A Peek into Blockchain, NFTs and Next-Gen Marketing with Tyler Stambaugh | S3 E13

Tyler: 0:00

I actually started my career at JP Morgan right after the financial crisis. I worked there for about five or six years where I learned all about the banking industry. I learned all about the treasury of different lines of businesses, and then I actually made the jump over to consulting with all the knowledge that I had gained there. When I was at Accenture doing consulting, I was focusing on large companies, and large banks, being able to improve their data, their reporting, and their analytics, and involved a lot of backend data stuff.

Joeri: 0:29

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast, season 3, episode 13. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, Today I'm so excited to be joined by my friend, Tyler. Tyler, how are you?

Tyler: 0:45

Hey Joeri, how are you doing today? I guess I get to be lucky number 13 in terms of episodes for the season.

Joeri: 0:51

Huh yeah, you are, you know, but season 3, episode 13 already. So, if I would really count, we have already more than 100 episodes, so it's not really number 13. So we avoided that. Yeah. So, guys, if you don't know Tyler, Tyler Stambaugh is a co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Magnetiq. That's a platform and marketplace helping brands activate and engage their biggest fans by leveraging the power of blockchain and NFTs. He's an R2 Magnetiq. He worked at Accenture as a risk and technology consultant helping enterprises design, and implement large- scale data analytics solutions. Tyler lives in New York City with his wife and his two sons. I see some common things. You know. You've also worked in analytics and also you have kids. Yeah. So, Tyler, yeah, I already gave a short introduction, but tell us a bit more about your background and more in particular, maybe because you came from traditional finance and then you're now in the Web 3 space. So talk us a bit about that.

Tyler: 2:00

Yeah. So I actually started my career at JP Morgan right after the financial crisis. I worked there for about five or six years where I learned all about the banking industry. I learned all the different lines of business and then I actually made the jump over to consulting with all the knowledge that I had gained there. When I was at Accenture doing consulting, I was focused on large companies, large banks, being able to improve their data, their reporting, their analytics, and involved a lot of backend data stuff, and so when I discovered blockchain in 2017, it was a huge awakening for me, because what blockchain really provides is what all of my clients were talking about, like we need golden source data, we need one area to go to where we know the data is good, where we know it's not different in this database and different in this database, and I was like, aha, this is really interesting. Then you start learning the mechanics behind how a blockchain is secured, with all the mining and the cryptocurrencies, and I went straight down the rabbit hole. I even took some training when I was at Accenture and there were three main pillars that they thought blockchain would be great for digital identity, which we can get to later on in the podcast, because that definitely folds into the magnetic supply chain and the one that we hear about the news all the time currency and payments, right.

Tyler: 3:14

So 2017, there was a bull run going on. Everyone was talking about blockchain, so I started to get involved and try to fold that into the work that I was doing, and then it kind of faded away. And then we come back into COVID, post- COVID, when everyone's talking about it again and all this infrastructure is being borne out, and I kind of saw an opportunity. Accenture being a firm that is very large, does look to the future, but they also need to be conservative for their clients, and so they weren't really looking at the public chains that we hear about, like blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and everything like that, and so I saw an opportunity to transition out of consulting there and to build something in this existing Web 3 space that we've seen today, and that was the transition of going from my traditional background, falling in love with the technology at an early stage, and then finally watching where it got to a level of maturity where I thought I could make a difference and build something that could actually provide value to people.

Joeri: 4:07

Wow, yeah, that's a nice story. And so now you're at Magnetiq and I know you attach a lot of importance to turning customers into brand ambassadors. So can you expand a bit more on why that strategy is important, especially in Web 3?

Tyler: 4:26

Yes. So how I transitioned from Accenture to Magnetiq was I was working with a side consulting group where we were consulting social impact organizations on how to leverage Web 3 technology to connect closer with their communities so think of criminal justice organizations, human trafficking awareness, and the struggle they were having was I can get a lot of support and hashtags and people signing up and everything like that, and I can do localized events and people show up, but I don't really know who the core of my audience is. And this is where NFTs came into play and, almost like digital identity, where I can kind of make a digital stamp on the internet, this person believes in my cause. Now I can bring these people together in a community because I can identify them and I can start to engage them and interact with them. And so we were running a bunch of these things right, and they were taking us three to four months. All these requirements. It was all bespoke, but really we were doing the same thing over and over again and the technology really wasn't that complex to just spin up an NFT project. And so we said, hey, this seems to be adding a lot of value to these situations. Let's create, almost like a factory, a platform play, and that's where Magnetic was born out of.

