Branding in emerging tech moves fast, breaks things and drags a lot of buzzwords along for the ride. But fame still matters. Trust still matters.

And the companies that win aren’t the ones shouting the loudest. They’re the ones people remember.

In this episode, Jacob and Matt sit down with Thumbcorp’s co-founders Dan Cushing and Diego Borgo to unpack what brand fame really looks like in the worlds of blockchain, Web3 and frontier technology.

Dan brings decades of creative and planning experience from Levi’s to Stella Artois to Vogue. Diego has helped global giants like adidas, Prada and Salesforce translate complex tech into stories the mainstream actually cares about. Together, they’re building Thumbcorp: an agency that sits at the intersection of visionary technology and the real world.

We get into:

• Why “Web3 branding” is a terrible label for a very real opportunity
• What founders misunderstand about hype, trust and community
• How brands can earn cultural relevance without burning credibility
• The role of memes, virality and storytelling in building fame
• The common mistakes tech companies make when trying to go mainstream
• How Thumbcorp approaches creating and sustaining fame
• The future of branding in the next wave of decentralised tech

If you care about brand, tech or the messy bit in between, this one’s worth your thumb-scroll.

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Transcript

Hi folks, welcome to this latest episode of JUST Branding. It’s great to have you along for the ride. Today, you’re in for a treat. We have got two of the founding members of Thumbcorp, an agency that delivers fame for visionary tech companies, sitting really at the intersection of visionary technology and the real world. So you’re in for a treat if you are interested in that space. It’s going to be really exciting.

We’ve got Dan Cushing with us and Diego Borgo. I’ve actually had the honor of working with both of them individually and collectively over the last few years. I know their level is through the roof. So you’re going to hopefully learn some really interesting, exciting things about brand building specifically in this tech space. So let me give you a couple of intros just so you know where they’re coming from. So first of all, Dan Cushing, he’s joining us today as a co-founder of Thumbcorp, Dan cut his cloth in publishing and ad land in the creative and strategic planning departments, working to some of the world’s biggest accounts from Stella Artois to Levi’s to Honda and Vogue.

And really that grounding has shaped how Dan sees brand. From there, he’s moved into business development, working on site and across the globe at the forefront of culture. Today Dan is building Thumbcorp, an agency as we’ve said, that’s really kind of making waves in that visionary tech space, bringing some of that visionary ideology into the real world. And we’ll no doubt tuck into that with you shortly, Dan. So welcome to you, Dan.

Lovely. Thanks, Matt.

All right. And then I’ll move on to Diego. Diego has joined us. He’s also an executive partner at Thumbcorp with over two decades of branding experience and eight plus years in blockchain. Diego helps tech founders go mainstream by translating complex products into narratives that people outside the bubble can understand. And he’s advised global leaders like from brands like Adidas, Prada, Salesforce, Unilever, MasterCard, Volkswagen, all of that law and more on navigating this mysterious Web3 territory while also partnering with projects such as Pith Network, Aptos, Cookie3 and Omni Network who are already in that space to kind of come more mainstream. So, beyond advertising, Diego is a global speaker sharing insights at Web Summit, Paris Blockchain Week, DMEXCO, I’ve probably said that wrong, BAM, Marketing Congress and more. And his content is reaching over 50 million plus worldwide. And beyond that, he is the guy you will know from his pink beanie. So, welcome Diego. It’s great to have you on the show.

Thanks Prada and there’s a hell of an intro.

There was.

That knocked my one completely out of the park.

That did.

It set the tone immediately.

I’ll try better next time.

Oh, he’s done one, whatever. Yeah. Basically, I’m your sidekick, Diego, in a nutshell. Amazing.

Love that. Love it. Cool. Well, look, chaps, thanks for coming on the show. Let’s tuck in to some stuff. First of all, tell us a little bit about this Thumbcorp. Weird name. What’s that all about? And how did that start? Maybe, Dan, I’ll direct that question to you, maybe, to start with.

Sure thing, buddy. Well, firstly, obviously, guys, thanks for having us on. Big fan of your show, first and foremost. So really looking forward to this conversation. How did Thumbcorp come about? Good question. So it’s been an evolution. I set my first shop up now, just coming up to four and a half years ago, under the name of Power Studio. And Power Studio was a result of my years in the game, as you’ve said, I cut my cloth in big ad land, and it took me into some phenomenal rooms. And I got to see firsthand just the true power of what great strategic thinking allied to next level creative outputs could do and how that could shift the dial. It took me around the world. I enjoyed a hell of a time. I came back to the UK. I’d seen a seismic shift in how advertising agencies were delivering for their clients. And it had really got into a bit of a production line, sort of sausage factory, almost. I got a gig on site, which was a real eye opener. It’s the first time I’d moved out of Ivory Towers and began to see just how brand operated at the coalface for a large, I think it was a large finance company. And I started to realize where it was failing, where it was going wrong. An opportunity presented itself to pick up a client, a large one. I brought with me a wildly talented commercial brain, a guy called Mick, who was able to really nurture me and get to the grips of how to get brand performing better for you, which is the name of the game, right? What is it adding to the bottom line? The idea being, when I set the first shop up, that I wanted to understand how we could build building blocks and how we could help reinvigorate brands with always the long-term goal of synthesizing the building blocks for brands, the brands that were either stagnating or looking to reinvigorate, but then allied to great creative outputs. I took it upon myself to just make that march up, barely washing my face to start with, to be quite honest. Then traction started to happen, and we got a lot of flow, and we were winning a lot of work in the scale up space. But certain problems started to happen reoccurringly, that they didn’t necessarily have the budget to keep us at the table to deliver those big creative outputs. Then piece by piece, as we were going, it took me into different rooms, two of which threw me into conversations and around the table with the man in the pink hat in the Web3 and emerging tech spaces, where it was safe to say suddenly ambition was met with the budget. And I was dancing a few times with Diego, we got, we managed to get our teeth into some really big chunky briefs for some clients that had wild ambitions. And I was able to synthesize the thinking from that original kind of positioning right through and calling my network to deliver some ground breaking creative outputs. And it was when we had that set of creatives around the table beginning of the year, we decided to go full pelt. And hence present day, where Thumbcorp was emerged and it made sense as we kind of went through that journey to keep Diego firmly at the table because his inputs have been wildly beneficial. So that’s where we are present day. Is there anything you wanted to add on that, mate?

