How NFT's are Going to Change Advertising

The emergence of new digital technology has always changed the way advertising done. Here we look at the new wave of emerging digital technologies like NFT's and the Metaverse that could potentially change advertising forever.

69 million dollar NFT collage created by popular digital artist Beeple

Evolution of Advertising

Advertising is one of those business that has had to evolve and adapt to new technological advancements in order to function and connect with customers. This is both a blessing and curse for advertising agencies.

It is a blessing because the emergence of a new mediums allows for new methods of expression and for businesses to be more creative with their communication. It can be a curse, because learning the language, rules and limitations of the new medium can be quite difficult and mistakes made along the way can be detrimental to the brand and the agencies success.

Take for example, when the television emerged and came to be found in most households, advertising as an industry had to change and adapt. The audience watching TV was different from the ones listening to the radio and reading newspapers. This was a new medium and they wanted different things from Television commercials.

The TV commercial spots also allowed for new ways for brands and agencies to tell the stories of their products. This was mainly because the TV allowed for moving visuals and audio simultaneously. This game changing development allowed for a whole style of advertising and business that adapted quickly and effectively, thrived.

Back in the early 1910's the main medium of advertising was through news papers and fliers (print). The development of the radio changed everything followed by the the Television. Each change brought more opportunity and surprisingly didn't spell the end of the previous medium.

Similar Quantum shifts in how advertising is carried out have happened in recent history too with the emergence of Social Media and when on demand streaming services like YouTube and Netflix gained mass adoption. Each of these technological developments changed the way advertising is done.

What is the new wave

NFT's: A Non-Fungible Token is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain (a form of digital ledger) that can be sold and traded.

NFT are a new form of blockchain technology that has the potential to shake up the advertising world. NFT's were originally launched with use case of selling art. This is primarily because once an NFT is created no other NFT can be created that shared the same core code and properties.

This allowed for Artist to sell their digital art works on the internet blockchain by passing the traditional art infrastructure. The NFT craze caught on like wild fire in the art world and within weeks thousands of digital art works were being bought and sold for millions of dollars on the blockchain.

NFT projects like Crypto Punks, Board Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, NBA top shoot and CloneX are extremely popular.

But the NFT use cases have evolved and keep evolving. Now when you buy an NFT you not only buy the creative but also can get access to a community of people who have also bought into the project. Having access to this community comes with certain perks, like you get to hang out with the artist, you get an invitations to private events or get access to more work from the same artist first.

NFT use cases are constantly evolving, now music is being transformed into NFT's and I believe it's only a matter of time before someone develops an advertising use case. Brands like Nike, Taco Bell and the NBA are already adapting towards this change.

It's only a matter of time before more brands get on board and set their creative teams loose with software developers to create the new wave of Web3 advertising. Given the nature of the new web I predict the this new era of advertising will have to be extremely intelligent and oriented towards created real world social good in some way.