Tyler: 5:35

And then we started to take our eyes off of social impact and move more towards the brand space, where you already have people that have a strong affinity towards these brands, but let's help them be able to better engage with them. Again, that digital identity them so they can start rewarding those people a lot more. Right, it's all about segmentation of your audience, right? And so we're providing to brands is a better lens into being able to segment your customers into the highest value, the ones that'll go to the mat for you will talk about you all the time, and then give them the tools to be able to provision that to those people and make them even bigger enthusiasts of your brand and give them more opportunities to talk and do word of mouth, which, as you know, for marketing, is one of the most effective acquisition strategies out there. So I think that answers the question, yeah it is, no, it's actually where I wanted to go.

Joeri: 6:27

You know already a bit further down, because digital identity, of course, it's a major subject to talk about. Also, community, Tyler, you mentioned it already, the term community is a recurring theme in the Web3 space. Yes, could you delve a bit deeper into the importance of community building in Web 3 and maybe how it shapes a brand perception?

Tyler: 6:51

Yes. So actually what I'll say and this is maybe a hot take aside from all the infrastructure and creation of the concept of an NFT and people's consciousness, I actually think the most valuable thing that came out of this last cycle that we saw with crypto was the formulations of these digital communities. I think over the last decade, with the way social media has involved and the way we start to interact with each other online you have all of those friends who are very inflammatory online and then you get in a room with them and they're just completely different person because the interaction model has changed so much. And I think what Web 3 has actually done in a very powerful way is it's almost lit a fire and people realizing that like, oh, I can be a part of a digital community and really get to know people at a deep level. And we saw this bear out with a lot of NFT projects that you hear about, where there would be these crypto conferences. The NFT project communities would plan an event using the budget from the project, where everyone gets together.

Tyler: 7:50

I've watched this in real life.

Tyler: 7:52

I'm at an event of a project that I don't own, but I just see these two people that you would never expect to have any sort of association with one another and they see that they're wearing the merchandise of that project or something like that and they're immediately like old friends who are long lost buddies or something like that, and they just start like mixing and communing and I was like this is really powerful. We're not seeing this type of stuff at scale anymore. And so what I think Web 3 can unlock and they kind of created a blueprint for it that some of these NFT communities that they've done is the ability to recharge that community, because what you have now is not just kind of like an ideal that everyone rallies around. You actually have a digital asset that everyone can kind of showcase and be like I'm part of this community, I'm proud to be part of this community, and now everyone can start to identify with that on the internet and kind of band together. It's kind of like a community member helping a community member.

Tyler: 8:48

Well, how do I know you're part of the community? Well, now you know, because we have these digital assets that prove, without a doubt, this person belongs. Basically.

Joeri: 8:56

Right. So indeed, digital identity and communities, they come together.

Tyler: 9:02

They're intertwined, they need one another, online at least.

Joeri: 9:06

And so how does Magnetic help these connections of building these identities, these communities? What is the role that you guys are playing in there?

Tyler: 9:17

Yeah, so we are an infrastructure platform to help brands come into the space without having to hire a bunch of expensive developers and learn a completely new, different skill set. What we've done in a very strategic way is we've stripped out all of the vernacular from Web 3. So the digital assets that you're creating, we don't call them NFTs, we are Magnetic. We call them magnets. You don't have to like it. We have a back- end seamless integration where we create a wall on behalf of people using username and password, so your users don't have to worry about having their seed phrases and self-maintaining and everything like that. We give them the option to take all the stuff off the platform if they'd like to, in the ethos of Web 3, if you want to own your own thing and explore the internet with it. But we're basically creating a safe space for the brands to take advantage of all that blockchain technology can do, which is this digital identification, and we can start to get different line s of sight onto what engagement profiles of the customers outside the point of sale or outside the point of an event. Our platform all in one helps you come in and create these anchors to your communities or promotions or whatever it is that you would like to do as a use case. It allows you a mechanism to distribute it. It can either be paid we have payments on the platform or you can actually just have people come and claim it. And then, on top of it and this is where I think we differentiate from a lot of other platforms we're not just here to help you launch this thing and say good luck.

Tyler: 10:47

We've also created tools and activations that you can push through using that digital identity of who those people are.