Yeah, no, for me, it’s just exciting because obviously what we’ve been doing within Thumb is bringing the best of both worlds together. So if you look into being native to an industry like WebTree, Blockchain, Crypto, you name it, it’s very deep down the rabbit hole. I tend to say to people that there isn’t like a part time, there isn’t even a full time. It’s 24-7, it’s an industry that doesn’t stop. Every day there is something exciting, every day there is a scam, every day there’s a scandal, and it’s just all in. I tend to say like, I’ve been working with the largest brands in the world, as you mentioned before, and I also been working with a lot of different startups within e-sports and marketing tech, but I never found an industry that is so exciting as Blockchain, WebTree, Crypto. It’s just like, it’s the wild west, but it’s also extremely innovative. It’s breaking the mold, it’s trying to revolutionize many different things, including the global economy. And it’s just exciting. There is not a single day that you don’t meet anyone that doesn’t blow your mind or just kind of like make you think differently about it. So that’s kind of like where I’ve been natively since 2017. And as we got together, Dan is bringing his background, I’m bringing my background. And now that this industry is maturing slowly, but surely still far from perfect, but we’re seeing an opportunity where those companies are going to start trying to go mainstream, right? They’re going to start trying to the average, talking to the average. They’re going to start trying to find their ways into let’s call it the normal world. And that’s where a lot of them are struggling. That’s where a lot of them are failing because they’re trying to bring the same message, the same value propositions, the same benefits that worked within the bubble because it resonated with the tech heads, because it resonated with the DGENs as we call them. But, you know, outside of the bubble, nobody gives a f**k. And that’s why we’re here and that’s why we got together.

I’ve got two follow up questions. One for you, Dan, and one for you, Diego. Dan, you said you moved from Para Studio to Thumbcorp. Different name, obviously different intent and positioning. But what does Thumbcorp, where does that name come from? What does it stand for?

Good question. Yeah, that was in essence, we want to represent absurdity, right? Because absurdity is at lies at the very core of what shifts the dial for us. And we want to kind of live by the mantra of how we deliver brands. And brands should be associated, as we all know, to a meaning. Thumbcorp was the birth child of one of our great planners who conceptualized around the notion that what is a thumb? What does thumb serve as a kind of a vehicle? And thumb is your missing link. It’s your enabler. It allows you to grasp things that your forefingers simply cannot. And I think we’ve all struggled to date with understanding how we sell brands, right? Brand has got its own branding crisis, as we know. Let’s make a bit of fun at that. Let’s make a play on that. And that’s where the origins of thumb came from. And then the side swipe was really just around this wild world we live in about this corporate greed. So the corp was an extension more just as a tongue in cheek play than anything else. We are far from a big building with big gold lines out the front. The world does not need more of that. It certainly doesn’t. It needs the innovators. It needs the visionaries to tumble those guys. So it’s a kind of amalgamation, but at its core, it needs to celebrate absurdity and the power of creativity.

I love it. It’s such a cool name. When you first sort of talked to me about it a few years, well, a few months ago, well, years ago, might have been last year.

No, last few months it would have been, yeah.

A few months, yeah, I just thought it was such a clever idea, like this idea that businesses, they need their thumb, right? It’s going to be the brand which is going to help them grasp things and take grasp opportunities, I guess.

I just want to mention their site because it is absurd, right? It’s neon colors, big bloggy text, memes, gifts everywhere. It’s totally unique. So, yeah, just want to check that.

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, Jake. That was obviously a deliberate intent, as you can imagine. I’m sure you guys have suffered with this, right? Like branding agencies per se, we all tend to like to keep it very within the tram lines, which is absurd in itself, considering some of the amazing outputs everyone’s responsible for. And as a challenger brand, we know that we’ve got an uphill battle on our hands, right? We’ve got to get noticed. So all of that was intentionally considered. And if it brings a smile on people’s faces, then, you know…

A thumb with a rocket ship kind of like flames coming out of it, that got me smiling.

Yeah, you should definitely, folks, you should definitely sign up for the newsletter and all sorts of stuff, because it’s not only like really smart thinking, if I may say so, coming out of your studio and great outputs, but it’s just super fun. Like it is absurd, most of it. And that, as you say, gives a little smile to people’s faces. So check that out, folks. Right, but another question, Diego, some of our audience are not into Web3 and all that stuff. So I was just wondering whether we could kind of just sort of give a bit of a simple definition on what you see Web3 is. What is Web3?

Wow, ooh, it’s a philosophical question at the same time. How much time you got? Like a week?

It’s as simple as you can make it.

