As mentioned the role can define access to specific functions of the server (image on the right), like in Dollynoire‘s Discord server: from access to a channel (in my case, on the right, the music channel) to the possibility to mint on specific items (as in the first drop I bought a rare card I was assigned the role “whitelist_black” which allows access to specific NFTs in the next drop).
3.5 Activity-based levels
Engagement and active participation are an absolute necessity when it comes to building a powerful community.
One of the best and most comprehensive leveling bots is MEE6, which provides customizable rank cards to your most active members and assigns them roles automatically once they reach a certain level, gamifying the whole Discord experience.
While I have not yet seen specific cases where levels are used to reward the most active users, what I have seen is that in many cases in the pre-launch phases of a collection, levels are used to allow users to access whitelists (if you don’t know what a whitelist is, I discuss this below).
Users who reached level 10 before the launch of The Ballman Project collection could access the whitelist. As the level grows according to one’s participation (and thus also the number of posts) the downside is that since the number of posts grows in a non-organic way and for those who have less time to follow the conversations (like me) it is very likely to miss important things.
3.7 Moderators
Last but not least, moderators, coordinators and all these persons behind all of this. They have a very significant role when it comes to community building. They have the power to moderate or delete messages and invite, ban, or suspend people on the server.
But with great power comes great responsibility. Mods are in charge of making your server a safe and cool space to hang out, keeping an eye on everyone, and making sure they behave according to the rules. Their work will have a major impact on how strong your NFT community is.
In fact, Discord moderation has grown so important that the platform now has a Moderation Academy. Also, major brands have begun creating specific roles for Discord mods in their companies to boost their digital efforts. Gucci, for example, was recently looking for a Discord Community Moderator. That’s a career opportunity you don’t learn about in school, isn’t it?
The best mods are reliable and active participants on the server, as well as experts in their field. As such, they can easily earn the member’s trust and respect, which is essential for a well-moderated and highly-connected community.
The key accountabilities listed in Gucci’s job description above.
3.8 Management tools
Now, this all sounds pretty overwhelming, right? From engaging with your investors to protecting them from scams, there’s a lot of work involved in growing a community.
Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. I will write more on certain tools that help you manage and automate these tasks in my next posts.
4. Growth hacking
Now that your website is published and your Discord server is all set up in a safe and well-structured way, it’s time to make it grow. There are a series of steps you can take to foster your community and scale your NFT project. Let’s delve deeper into some of them.
4.1 Giveaways / Airdrops
NFT giveaways and airdrops are powerful marketing tools that can help build awareness around your project and reach a greater audience.
In an NFT giveaway or airdrop, you’re basically giving tokens to certain users for free or in exchange for something other than money – such as following the project on social media or subscribing to the project’s newsletter. The idea is to create hype around the project and spark a conversation that will bring more people on board, so it’s a kind of a win-win situation.
Giveaways are usually used in the launch phase of a project to attract new users and generate hype, as in the case of Exploding Heads Club.
4.2 Whitelist
An NFT whitelist is essentially a list of people that are pre-approved to mint NFTs on a specific date and time. This means that whitelisted people get early access to the NFTs and guaranteed slots to mint them, as well as “early-bird” price. And some projects might even offer NFTs for free to whitelisted people.
Whitelisting is a common practice in the NFT world. It’s the perfect tactic to reward early supporters of your project and it can do wonders in terms of awareness and promotion.
Whitelists are also usually used in the launch phases, again to feed the hype for the project through viral marketing strategies, as in the case of Cyberdecks, a Dolly Noire‘s NFT project.
Now what?
If you feel a bit overwhelmed by all this information, I completely get it. It’s a lot to take in but the good news is that more articles are coming your way (I guess it’s a good news, isn’t it?). In my next posts, I will delve deeper into some of these topics and more, including OpenSea, tools for managing and automating the community, and so on.
So, if you want to stay in the loop and discover how to make sense of the NFT world, enter your email address below (will send monthly updates little longer than a tweet) or keep an eye on Linkedin and Twitter.
Il mio primo blog lo devo a Splinder, una delle piattaforme di blogging più in voga nei primi anni duemila, nonchè tra le prime al mondo. Ricordo ancora l’url, i-music.splinder.com, informazione che basta per scoprire se archive.org ne ha mantenuto qualche traccia.