Tyler: 10:54

You can activate things like merchandise right, where you can facilitate merchandise drop people. You can give them claim codes for different events or discounts to your store. You can provision special, gated, and exclusive content to people. Everything is built in so you don't have to go to outside solutions like Survey Monkey or anything like that and all of that again is tethered back to the digital identity of that customer. So now you're getting a richer profile of that customer that you can feed into your CRM and other marketing efforts, but at the same time, you're providing a really, really interactive experience to your most valued customers. That, in turn, will increase affinity, will increase their level of spend with your company, will increase the amount that they're talking with their friends about it, and again our whole thing was no more point solutions all in a box that we can help facilitate, and we just continue to grow with our early partners and we're just listening and constantly sharing different features that are value add that then everyone can share across the ecosystem.

Joeri: 11:55

Right, so yeah, by making it easy like that, brands can make connections with their customers, with their community. It's also about emotions making emotional connections, so I love really what you are building. So maybe talk a bit about that, about these emotional connections and how we can build them.

Tyler: 12:17

Yes. So I think what a lot of traditional loyalty is built off right now is very transactional. Come in, spend a bunch of money with me. I'll give you a bunch of points. That makes it easier for you to spend money with me, right?

Joeri: 12:31

Yeah.

Tyler: 12:32

If you see it in the most advanced ways, when you get airline status, then you get even cooler perks, which I think people really like, like the airline lounge. Or oh, here are some of our partners that you now get special access to. Maybe they partner with a hotel chain and that's really cool. I used to be a traveling consultant so I used to get that all the time and I felt really special and I really just stuck with that airline because of what I got. So I used to get that all the time. And I felt really special. And I really just stuck with that airline because of what I got. The problem is that is not a very easy thing to build. It takes millions of dollars, years of planning, and all this infrastructure that you need to build. I mean, you have a lot of direct- to- consumer brands that are growing at a rapid pace, who would never even dream to implement that even though it would be something that would be very valuable, add and make their customers feel special? And so what we've created here is the ability for you out of the box, no code to be able to spin these things up. And your imagination ans creativity is the limit. Right? And that's our entire goal with all of this and when you talk about an emotional connection, it's basically being like I am heard I am seen and I'm being rewarded as such,

Tyler: 13:33

The brand has recognized that a love them.

Tyler: 13:35

I'm not just doing this in goodwill anymore because I love their products, because a great product only takes you so far.

Tyler: 13:41

Then you need to be able to identify who these people are who really love your product, and you need to empower them, right?

Tyler: 13:47

You need to say, hey, I see you, you are really important to me because you are the backbone of my business. So here, here is a program that you can opt into, and buy into. That'll give you a good value, that gives you things above and beyond what a normal person would have, right, and I will give you the tools to go out and spread the gospel about me and exchange the feedback that you give me will be taken with a bigger weight than just some poll I do on Twitter or something I do on my Instagram stories because I actually don't have a clue as a business when I do those surveys if the people answering are even using my products. Right, it could be anyone. And so we're creating this ecosystem for your 1,000 true fans, if you will, if you've ever read that essay and really leaning into them and solidifying that backbone to your business that then you can create, with them going forward to become a more evolved business with your consumer.

Joeri: 14:38

Right, yeah, indeed, I know you only 1,000 true fans, indeed, and it's all about relationships. You mentioned already obstacles that brands have. Are there other obstacles that you haven't mentioned yet, that you're trying to solve with magnetic?

Tyler: 14:55

Yeah, yeah. So when we went on this journey, we originally were taking a look at existing NFT projects and what was working, and so I'll talk about that first and then I'll talk about, kind of, when we delved into the marketing side of what's happening today as well at enterprises, right? So from an NFT side, I would say, in the NFT space, you have these people who are incredible hype marketers. That's what a lot of these projects were built off of and, as a result, you see a lot of what we call rug pulls, which would mean someone was promised something and they paid and then upfront and they never got it delivered, right, and I think part of that is bat bait, and I think part of that is people that are really good at creating this hype don't necessarily know how to execute. And so when they said they were going to do all these things, all of a sudden they go and they sit in a room and they're like how are we going to do all these things? And they're like, whoa, that's a lot more than I thought. Oh, this is taking up more time than I thought. And these things become slow drift and you know, in web three people move so fast they're like it's been two weeks Where's my thing right? And when, in reality, what they promise probably takes three weeks, three months, and there's no foresight of being able to set expectations for those things. So we're seeing a lot of things fall in their face as part of that.