You know, you try to figure out the meaning of life. I mean, that’s kind of what we’ve been doing in this industry, you know, because everybody’s got a concept and everybody’s got a vision and nobody knows where he’s heading. So it’s quite funny. So like trying to make it super short and butchering, you know, 95 percent of the technicalities of it. I’m sure everyone has ever heard of Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin being obviously a cryptocurrency, but essentially gave birth to a technology called blockchain, right? Blockchain is nothing more than a ledger where information can be stored verified and is immutable, right? So you have transparency and see what’s being happening within that ledger. It’s immutable because once it’s, you know, written down, it can be changed. And it’s transparent because anybody can look into it, right? So that’s where all this thing happened. Bitcoin being a currency that has been built on top of it to two things. One, solve the problem of how do you start spending money digitally like you spend cash physically, which is if I give you 10 bucks in person, there is no middle man between us. But if I want to give you 10 bucks over the internet, there’s always someone in between, right? So that’s one of the problems that was set to solve digitally. And then the second problem as well is just being a counter movement against money printing and inflation and governments having control over fiat, aka dollar, euro, pounds, right? So everything started there. And then as it evolved, many, many, many different currencies have been issued. I think we have over than five million different cryptocurrencies right now, including a great majority of meme coins and coins that absolutely do nothing, if not speculation. And on top of that economy now, you start building applications, right? So you have the internet. If you think about how the internet has been evolving in its infancy, the internet was nothing else than just a database that you could read from, right? Like a newspaper. You get a newspaper printed, you look at it, you read, you couldn’t input, you couldn’t change, you couldn’t do anything. Evolved to what we call Web2, where you can input, you can create a blog piece, you can upload a piece of content. What we are doing right now is essentially that, right? We are creating information within the web. So instead of you just consuming it, now it’s two-way. You can consume it, you can create. The third layer which Web3 has been posing to add value to is the element of ownership, right? So you can consume, you can create, but you don’t own anything, right? Everything is owned by either a middleman or big tech or anybody else. Whatever you put out there is not ours, it’s not yours. So that layer of being able to leverage blockchain technology as a way to publish something on a ledger creates an element of giving ownership to people over whatever they are creating digitally, right? This is one part of the thing. The second part of the thing is because cryptocurrencies as internet money as we call or digital money as we call are used for people to transact digitally. Now there is a way on which you have your coins within your digital wallet and you can interact with applications within the web through your wallet and therefore that’s how you can move money around and that’s how you can pay for applications, how you can get paid through applications, right? And all those applications are being built on, for example, Ethereum or other types of blockchain that enable things to be built upon them, right? So it’s almost like a new infrastructure and a new layer that is being built on top of the already existing tech stack that is supposed to create that third element, which is ownership, you know, that comes on top of everything else that currently exists. So that’s the simplest, fastest and less techy way it could potentially, you know, bring it true. There’s a lot of things to steal that obviously are far from perfect. It’s a very early and immature industry, but if you keep an eye on what’s happening and it’s changing very, very fast, especially this year, you’re seeing that, you know, this thing is not going anywhere.

Nice, nice. Jacob, you’ve dabbled a little bit in Web3. Like what’s your sort of take on what Diego said?

That’s a tough one. He’s so much deeper. And yeah, I got excited when I first heard about blockchain and crypto and Web3, and I ended up co-founding a company when that all came out. And then that kind of crashed. We all, we just had too many chefs in the kitchen and it was, there was too many, too many there. So we kind of put that aside and it was good while it lasted. But I got really excited about the whole, whole idea of it. And yeah, that’s why I started the company, but yeah, it just didn’t work out.

Can I just interject? Because I mean, I’m, just so everyone knows that I am not a native to that space, right? I am a bonafide kind of normie through and through to my bones. I have bits of tech, then I probably use the capabilities up to about 5%. So when I hear Diego, and I’ve been in this space now 18 months, I would say two years. And when I hear Diego talk and explain it like that, the battery still drop out the back of my head slightly. It is a complex and he’s done a really good job about taking the weight out of it. But just from my perspective coming in, Web3 represents, it is the future in some shape, way or form of how we transact, how we own and how we can begin to build equity in our own data and our own kind of essence of who we are. It’s about retaining and taking back control, is how I look at Web3. All of the various multi kind of layers, etc. Then it becomes an extremely complex proposition. But the core of it, that’s what I, when I think of Web3 and Blockchain, that’s what really lights me up. Because from an ideological perspective, it is doing something fundamentally to shift the power of control essentially, and that’s more.

The company that I started was actually to help educate other, or creatives in particular, that was an issue we’re trying to go after, to help educate them on Web3 and the benefits of it, and how crypto and blockchain is integrated with it all, and how artists and creatives can actually utilize that. But like I said, it didn’t work out, but it was a really complex subject, and that was the biggest barrier, just people didn’t understand it, and we wanted to simplify that and create courses for creatives to understand it better.

Yeah, maybe it was just timing, Jacob. Maybe it’s…

It was so early, and then the NFT bubble popped, and it was just like there was a big crash, and yeah, people parted ways, and you just couldn’t get things done, we didn’t have the proper team, so yeah, it was time-

I think that’s a really big gap in the market, Jacob, to be honest with you. I think that’s worth having a chat about and looking at, because I think there’s a huge need for that. This isn’t going anywhere anytime soon either, that kind of infancy period, and oh, is this gonna work? Is this test? There’s too much now invested, you know, GDPs from around the world, like this is, in order for this to suddenly evaporate and vanish, it would have seismic consequences. So yeah, worth it.