Lo snapshot più vecchio risale a dicembre 2005 e, nonostante siano andati persi i contenuti multimediali (in particolare la grafica del blog), mi ha permesso di ricordare tra le altre cose che si trattava di un blog collaborativo (tra gli autori più attivi c’era Alessandro) e che ben 17 lettori abituali facevano parte anche di un gruppo su Last.fm (quanti ricordi, eh?). i-music diventerà successivamente blogmusica.it, ma questa è un’altra storia.
Non ho mai prodotto contenuti memorabili, ma tra i ricordi più divertenti che ho di quei tempi c’è questa intervista fatta gli Offlaga Disco Pax pochi mesi dopo l’uscita del loro primo disco, motivo per cui nel riesumare il mio blog ho pensato di ripubblicare.
25 Agosto 2005, Festa dell’Unità di Reggio Emilia
Termina il soundcheck pomeridiano: raggiungo Max (che si autodefinisce “voce, testi, ideologia a bassa intensità” della band). Il tempo di una rapida presentazione e uno scambio di opinioni sul mio recente viaggio in Slovacchia e ci raggiungono sia Enrico (“basso, moog prodigy, casiotone, premeditazioni grafiche, pensiero debole”) che Daniele (“chitarre, basso, mutuo quinquennale”).
Pochi minuti e, dopo la smentita definitiva di Max della leggenda che dice siano originari di Cavriago (“siamo di Reggio! Basta con questa cosa che siamo di Cavriago!! Sottolinealo!”), cerchiamo un posto idoneo alla chiacchierata che ci aspetta. Al “Re di Denari”, uno degli stand della Festa, stanno cominciando a scaldare le salsicce: siamo tutti d’accordo, è il posto giusto.
Il vostro manager vi chiama “Robespierre da lunedì prossimo in alta rotazione su Mtv”. Risposta?
[Daniele] Facciamolo ruotare velocemente! [Max] Dubito fortemente che entrerà in rotazione considerato il contenuto, la forma e tutto il resto, però il video lo abbiamo fatto. [Enrico] Se ci dicesse una cosa del genere, credo che la cosa più importante sarebbe rimanere coi piedi per terra e con le idee chiare…
D’altronde, voi potete farci ben poco se il video finisce su Mtv…
[Enrico] Ah beh, certamente non possiamo chiamare Mtv dicendo di passare un po’ meno il pezzo perché ci imbarazza! [Max] Queste sono comunque speculazioni intellettuali. Non siamo certo un progetto che può essere malleato in maniera da renderlo più vendibile; cosa fai? Mi fai cantare? Io non so cantare! Vista la sua natura, questo è un progetto che non si presta a manipolazioni. [Enrico] Diventeremo la versione commerciale dei Massimo Volume! [Max] Ad ogni modo, se il video finisse in heavy rotation su Mtv, io mi stupirei tantissimo! [Daniele] A me farebbe anche un po’ piacere, insomma, alla fine sarebbe divertente… però un po’ di stupore lo creerebbe visto come va il mercato musicale e la musica in Italia.
Già, il mercato musicale sta affrontando un periodo molto difficile. A questo proposito, che ne pensate del caso Napster e di tutto ciò che ne è seguito? A voi forse la cosa ha giovato…
[Enrico] Qua ognuno dei tre ha una visione diversa. Max è l’unico ad avere una linea veloce, ma non ha neanche un programma di download. Io un ho un modem 56k con Limewire e utilizzo il download più che altro per trovare cose che non sono sul mercato italiano per ascoltarle con calma da casa più e più volte ed eventualmente andarle poi a comprare.
Chissà che avventura scaricare album interi con il 56k!