Tyler: 16:03

So we initially created the platform. We were like great, this could be a place where someone could launch a project or bring an existing project, do integrations, and now you have all this toolkit at your disposal to deliver on that roadmap that you promised people, right? But when we started taking a look at the brand space and what was there, we started to realize, hey, you know what? This is actually a really interesting thing because if you can capture your highest value consumers in there and start providing them these programs now I can start to get really unique engagement metrics because what I didn't mention yet is that all of the benefits that we send to people as well are NFTs as well. So all of the data is on a chain that we read from an analytics perspective and, as a result, we can start to create engagement scores across all of the people and we'll eventually put gamification into the app, where those engagement scores will be public and users can see who the most engaged person. So we're not trying to analyze someone in a black box back room or something like that, but the brands have access to this engagement data and now you create a customer profile.

Tyler: 17:07

Again, as I said before, you can feed into maybe your lifecycle marketing program where you're doing email targeting right now, instead of just running off of how much is this person bought at my store, how often have they clicked in, how much time have they spent on my website, which is all directed around when you're on their mind at that time and you're engaging with their ecosystem To now, I can see maybe a brand extension right when, if I'm a sporting goods outlet, like a surfing company, and when they need a new surfboard or a new accessory, like sure they'll spend time with me and maybe they're a repeat customer. But now I can do an extension on that and I can use some of my partnership with surfers and bring that content to people and see how they engage. I can also do other promotions like Here's a live event, how many of those people joined, who are those people? And now you have this very traceable customer profile and now I know, hey, these 500 people are my superstar people. I should be targeting XYZ to them, right? Or I should be approaching some of them to empower them to maybe start writing a blog or something like that about it because they're so into it.

Tyler: 18:13

And so now, all of a sudden, we've created that almost like platform to do like brand extension for these companies, and so that was a problem that we didn't know we were solving when we built everything, but the more we started to look into this and have conversations with marketers and everything like that, we started to realize the level of analytics, while it's advanced so much over the years, are still very limited to transactional data, especially with the new privacy restrictions that are happening, where you can't track people around the internet and everything like that. So that's where we actually see the blockchain portion of it and the magnetic ecosystem really feeding a lot of value back into existing marketing processes at big brands.

Joeri: 18:55

Interesting and also we both have this background with analytics and we take it. It's really interesting what you can do with it what you can track and how you will use it. You also mentioned in Web 3, that often people look at marketing like hype marketing in O's and FDs, but it should be a longer term, you should have analytics and so on. When you look at the role of a CMO with these new solutions in Web 3, how do you see the role of a CMO, and maybe how do you see it evolve in the Web 3 space?

Tyler: 19:28

Yeah, I think I'll piggyback off my last comment related to this new set of data. The CMO today is not just about creative and reaching people and focusing on one or two mediums and hitting it hard. It's all about optimizing. It's about optimizing what mediums I have on where my spending goes. Am I targeting my customers in the right segmentation? Do I understand all the different types of my customers? And the more granular it can get and the more detail you can get with the technology that's available today, the better. Now I can use these economic principles with producer surplus, where I am hyper-targeting you because I know you'll spend $500. And I'll target a little less spend on you because you're only going to spend $100. The more information you can get from that. And I think Marketer should be looking at Web 3 tooling as an additional appendage, not as a standalone little cool promotional ecosystem, but as an integration into that, because you can still connect these people by email. So when they open a wallet, for instance, on our platform, they open it with an email. So I have all of this blockchain activity that's tied to an email. We don't ask for names and addresses. We don't ask for any of that PII. You can give it to us if you want, but it's not required for our sign- up of our platform and now you can filter that back through into a customer profile that you've created and you can start to be more smart on it.

Tyler: 20:49

But another piece and this is really like the big brain at scale when we get to it's not an if, it's a when we get to people adopting this writ large Is this concept of collaboration, cross- brand collaboration. So today there are solutions out there that help you figure out who should collaborate with. But there's a lot of research that you have to do, silo databases to figure out where people are spending, and you have high- level stuff like, oh, when someone went to Costco we're seeing these patterns, if you will, and these types of different products. But at least how Magnetic looks to solve this is that you've got this profile that's tied to a wallet and the wallet owns all these different magnet programs because we established the magnets or the NFTs and they could be at a bunch of different brands. And now what you'd be able to do just on magnetic and this is what blockchain allows because, let's say again, gold and source database that's encrypted I can look and see oh, interesting, 20% of my magnet holders are also holding Coke. Cool, maybe I should approach Coke and say maybe there's something that we can do here because my audience really likes your product and it's not just saying I have a suspicion or a hint. You can come with data and show them. Hey, this is what people have opted into. The people that love my brand also love your brand. So let's do something cool to energize them and something promotional that we know has a good chance of succeeding because we have that natural overlap. And so what I just described from all that we've talked to and what we've seen and me coming from the consulting side of the house that's what they bring us in to do.