All right, we’ll put that down. If you’re building a brand and wanna do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live masterclasses and a crew of brand builders who’ve got your back. Get on the wait list now at joinbba.com. Now back to the show.

When you think of that space and the work that Thumbcorp are doing in that space, and the work, Diego, you’re doing in that space as, say, a consultant advisor as well, I guess it’d be quite helpful to think through, well, how is branding working in that space? I mean, we’ve touched on it a little bit, but does it differ much from, say, more traditional markets? And what are you seeing? What are the brands that are emerging, and how are you helping them?

Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s twofold, right? So, if you look into what Jacob was saying around that whole crazy hype around NFTs and Metaverse and WebTree that started, let’s say, mid-2021, and the work I’ve done with Adidas obviously was a part of, a big part of it because it was a big sign-off. Once we’ve done Into the Metaverse, which was an NFT product that we sold 24 million euros in 24 hours, every single Fortune 500 brand in the world had someone in their organization that was excited about crypto for years, like myself, trying to find something to bring into the company, but never really finding the right angle. Now, that thing was like a slide that they could put in front of the board and say like Adidas is doing, has been successful. We need to move into that space. So that whole bull run started off like out of the Fortune 500 brands, I would say that 80 to 85 percent have done something in that industry. That being like just a pilot PR bullshit or gone really deep the rabbit hole, for example, like Shell, a company that I also worked with, that has an eight year plus blockchain team in house, focused on how they are shifting a lot of their energy products on chain and leveraging this type of technology to create new revenue models. So from A to Z, everything has happened. That was the time still where those brands are trying to come into the industry. They’re trying to understand, they’ve seen the trend, they’ve seen the opportunity, they’ve seen the money, they’ve seen the new spark, and that has faded and that has shifted. A lot of that has been focused on consumer facing, right? So how we make a product that consumers can buy, a product consumers can interact. And what we are seeing now is rather the other way around, right? This element of the Fortune 500 is right now through much more legislation or pipeline or kind of like the pipes and the infrastructure that is being built. Stablecoins is obviously a great example where a lot of companies are looking to, that’s what’s happening. Those companies are approaching our industry from a different angle, right? It’s institutional, it’s a supply chain and things in that direction, right? So this has changed on how big major brands are looking to the industry. And then on the other side of the equation, you have Web3 native companies that are one, selling within the bubble and working within the already existing customers that are native to this audience. But also, you have another photo of that, which are companies that are trying to go mainstream, right? So I just wanted to paint that picture before we dive deep into like the difference in the nuances of branding. But that’s kind of like the overall landscape that you’re working with, right? Now, there is a major difference on how those big brands are coming to the space and also how those native brands are going mainstream, right? Because they’re kind of like doing that. We see it in that intersection, right? We bring big brands into the space like I’ve done before Fortune 500. But also, we’re bringing those native companies into the mainstream through things around fame and everything that we’ve been talking before, which obviously we’re going to tackle a bit deeper. So, with that in mind, what is interesting within how brand is being built natively within the bubble is that a lot of times founders are mostly focused on how they can get attention, which is very funny because even the terminologies are funny. Everything that everybody is measuring right now in marketing in Web3 is around how much people are talking about them. So, everything happens in crypto Twitter is essentially a part of X right now that people spend most of their time on. And everything is around mindshare. So, that’s the metric. So, how much people are talking about this project, how much Kay Wells, which is a key opinion leader, is essentially influencers are talking about this project, and how much of that is being spoken on the timeline. So, how much of that is being measured. So, a lot of that is being posed around essentially this KPI. Also, there’s other things like how many people are using the application, how many people are actually on chain, transacting and being there present. But a lot of how the brand is being built is within the bubble. It’s how we talk to people that are already here, how we try to sell or convert people that are using other applications or in other chains, how I steal audience from that chain to my chain. So, it’s very like cannibalism-like, because everybody’s fighting for the same eyeballs within the bubble. What very few are understanding in being able to do so is how they expand beyond it, how they go and prove value to people that are not inside of the bubble, how they go there and grab new audiences into this bubble. That’s the consistent challenge, because as you guys were saying before, it’s still very difficult for people from outside to understand the value on this product. But then when you try to sell to them, a lot of them don’t know how to speak their language or how to translate benefits. That’s the challenge slash opportunity that we face every day, but we are also seeing that once you’re able to translate especially value, then you’re going to start creating this flow into how you’re growing the industry, how you’re getting more people to get their hands on the product. And the other way around as well is how those brands that are coming to the space are coming here to help growing the space rather, and also how they can translate to their already existing audience, the Web2 people that know nothing about it, they don’t care at all, on how the experience can be better, or new products can be created, or new business model can be created.

Nice.

I guess that segues that idea of attention to this concept of fame, which I really want to get us to. Dan, what are your thoughts on what Diego said, and how does that translate into the way that Thumbcorp helps to build fame for brands?