[Daniele] Sì, sperando che non cadesse la connessione! [Enrico] Per quanto riguarda la musica indipendente io sono contrario, assolutamente. Cioè, nel nostro caso va bene, ma magari ci sono dei gruppi indipendenti che vendevano 1000 copie e che ora ne vendono 500 perché gli altri 500 le scaricano. Visto l’andazzo della musica indipendente e visto che alcuni CD, come il nostro, li puoi comprare a non più di 12-13 euro, tutto ciò risulta un po’ dannoso. [Daniele] …e ridicolo! [Max] “ogni tant còmpra anc un desc!” [Enrico] Nel nostro caso, siamo alla terza ristampa. Di copie ne abbiamo vendute tante e ci fa piacere pensare che siano molti di più quelli che ci ascoltano anche solo per passaparola. [Max] Lo vediamo ai concerti che, per coloro che hanno scaricato il disco, la tentazione di comprarlo originale c’è. Forse, anche grazie al fatto che il disco è stato molto curato a partire dal progetto grafico, dal packaging. [Daniele] Io scarico solo cose che non trovo. I CD che mi piacciono li compro a prescindere dal prezzo: se una cosa mi piace, non mi frega un cazzo di quanto devo spendere. A me piace rientrare a casa col disco nuovo, scartarlo e, mentre lo ascolto, leggere il libretto; non mi interessa scaricare 2000 dischi a settimana che poi ne ascolto bene solo 3. [Max] A me hanno proposto di ascoltare in anteprima il disco nuovo dei Deus ma non me ne frega un cazzo! Lo vado a comprare quando esce! [Daniele] A mio parere, inoltre, il download sminuisce l’importanza della musica che non è più essenziale per nessuno e diventa una cosa che, avendola gratis tutti allo stesso modo, prendi quel cavolo che ti pare e non dai importanza a nulla. Al contrario, se vai in un negozio e spendi soldi comprando un CD a cui tieni, risulta essere più importante. Con il download tutto è uguale: da Bob Marley ai LCD Soundsystem, da Castellina Pasi a Eros Ramazzotti. Per questo a me disturba molto il download illegale; ma non perché lavoro in un negozio di dischi, anche perché prendo lo stesso stipendio sia se vendo 10 che 1000 dischi a settimana! Si tratta di rispetto nei confronti di un lavoro fatto da altri che viene sminuito.
Stanno per iniziare le selezioni di Sanremo. Che brano portereste tra quelli di “Socialismo Tascabile”?
[Daniele] Il più lungo! [Max] Tatranki! 7 minuti di palla con lancio finale di wafer! [Daniele] No beh, visto che solitamente si presentano pezzi d’amore, “De Fonseca”. [Max] Forse, però, sarebbe più dirompente “Robespierre”… [Daniele] …o “Cinnamon” con lancio finale di chewin-gum alla platea dell’Ariston: non è male!
8 giugno 2004: è la data in cui avete postato il vostro primo messaggio sul blog. Sono pochissimi gli artisti che ne mantengono uno (e voi, per di più, gestite i contenuti di persona, se non sbaglio).
[Daniele] L’idea è stata mia. Si trattava semplicemente di un modo per tenere aggiornati sulle date mentre preparavamo il sito, il resto è venuto dopo.
L’utilizzo di un blog denota comunque una certa conoscenza in ambito telematico. È una tecnologia poco conosciuta oggi, figuriamoci un anno e mezzo fa…
[Max] Vero! Infatti quando Daniele mi ha detto “Apriamo un blog”, io gli ho risposto “Che cazzo è un blog?”. [Daniele] Io ne avevo sentito parlare; lo aggiorniamo noi quando vogliamo in cinque minuti, ci mettiamo le date, due cazzate e fine!
Tra l’altro è più curato del sito…
[Daniele] Sì, il sito è fermo. La gente non se ne accorge, ma lo sta curando Enrico a casa. [Enrico] Sì, lo sto curando con tanto affetto e tanto amore, ma non ho ancora trovato qualcuno che lo “butti dentro”. Non abbiamo particolarmente fretta. [Max] Riassumendo: Daniele ha avuto questa idea del blog, pian piano ci siamo accorti che i contatti crescevano e che era diventato una forma di comunicazione molto seguita dalla gente: siamo rimasti stupiti. In mancanza del sito, rappresenta un surrogato che sta facendo a dovere il suo lavoro; abbiamo un contatto diretto con la gente anche se spesso è un “bollettino di informazione” per quanto riguarda gli appuntamenti dal vivo.