Tyler: 22:32

A lot of the time it's figuring out where should I partner, and how I get the data to figure it out, and do the analysis.

Tyler: 22:39

And you gotta get access to this and that and do all this stuff.

Tyler: 22:41

Now we have it like because it's encrypted, we're not invoking on people's privacy, it's in plain sight, and we'll be able to then, like, get quicker insights and then, through the programs and through the tooling, you can actually start doing some of these team- ups straight through Magnetic and just be like Coak can be like great.

Tyler: 22:58

Why don't you drop them? Like everyone will pay you like $15,000 to drop them all, like a coupon to go get like Coak at their supermarket or something like that, I don't know. Something along those lines has just become really, really easy without having to be like sign up for this profile and put all your information in and do this and do that, and so that's the future that I see. So just a recap, real quick, like it's all about the data and getting more granular and more segmented and understanding what people are doing outside when they're interacting with your brand, and bringing that into the fold when you're doing your marketing and you're selling. And then, on top of it, it's that ability to now create a stronger affiliate network and be able to act on those things without very, very large operational technological lift.

Joeri: 23:43

Actually, I was going to ask you what are you most excited about. Maybe you've just answered it already.

Tyler: 23:51

Yeah, yeah, we have this concept called the affinity graph. So if you're familiar with social media and Facebook I think when Zuckerberg it was the social graph, right when you have a person in the middle and then you have all the other people around them and then those people are then you take each individual person there in the middle and then you just start to see where all these connections sit, kind of like on your LinkedIn, where it's like third, second, first connection, and that kind of thing. We call this the affinity graph. And so the affinity graph is we kind of flip around. Instead of it being person- to- person, it's a person- to- brand. Now I can look at it as a brand all the people around and where do those people intersect with other brands? And that's how I get my oh 20% like Coke. Or I can flip it around and say personal brands around them. What other people like those same brands? Ooh, now I can start connecting those people as well because they have like- minded affinities. Maybe you want to become friends with this, and then you start to become a little more of a social app. And again, we all know how these ecosystems evolve Once you start getting that kind of targeted value added from a social perspective, and then, from kind of a collaboration data perspective, it starts to create these well, I don't get this anywhere else.

Tyler: 24:59

I kind of need this right? This is something new and unique that I haven't been able to do before. So I think that's the thing, what I set out to do, and you know, as a founder, you set out and you have this vision and it's gonna change a million different times and it's certainly happened over the last year since we launched the company, or at least started the company. We've landed here and I couldn't be more excited because it really is something that I think is new novel and unique, that hasn't been created before.

Joeri: 25:27

Yeah Well, Tyler, I feel your passion, I see it. It was really a fascinating conversation with you and I guess people who are listening and they still have questions, or they feel your energy and they want to contact you, or where would you like to send them?

Tyler: 25:45

Yeah, so you can go to our website, www. magnetiq at the end instead of a c, .xyz, and if you're interested in collaborating with us, you can fill out a form at the bottom and it'll send. Then we'll reach out to you. Or if you just want to talk to me and get to know me and hear more, totally happy to take anything via email as well. Tyler, at magnetiq. xyz, you can also find me on socials. My Twitter is at Professor Stam, which is a legacy name from when I used to stream video games, which is a whole other story in and of itself and you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Tyler Stambois, Chief Product Officer of Magnetic.

Joeri: 26:22

So that's where you can reach me. Yeah, great Tyler. Yeah, you know. I know you have a lot of other stories to tell, but yes, yes. So maybe for next time, but for today, thank you so much, tyler, it was a pleasure.

Tyler: 26:35

Thank you for having me, Joeri. This was so much fun.

Joeri: 26:38

So, guys, as you know, Tyler mentioned a few links and also his email address. You will find them in the show notes. There will also be an article related to this podcast episode. If you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did and you are not subscribed yet to the Web3 CMO stories, this is a good moment to do that. If you feel that people around you could also benefit from this episode, I would encourage you to share this episode with them and, of course, I would love to see you back for the next one. Take care, bye. Web3 can take your best to new heights and you're ready to harness its power, but feeling lost and overwhelmed. Therefore, join my W3X Web3 Mastermind. Send me a personal message for more info. You can find me everywhere on social media. There's only one person with my name, Joeri Bilast. Talk soon.