Yeah, it’s an interesting topic. I think coming from the outside looking in, when I’ve walked into the Web3 space, that there’s a couple of key factors at play, which distort how we would particularly define what brand building is. First and foremost, this is a wildly overcapitalized sector and market in itself. So as we know, human beings, if you plunk them in a situation where the rewards are so gargantuan in such a short amount of time, it elicits a level of greed, undeniably, that happens. That’s not to say every company out there is doing that, far from it. There were some real genuine bonafide visionaries who are committed to adding utility to the bottom of their thing. But the challenge I’ve faced is getting to grips with, are people actually concerned with brand building? Or are they more just concerned with, let’s get as many eyeballs as what Diego spoke about? How they’re measuring those eyeballs is no consequence, 99% of the time, because they’ll have a token associated with it. They’ll have some sort of monetary short-term reward. Now, that blurs the lines fundamentally from where I sit as a traditionalist in terms of what and how you guys would present that in terms of what is the requirements, because the need might just simply not be there. They might be saying out loud, oh, we want to build this, we want to give back, and we want to kind of cross the chasm. But in actual fact, what they really want to do is just build something that is going to give them gigantic returns and then shut it down. A lot of the time that can happen. But what we’re starting to see from the brand building perspective is the companies that we’re talking to, those people that do have the bonafide utility. The biggest education piece that exists is making people aware of the difference between hype and fame, as we say. So are you becoming famous for a legacy? Are you becoming famous for something that outstrips what your product does? Are you committed to a single promise? Is there something you can stand by resolutely that you can defend, scale and own? Now, just by kind of introducing that as a concept, what you do is you start to level the playing field and it kind of reduces your market. And it’s taken us a lot of time to kind of sieve through that and see where they stand. But I would say that takes out a large percentage of who we talk to, because hype exists for a reason, right? And if KOLs are putting t-shirts of their product on and they’re pumping the token value by X amount, that’s sometimes all they need. We get that. We’re not here for those people. We’re here for those utility makers. We’re here for the guys that are looking and saying, right, how do we become meaningfully different to the people outside of our bubble, who understand that the easy wins within the jar will only take us to a certain threshold? And that requires a different lens. So when we talk about fame, sure, there’s a prosperity angle to that, but it’s also about your legacy. It’s about understanding how are we positioning ourselves in people’s minds that is meaningfully different, that we can go on the defensive and the offensive about. And as often as not, that creates a bit of a cultural tension, because it’s a new concept for these companies to have to get their heads around. You know, can you imagine if you were a scale up in our scale up world, in normie world, in Web2 world, scale up to reach a threshold of say, they turn over 15, 20 mil and then they might look for investment, et cetera, et cetera. These guys can pull and trade up to 500, a billion, with really lean teams. So that cultural point of tension becomes a fascinating topic because you’re really dealing with, okay, how committed are you to this? How truly committed are you? The rewards are great because it means that we get to work with some phenomenally brilliant visionaries. But I can’t deny that it’s kind of had to kind of, I’d say to almost half our market audience because so many are chasing those short term wins.

How are you telling the difference between hype chases and fame chases?

Yeah, it’s been a journey, hasn’t it, Diego? Yeah, it’s been a journey. Yeah, I’ll just pick up on that quickly. Diego’s obviously much more in tune with what he could look for. But when I walked into that space, Jacob, we were going into a lot of rooms where on the surface, people were saying the right things, and then it always invariably came down to, okay, well, if we didn’t do that part and we just shortcut it to there, and we got eyeballs and we got eyeballs, and then you’d want to find out, have you got a token in the pipeline? Does your token need reinvigorating, for instance? Are you looking for numbers for numbers sake? These could be big red flag questions that would dictate to us, okay, what is the commitment around the table to build something of real substance, as opposed to the fly by shooting stars? Dee, I don’t know if you’ve got more to add on that particular subject.

Yeah, I think it’s, look, we obviously don’t work just with blockchain and Webstreet companies as Demo is saying, right? It’s a market that is still very immature, it’s small and it’s evolving, it’s going to grow and it’s undeniable. But I think that the whole conversation is a tech brand problem challenge as a whole, right? Because what happens is whenever you are working within this tech environment, and we’re talking about emerging tech, right? We’re talking about immersive experience, we’re talking about blockchain, crypto, Webstreet, you’re talking about even AI, right? It’s hyperfunded, hypercapitalized as Demo is saying, but most importantly, 99% of the people building within those industries are tech heads, right? They are in because of the tech, they love the tech, it’s all they can think about, it’s all they care about, and that’s it. So, they’re so focused on that, that even thinking about how the rest of the world perceives it, it’s just impossible for them to understand, right? A lot of times we sit in front of tech founders and we start talking about brand, and you just see their eyes just kind of like looking, staring at the screen, they don’t even grasp what we’re talking about, right? They cannot even imagine it, at the same way as when they start explaining how their product works from a code perspective, from the technological perspective, and all of it, right? So, once you zoom out to that overall emerging tech bubble, the way that those guys are approaching brand is the same way they approach product. They need an MVP. If it doesn’t work, they people. It doesn’t work, they people. They throw money at it, they throw devs at it, and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but brand doesn’t work that way, right? It’s totally different. You’re not trying to find product market fit through your brand. You’re trying to find product market fit through the features, through the thing that your product actually does. But essentially, the problem you’re trying to solve or the vision you’re selling or the story you’re telling, it’s regardless to how that product is going to work in a way, right? So that translation part is what they struggle a lot with. And they’re just like, yeah, we changed the name, we changed the logo, we changed this, we changed how we talk about, we changed the narrative. We don’t care about this. I don’t think we need it. We don’t even need the brand. I mean, look at what Elon Musk is doing. They’re against brand as well. They don’t run any ad or anything. So you always fall into those type of conversations where they don’t even know what good looks like. So that’s one thing that Dan and I keep going back to, especially if the AI is lopped right now. How many people now come to me like, look at this ad, dude, it’s so cool. I spent half an hour to do it and I don’t need to pay agencies anymore. And they send to me like, yeah, that’s crap. I understand that it’s making easy for you to do it, but it’s the same for me, vibe coding an app and sending to you as a developer or a tech developer and saying, oh, look, I just coded an app and you’re going to find a thousand of bugs and a thousand of security elements and a thousand of issues within that app. Does it mean that I can code an app? Yes, it does. Does it mean that’s good? Does it mean that’s safe? Does it mean it’s going to work? Probably not. So that’s kind of like the conversation that we’re having all the time, which I think it comes back to a lot of element of the mentality of tech heads that are building within it.