Cambiando discorso, Last.fm è un sistema che permette all’utente di sapere cos’altro ascolta chi ascolta gli Offlaga Disco Pax. Digitando il vostro nome, si leggono, tra gli altri ascolti, Perturbazione, Moltheni, Paolo Benvegnù, Ulan Bator, Baustelle e tanti altri artisti della scena underground. Curiosamente, tra i nomi si leggono anche Paola & Chiara, Ambra. Tutto questo ha una spiegazione logica?
[RISATA GENERALE] [Daniele] Beh, perché? Secondo me “T’appartengo” di Ambra è un must della musica pop! [Max] …o trash? [Daniele] No no, ci sta a bestia! [Max] La realtà è che abbiamo una fan dodicenne! [Daniele] Fortuna che non ci sono Albano e Romina e i Ricchi e Poveri! [Max] Samantha Fox c’è? “Touch me, touch me, I wanna feel your body!”
A proposito di questa varietà, quale percentuale di persone che segue i vostri concerti o ha comprato il vostro disco credete che capisca appieno tutti i riferimenti storici presenti nell’album?
[Enrico & Daniele] Bella domanda! [Max] La mia teoria è questa qua: ero convinto all’inizio del progetto che il nostro potenziale pubblico (premesso che credo non ci fossimo mai posti di avere un potenziale pubblico!) [Daniele] Sì, noi stessi eravamo il nostro potenziale pubblico! [Max] L’idea che quei testi, per l’età che ho io e per quello che scrivo, potessero avere un pubblico sotto i vent’anni mi sembrava curiosa. Non mi aspettavo che una quantità, non certo maggioritaria, di ragazzi così giovani potessero ascoltare e ritenere interessanti i nostri testi; sarà per il tipo di famiglia da cui provengono, il tipo di cultura… sì, può darsi che sia per quello. Difficile pensare che questi testi portino a qualche processo d’identificazione personale per un ragazzo di 20 anni che non ha un certo tipo di approccio storico. [Enrico] Secondo me ci sono più livelli di confronto: quelli dell’età di Max hanno la capacità di comprendere appieno e d’immedesimarsi più facilmente. D’altro canto, non si può chiedere ad un ragazzo di 20 anni di capire completamente testi come “Tatranki” o “Cinnamon”… [Max] …ma potrà certo comprendere altri testi, in fondo non sono tutti “iperpolitici”. Siccome però questa roba non è nata con un processo di marketing, ognuno può “prendere” da ogni canzone ciò che gli pare. Non abbiamo un approccio… uh, non dirò quella parola che dico sempre… insomma, non dobbiamo insegnare niente a nessuno.
Nei vostri testi non si parla mai della Chiesa. Di questi tempi associare la Chiesa ad un’azienda non è più così strano.
[Enrico] C’è chi associa un concerto degli Offlaga Disco Pax a una messa. [Max] Questa è una bella risposta. C’è chi dice che abbiamo un approccio liturgico. [Daniele] Posso dire una cattiveria? I seminari non sono altro che “fabbriche di preti”, c’è poco da dire. [Daniele] Un’azienda lavora per i suoi dipendenti ed è con i suoi dipendenti che crea una sorta di insieme e di lavoro. La Chiesa, purtroppo, permettimi la parolaccia, ma rompe il cazzo a tutti. [Max] Io non mi sento anti-clericale. [Daniele] Io sì, tantissimo! [Max] Porto rispetto massimo per la fede altrui… [Daniele] …no no, aspetta! Non si parla di fede. Si parla di Chiesa. La Chiesa è un’associazione a delinquere, la fede è un’altra cosa. Puoi scriverlo! Se poi vengo scomunicato? Bello, bello! [Max] In generale, ho un’opinione non bella della Chiesa come istituzione. [Daniele] È un’istituzione sbagliatissima, si comporta male nei confronti della gente! [Max] Però sono andato a votare al referendum!
A proposito della leggenda metropolitana che voi siete originari di Cavriago, potremmo smentirne un’altra. Il protagonista di “Tono metallico standard” si dice essere il cantante dei Julie’s Haircut. Siete in debito o in credito con loro?
[Max e Daniele] Siamo clienti! [Daniele] Io ho tutti i loro CD e anche i 45 giri: conta qualcosa? [Max] Né in debito né in credito. Non abbiamo problemi con i Julie’s Haircut e siamo molto amici di Luca.