And just another point, I suppose, to crystallize, Jacob, it hasn’t really tremendously changed from Birnbach famously said many moons ago, one of the godfathers of modern advertising, that all good advertising, if your product is not good, all good advertising is going to do is make you fail faster. Okay, because it’s just a shine of light and the masses are going to realize that you’re selling s**t. So, invariably, what we look for at that interrogation stage is, if you’re not either able to describe to us how you are of meaningful benefit to the end user here outside of JUST Driving bottom line, you’re signaling to us you are a hype merchant of some description, you know, or if you can’t land on that grain of sand description, are you at least showing a commitment to want to go through that distillation process? Because as we all know on this call, that takes a lot of work to get to that point. That will soon shuffle out those that are just virtue signaling to some degree and those that are truly committed to it. Love it.

Cool, well, in terms of like that world, what does brand fame then really mean? Like, what does that really mean in this world of emerging tech, in this world of Web3? How would you sort of describe a brand that has got brand fame, if you like?

It comes down to being meaningfully different. That’s what fame should be all about. It should be anchored to a position in people’s minds, as we know. The best technology is not gonna be the one that wins. It will be the best technology with the best story, told, crucially, the most engaging and entertaining way. That’s what will win. And when we talk about fame, that’s the name of the game here. It’s about, we can’t fabricate fame unless it’s anchored to a promise that can be committed to. That is of going to be meaningfully different to its audience. That kind of renders whether you’re second to the market with the second best products and second in media spend, you are increasing your chances of winning long-term, if that is why you’re there. Are you making yourself easy to buy? Has it been understood? Not only what they want from the technology, what they’ll get from their attention, but is the emotional benefit of the technology and what it can provide, is that being laid out? So that’s essentially framing what fame is and the difference between the fame and the hype. It’s that piece that, and in order to do that, that anchoring to a position in your people’s minds, that’s the bit that requires the commitment from them, from our partners.

Can we get an example of that, perhaps? Yeah, for sure.

I mean, we could talk about ones that we’ve done ourselves, if that would be of use. So, I mean…

Yeah, let’s do it.

Yeah, the Pith Network were a great example of a leading DeFi specialist data provider who came to us and we repositioned them the back end of the last year. We worked collectively on that. Dave was an exec partner at the time. Matt came in on that job as well. And we had to get to grips with understanding about what was that key core thing that you did that doesn’t have to be necessarily in terms of a product delivery system. But what do you do and how do we want to position ourselves as we’re jumping the chasm into the normie world, into the TradFi world, into the institutional world that you want to be associated with. And through a lot of distillation and understanding about certain narratives were being upheld because the market leader was dictating a certain pace of the narrative, we had to reroute and look for where the category plot twist would exist to take us to a grain in the sand. So if we refer to it like a, for instance, an egg timer, if you imagine that an egg timer is upside down and all the grains of sand are at the top of that egg timer. As we’re going through that process of distillation, we are looking to simplify the ampoule. By getting landing at that one grain of sand, then it’s the key moment to turn it upside down and amplify the simple. And that positioning piece, we landed around purity, which is what that branch should represent. That then dictates the pace of how all outwardly facing comms will look, for instance, how all future campaign work will look, for instance, how it will dictate the product launches, because they have to be upholding that one single promise in order to then become similarly attractive to institutions, to partners, to bridge the gap between DeFi and TradFi. It has to have a category over here of its own, but anchored to a product truth that they could stand by. In that particular instance, that was about how they collated their data. So it needs to satisfy the product truth, the customer need, and where the opportunity in the market sits.

So where is the fame coming into that? Because from my perspective, it sounds like a traditional brand strategy project. So I’m just trying to select the…

So in terms of the fame, we then blow that up, Jacob. So it’s about how we synthesize. So that was one in a sprint in terms of how we position, and then we blow that up with through and above the line campaign work, which is due to launch this autumn. So that will be about looking and saying, okay, from with maintaining your existing audience within the communities in the Web3 space, we need to keep that lights on kind of performance related and engaging with your communities. But we need a big idea. We need a campaign that’s going to reach the eyeballs across the pond, so to speak, in the Web2 territory. Nothing in terms of that delivery mechanism is revolutionary by any stretch. Like this is like a synthesized process that AdLand has been running for quite some time. The difference being that we can’t alienate our existing communities. We’ve got to make sure that however we reposition one of these kind of leading Web3 specialists, it still has to synergize with their existing market. And that’s when we get the kind of the polarized difference of audiences. So, fame has to exist outside of just a simple campaign. As we know, it has to still be of meaningfully different. And that’s where the nuances come on board.

Are you able to talk about any of the activation sort of work, Dan? Or is it still too early?

It’s still too early on that, I’m afraid.

Folks, I’ve actually seen some of it because I got a little peek behind the curtain. So, I will not speak on it. But when it comes out, definitely check out Thumbcorp’s website over the coming months, because it will blow your socks off. Dan can’t really talk about that and Diego, because they don’t like to blow their own trumpets.

It will be pure.

Having seen it, well, it will take it in an absurd and strange direction that you will never imagine right now. So, just check out the portfolio work for Thumbcorp when that comes through. But yeah, it’s based on purity, but that particular launch campaign that I’m thinking of is specific around some key value propositions, and it’s going to drive a lot of eyeballs. So yeah, enjoy folks when it comes out.

And Dan, that kind of like helped me think about fame where you’re talking out like the differences between Web2 and Web3 audiences where you had to talk to both audiences at the same time and bridge that pure idea or the grain of sand, as you mentioned. So it makes sense to both audiences. So yeah, I look forward to seeing that launch.

There’s one thing that’s really, really particular to this industry, which I have never seen ever in such a big scale. In any other sector industry that I worked with before, which is the amount of different audiences that you’re speaking at the same time.

Wow, yeah.

The minimum amount, it’s five. Totally different audiences, right? So let me walk you through real quick, and I think that’s a good bridge for them to jump on it. So one of them is going to be the token holders, right? Essentially people that have bought the token. In this case, PIFT token, people bought the token because of any reasons, right? Whatever the motivation is behind it, you need to speak to them, right? Because they’re essentially, in the normal world, it would be your shareholder, almost like. The second one is the community, right? People that are deep, they leave your product. Their profile picture is about your product. The only thing they talk about is their product. Their identity is your product. They almost have like coat-like mentality, right? A lot of people talk about Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. They just talk about Bitcoin. They wear Bitcoin merch. They don’t touch any other cryptocurrency. Their identity is being a Bitcoiner. They introduce themselves to you as a Bitcoiner, right? Like I literally met a guy last week. I was like, bro, what you do for a living? I’m a retired Bitcoiner. Like that’s how they position themselves, right? And their whole life revolves around that. So you have that community, which, you know, he is a token holder, but more than just a token holder, he’s like a core community member. They provide value, they build stuff, they’re everyday there where the community is, they hang out. You need to talk to them, right? And then you have partners, people that you want to bring into the ecosystem, that being from any sort of realm, right? That can be WebTree native, that can be outside of WebTree, that can be a brand, that can be a sports team, that can be whatever, right? That’s kind of like your B2B play. Then you have, in many case, because this industry is very kind of like capital slash financial oriented in Peev’s case, we also have TradFi, right? Which is traditional finance. So you’re talking to banks, you’re talking to institutions. They are not your partners because they might be a client, but they also might be a partner, right? So you have a totally different way on which you’re going to translate and talk to them. And then you have also DeFi, which is decentralized finance, which are the people that are building the rails within that industry, per se, right? So I could expand this to probably two more, but regardless of what you’re doing in this industry, you’re talking to at least five different audiences, right? Which I just walk you through there. They have totally different expectations, right? And that obviously adds a big level of complexity on how you keep that one grain of sand that Dan was alluding to and how you sort of like, you know, expand that and how you create messages that resonate with each and all of them based on where they are at in the journey and what they’re expecting from you, right? That I don’t know if that helps to kind of like build where you were going, but I just wanted to highlight that because it’s very, very unique to this industry.

Yeah, that’s super helpful.

Really helpful. Yeah, I think just in answer to Jacob, the last point, obviously the complexities of the messaging and how that translates, that’s, you know, commonplace in lots of different audiences and lots of different tech firms. But like Diego was saying, we have to ensure when we’re delivering the fame that it’s working in such polarized worlds, that it can still stack back up and leads what that big kind of fame-driving idea means and represents. Although to people like ourselves, that might sound logical and make a lot of sense and say, okay, well, that follows a classic kind of pathway and synthesize thinking. What we’re noticing in emerging tech spaces is there’s a big knowledge gap at play here and hype will only take you to a certain point, that soft sell, that kind of mini-vanilla hype will crash and burn. But how do we take our existing audience that is so wildly different to the one that we want to talk to and merge those two together? And it’s at that point, the fame-driving concept needs to be able to unpack and unify and unite to make them stronger moving forward. That’s a nuance that I haven’t come across before.

Yeah. All right. So just be interested in your advice, I guess, to people in that space. Let’s say I’m a founder or I’m working on a brand in that space. Like, how would you… You’ve talked about the need for this fame-driving idea and like… But how do you go about getting it? Like, and how do you know you’ve hit on it when you find it, right? Any thoughts on that?