Gli Offlaga Disco Pax se non fosse mai esistito Robert Moog.
[Enrico] Opplà! Ci sarebbe un Yamaha S10 della fine degli anni ‘80. O forse, io sarei chitarrista. Adoro il moog da parecchio prima che nascessero gli Offlaga Disco Pax; ho avuto la fortuna di averlo in prestito per un anno e mezzo. Non dico che il progetto sia nato solo per sfogare questa mia passione, ma sicuramente c’era l’intenzione di utilizzare questo strumento, di cui al momento ne utilizzo solo il 20% del potenziale. La cosa più affascinante del moog è che pur essendo una macchina elettronica produce un suono che è caldissimo, quasi umano. Si sente molto la differenza tra uno strumento costruito da un uomo e tutto quello che può essere digitale (programmatori, ecc.): c’è un gap altissimo.
In chiusura, suonereste nudi?
[Daniele] Io lo farei anche, ma non so se agli altri conviene! [Max] No!!! Anche se ho due tette della madonna!
Il concerto inizierà di lì a poche ore, subito dopo l’esibizione dei torinesi Perturbazione e Disco Drive. Il concerto si apre con “Kappler”, canzone che racconta di un periodo in cui non si andava a scuola quasi mai; seguono “Enver”, “Cinnamon”, “Tatranki”, “De Fonseca”, “Robespierre”, “Tono Metallico Standard” e, a chiudere i 45 minuti di show, “Khmer Rossa”.
Nonostante i brani della band non siano altro che storie o racconti musicati di cui, un loro ascoltatore, conosce già a memoria il finale, l’intensità e il coinvolgimento emotivo che Max riesce a esprimere con il solo ausilio delle espressioni facciali ti bloccano lì, sotto il palco, impietrito a riascoltare storie sentite già più e più volte. Il resto lo fanno Daniele ed Enrico che con i loro riff e beat saprebbero smuovere anche le prime file di una Chiesa la domenica mattina. Ma, fortunatamente, è mercoledì sera e davanti abbiamo un trio che non ha passato gli ultimi anni della propria vita in una “fabbrica di preti”, bensì in uno studio a sperimentare, a creare qualcosa di nuovo.
This post comes late, but after reading a customer data platform vendor’s fanciful press release that “over 99% of marketers will achieve the single customer view, or golden record, by the end of 2022,” I couldn’t put it off any longer.
No, customer data platforms – let’s say it loud and clear – the majority of companies will not adopt them by the end of the year, at least not in the sense in which we are accustomed to considering them (we will discover that it is a short-sighted classification).
It will not happen for these reasons:
Organisations are not ready. Marketers don’t have the skills to implement the platform themselves. And if the project is in the hands of the digital team, they are unlikely to have access to the data needed to make it an omnichannel project. That’s why IT has a crucial role to play, but I rarely hear of companies with infighting going on.
Technology is expensive. ROI is a huge uncertainty, with a year’s licence often spent setting up the tool and who knows how many more wasted on understanding how to get the most out of it.
Data protection policies change and – worst of all – do so on a local basis. Even the most structured companies are trembling at the prospect of severe sanctions, sometimes leading to heated internal discussions on how to interpret the regulations.
To paraphrase a famous saying, those who strive for the single customer view must learn to love the process, because it is not a goal but a journey. This is the approach I adopted when I proposed developing a CDP at Benetton, which is operational from September 2020 and has become a case history on Google’s blog.
Faced with such complexity and with an investment of the magnitude of a CDP (a 100k eur/year licence, the same amount for consultancy services to turn on a few connectors, two years of project work) would have been a suicide (at least for me). So I chose to approach an incremental project with a hybrid architecture, instead choosing one of the many emerging single-vendor solutions.
The result? I could boast about the savings – a quarter of the investment in terms of licences and consultancy and no long-term contractual obligations – or the release time, equal to five months of the project from kick-off to activation of the display campaigns using programming. However, the greatest satisfaction was the chance to design an evolutionary roadmap calibrated on what the prototype had taught us in terms of processes and necessary skills, having discovered that the customer data platform was the last thing in order of importance to enable personalization at scale.
The rest is history. A very interesting story, but one that I cannot tell you for obvious reasons of confidentiality.
Skepticism around hybrid approach
I was convinced that the approach was the right one, but the more I read things online, the more my confidence wavered. Hybrid architectures seemed more and more like heresy. So in April 2021, I started to actively participate in a community where they were talking about customer data platforms. Participants were discussing which approach was best between single-vendor, custom and hybrid. I presented my point of view, explaining that a hybrid approach can be a competitive advantage but must be supported by an appropriate organisational model.
I knew I was addressing a very hot topic, but I didn’t think I’d end up being quoted on CMS Wire in an article asking a question that has become a leitmotif since the martech landscape exploded, namely Do CDPs Really Make Marketers Independent of IT?
Even the most marketer-friendly CDPs require fairly advanced skills, education and training for a business person to master. Daniele Sghedoni, who led the build of an open CDP based on Google Cloud Platform for Benetton, agreed that a sound marketing ops team is the crux for marketing being able to derive value from the CDP deployment.
Even though I had detected some mistrust (even from market analysts with whom I had the opportunity to deal with) I was still convinced that a hybrid architecture was the ideal solution, although I was struggling to get a confirmation. At least until July, when the “Customer Experience Trends & Insights” report by the Martech Alliance was published, which showed, among other things, that almost 40% of companies were adopting a hybrid approach.
Organisation’s current customer marketing/data platform type as per the CX Trends & Insights research by Martech Alliance
Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing published in September was also highly suspicious, showing a decline in enthusiasm for Customer Data Platforms, although customisation and omnichannel marketing remain at the heart of companies’ attention.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, 2021 (click to enlarge)
More modular approaches to customer data management are emerging in this context, and this “unbundled” approach better aligns with existing internal processes. Better alignment means less work, less redundancy, and more adoption by the company at large.
This post of mine, as I said, comes late. I’ve been planning for at least a couple of years to propose a different point of view to companies interested in adopting real omnichannel strategies. However, I want to believe that, given the increased awareness of all-in on a single technology, it is not that late.
What’s next here
What I am committed to doing over the next few weeks is answering a few questions.
If we really want to talk about customer data platforms, what types do the market offer today?
How is a reference architecture structured and what is the role of a customer data platform?
Marketing, information systems, business intelligence, retail, vendors, consultants: how can we organise ourselves to obtain significant results?
Which technologies enable this paradigm shift?
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Questo post arriva tardi ma, dopo aver letto il fantasioso (eufemismo) comunicato stampa di un vendor in ambito customer data platform, secondo cui «oltre il 99% dei marketer raggiungerà la vista unica del cliente, o golden record, entro la fine del 2022», non potevo più rimandare.
No, le customer data platform – diciamolo forte e chiaro – non saranno adottate dalla maggioranza delle aziende entro fine anno, almeno non nell’accezione in cui siamo abituati a considerarle (scopriremo che si tratta di una classificazione miope). Soprattutto non in Italia, target a cui era destinato il comunicato.
Non succederà per varie ragioni:
Le aziende non sono pronte. I marketer non hanno le competenze per implementare autonomamente la piattaforma. E se il progetto è in capo al digital, difficilmente avranno accesso ai dati necessari per renderlo un progetto realmente omnicanale. Per questo motivo l’IT ha un ruolo determinante, ma di rado sento aziende all’interno delle quali siano in corso guerre intestine.
Le tecnologie costano parecchio. Il ROI è un’incognita enorme, con un anno di licenza spesso passato a configurare lo strumento e chissà quanti altri sprecati nel comprendere come sfruttarlo al massimo.
Le policy di data protection cambiano e – cosa peggiore – lo fanno su base locale. Anche le aziende più strutturate tremano alla notizia di sanzioni severissime, che talvolta generano accese discussioni interne su come interpretare le regolamentazioni.
Parafrasando un famoso detto, chi ambisce alla single customer view deve imparare ad amare il processo, perché non si tratta di un obiettivo ma di un percorso. È l’approccio che ho adottato quando ho proposto di sviluppare una CDP in Benetton, operativa da settembre 2020 e diventata una case history sul blog di Google.