Okay. Well, I think early stage founders, depending on what stage you’re at there, Matt, really, I think you’ve got to make sure that there’s first and foremost, and going back to that point, you’ve got to make sure that the product is delivering. Have you got a promise that you can commit to first and foremost? Otherwise, all you’re going to do is shine a light on something that you can’t stand by. We’re seeing so much hyperbole and so much hype, AI agentics, how AI is going to come in and do X, Y, and Z. But it’s understanding what the fundamental differences are on motivations, on where those seismic, those kind of semotic plot twists could exist within categories as well. How can you begin to understand what that truth is, first and foremost, looking also similarly about, I think what we tend to see a lot of the time is people’s concentration, too much focus as well we know on products, benefits and services. Now, tech is the great equalizer and all it’s going to do is keep flattening everything to its single point, where everybody’s going to be trading in exactly the same type of river. What we encourage those scaling people to do is look two things. What is it that you want the products to become famous for? What can you stand by? What is that commitment? But secondly, where does a twist exist within? It can be within category, it can be within company, it can be within the culture, it can come in many different forms, but how can you own a category plot twist that you can then begin to build a narrative around? Storytelling is the most wildly overused term I’ve tended to find in branding, modern day branding. We’ve been telling stories in branding since advertising began and not everything has to have a story associated with it. Stunts can exist, but the stunts needs to ladder against a position in people’s minds. The positioning should come first in terms of what is that one thing you want people to associate yourself with and then allow you to move. And we’re not anti-hype, we’re not anti-stunts, we’re all for all of those things, but they need to be stacked on top of each other, otherwise they’re just more digital landfill of noise upon noise upon noise. Like a good example of that would have been, do you remember Artisan? They ran a campaign about six months ago, where they suddenly went out to the tube stations and they attacked AI replacing the human being, right? So they did it as a pure stunt, and I get why it was eyeballs and it drove and it went viral. But when you started looking underneath that, I couldn’t see the correlation between what they were attempting to position that brand as. Was it anti-humans? Was it pro-humans? I didn’t really quite understand. So it became a stunt that went viral for a stunt stake, and we’re seeing a gargantuan amount of this. So what we’re encouraging emerging tech companies to do is to go, look, obviously, we need eyeballs. We get that. We’re attacking apathy in many different ways, and in our experience, the best way to attack apathy is through absurdity. So stunts will play their part, but get that position anchored from a position of truth. Then begin to weave in your narratives to this, because otherwise, it just all turns into yet more longer form of stunts. And I think storytelling needs a kind of repositioning in that regard to what is the end goal here? What is the point of this? What is the point of this brand story that I’m telling? If it isn’t meeting a key or addressing a key kind of twist on a motivator, then is it going to land? Is it going to create that emotional connection that we’re looking for?

Love it. Great stuff. We’re coming to the end of our time, so I wanted to just do a quick fire, real quick fire round. So this is not like long sentences. This is just like as succinctly as you can put it. Got about five questions. Are you ready to go?

Yes.

Good.

So first question, firstly to you, Diego, which brand in blockchain Web3 is getting it right?

Coinbase.

Dan?

Yeah, I go along with that 100%, not just to echo him. I am impressed by Speedchain. That’s a great example of like, I was kind of a bit queried, a lot of their sideways partnerships, but how they’ve unfolded that brand and how they’re leading to kind of further deals, that’s very cleverly done. They’ve got some really bright minds around that as well.

Awesome. All right, Dan, one word to describe branding in Web3.

Schizophrenic.

See? Inexistent.

It’s schizophrenic and non-existent.

Sounds like a very bad condition. Right.

Right here.

Yeah. All right. All right. The biggest myth about blockchain or Web3 branding that you’d bust.

You go first on that, Dan.

The myth is that everyone in the industry think that people still don’t get it. It’s kind of like, oh, they don’t get it one day. Once they get it, they will come. Like, no, they won’t get it because they don’t need to. It doesn’t matter. You don’t understand how AI works, but you use every day.

Yeah, I would just echo that and another myth is that simple language on its own is not going to do the job. Everybody has reduced it down to let’s just say things that everybody can understand, and they’re missing a fundamental key core component that you are not hitting a motivator. You are not attacking the person behind or really digging into the behavioral science behind this. I think that’s a myth that needs dispelling big time.

All right. I’ve got another one. Where is your go-to source of inspiration? Start with you, Dan.

I’m an avid reader, so I will read. If I want to be reminded about the power of the vitality of words, I’ll pick up Charles Bukowski. He never fails to deliver about just how he lives in the cutting edge. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, but all his work is right at the cutting edge of the down and outs in America during some depressing times, but he was this wild, like modern day Hemingway. And his nuances of how he understands people and how he can bustle and look at people and just capture the essence of somebody is delicious. And he has a really incredible way to be a rough and tumble kind of psychologist, and it’s exquisite.

It’s a really good question. I mean, I’m all over the place through podcasts, YouTube feed, yeah, newsletters, all the both, yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Just get flooded and filtered.

What’s good?

One piece of advice you’d give to founders trying to build brand fame today.

Call us.

Yeah, love that.

Done.

Mic drop.

I just, I always circle back around the point. I’ve just probably made it five times, Jacob. Like, understand you’ve got a truth you can stand by, for goodness sake, you know, just because. And be aware that, you know, human beings will pick up your piece of tech and they will bend it and they will use it and they will do things with it that you have not expected them to do. So be agile to that and remember that in that kind of dev room, it’s going to look wildly different out in the world. So at least be committed to standing by a promise and a truth. We need more of that. We need less hype crap that’s coming in the world. You know, we really do.

Folks, it’s been an awesome conversation. My mind has been blown multiple times. If folks want to kind of connect with you after this, follow up, kind of follow you, what’s the best way of everybody kind of keeping track of what Thumbcorp are up to? Dan, got any handles you want to drop or places we can go?

So follow us obviously on LinkedIn as our primary channel. You’ll find us on there. Diego’s prolific on LinkedIn, myself as well. We are doing road shows. We’ve got numerous upcoming events which we post regularly about on our socials as well. And check us out at thumbcorp.com.

Yeah, and you might see me in some of those.

The newsletter you mentioned as well before. I think it’s, yeah, rule of thumb. Can definitely put the links on the show’s note.

I love that name.

It’s good. Yeah.

So, well, let’s wrap it there then, folks. Thank you so much. And everybody listening, thank you for tuning in. I hope you found this conversation as interesting as myself and Jacob have. And, you know, wish you all the best. Have a great day and see you on the next episode. Cheerio. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks, guys.

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