Davanti a una complessità tale, con un investimento della portata di una CDP (100mila euro annui di licenza per ottenere le credenziali + altrettanti di consulenza per accendere qualche connettore + due anni di progetto) sarebbe stato un suicidio (per me in primis). Così ho preferito ragionare su un progetto incrementale con un’architettura ibrida, anzichè puntare su uno delle tante soluzioni single-vendor emergenti.
Il risultato? Potrei parlarvi del saving (un quarto dell’investimento in termini di licenze e consulenza e nessun vincolo contrattuale di lungo termine) o dei tempi di rilascio (cinque mesi di progetto dal kick-off all’attivazione delle campagne display in programmatic) ma la soddisfazione più grande è stata la possibilità di disegnare una roadmap evolutiva calibrata su quanto il prototipo ci aveva insegnato in fatto di processi e di competenze necessarie, avendo scoperto che la customer data platform era l’ultima cosa in ordine di importanza per attivare una personalizzazione su larga scala.
Il resto è storia. Una storia parecchio interessante ma che, per ovvi motivi di riservatezza, non posso raccontarvi.
Quanto scetticismo dinanzi ad un approccio ibrido!
Ero convinto che l’approccio fosse quello giusto, eppure più leggevo cose online, più le mie certezze vacillavano. Le architetture ibride sembravano sempre più un’eresia. Ad aprile 2021 ho iniziato a partecipare attivamente a una community verticale. I partecipanti stavano discutendo su quale approccio fosse il migliore tra single-vendor, custom e ibrida. Ho illustrato il mio punto di vista, spiegando che un approccio ibrido può rivelarsi un vantaggio competitivo ma deve essere sostenuto da un modello organizzativo adeguato.
Sapevo che stavo toccando un tema molto caldo, ma non pensavo di finire citato su CMS Wire in un articolo che poneva una domanda diventata leit-motiv da quando il panorama martech è esploso, ovvero Do CDPs Really Make Marketers Independent of IT?
[…] Even the most marketer-friendly CDPs require fairly advanced skills, education and training for a business person to master. Daniele Sghedoni, who led the build of an open CDP based on Google Cloud Platform for Benetton, agreed that a sound marketing ops team is the crux for marketing being able to derive value from the CDP deployment. […]
Pur avendo rilevato qualche diffidenza (anche da parte di analisti di mercato con cui ho avuto l’opportunità di confrontarmi) continuavo a essere convinto che un’architettura ibrida fosse la soluzione ideale, pur faticando a trovare conferme. Almeno fino a luglio, quando è stato pubblicato il report “Customer Experience Trends & Insights” a cura di Martech Alliance, da cui tra le altre cose emergeva che quasi il 40% delle aziende stava adottando un approccio ibrido.
Le tipologie di customer data platform adottate dalle aziende secondo la ricerca CX Trends & Insights di Martech Alliance
Oltremodo sospetto anche l’Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing di Gartner pubblicato a settembre, dove si riscontrava un calo dell’entusiasmo rispetto alle Customer Data Platform, pur rimanendo la personalizzazione e l’omnicanalità al centro dell’attenzione delle aziende.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, 2021 (clicca per ingrandire)
More modular approaches to customer data management are emerging in this context, and this “unbundled” approach better aligns with existing internal processes. Better alignment means less work, less redundancy, and more adoption by the company at large.
Questo mio post, come dicevo, arriva tardi. Sono almeno un paio d’anni che mi riprometto di proporre un punto di vista diverso alle aziende interessate a adottare vere strategie omnichannel. Tuttavia voglio credere che, data la maggiore sensibilità nei confronti dell’all-in su una singola tecnologia, non sia poi così tardi.
Il primo post di una serie
Quello che mi impegno a fare nelle prossime settimane è rispondere ad alcune domande.
Se proprio vogliamo parlare di customer data platform, quali tipologie offre oggi il mercato?
Come si articola un’architettura di riferimento e qual è il ruolo di una customer data platform?
Marketing, sistemi informativi, business intelligence, retail, vendor, consulenti: come organizzarsi per ottenere risultati significativi?
Quali tecnologie consentono questo cambio di paradigma?
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