DPS Recap: How Decrypts Alanna Roazzi-Laforet Sells Advertisers on Blockchain-Based Branded Content
Considering the collapse of the crypto market, some publishers and advertisers may wonder if it is still worth investing in blockchain experimentation. But for crypto publisher Decrypt, this technology has been a key component of several campaigns it has sold to advertisers through its branded content studio, Decrypt Studios, over the past year.
DECIPHERING THE BUSINESS OF THE BLOCKCHAIN
- “I try to have fun when we do deals, so it’s not just a plug and play ad on our website.”
- “We don’t chase traditional [advertising] budgets on purpose. I really wanted to get away from that kind of sales because it’s a race to the bottom.”
- “IRL is so important, otherwise you’re just speaking into a vacuum. So [Web3] is not the same as antisocial. It just means you deal with things in a different way.”
— Decrypt’s CRO and President Alanna Roazzi-Laforet
“There is so much money in the market, though [Ethereum] is down and Bitcoin is down, it doesn’t matter because the technology is here to stay, Decrypt’s CRO and President Alanna Roazzi-Laforet said during her session on the first day of the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida. Advertisers in particular are doubling down on Web3, the metaverse [and] all the good things.”
The company earns just 10% of its revenue from display advertising, according to Roazzi-Laforet. The rest comes from a mix of sponsored content and the Decrypt Studios business, which ranges from creating NFT drops and custom digital art for clients to building both temporary events and permanent inventory for brands in the metaverse.
It may seem counterintuitive that advertisers are willing to spend on a larger scale; custom campaigns that are relatively experimental when the economic downturn has in some cases cut many experimental ad budgets to shreds. But the budgets used to pay for promotions through the studio are usually not from experimental advertising budgets. According to Roazzi-Laforet, who also co-founded Decrypt Studios, many of the campaigns extend advertisers’ brand events and educational campaign strategies.
Clients of the studio are not limited to Web3-native companies, such as cryptocurrency exchanges, as one might expect. PR and advertising agency Dentsu and film production and distribution company Neon are also on the client list.
Neon, for example, worked with Decrypt Studios to create a virtual movie premiere for the movie “GameStop: Rise of the Players” in the metaverse using the Spatial platform. Participants sat in digital Lamborghinis and were able to interact with each other after watching the film.
“The budgets we handle are more on the education side if it’s a traditional advertiser or an activation budget for a larger film,” Roazzi-Laforet said, pointing to another example of a campaign where her team created an e-learning course. which issued NFT certificates to participants who completed it.
Some of the campaigns, especially in the film and entertainment category, are created with a mission to represent underserved communities, and those marketing budgets are all crowdsourced or crowdsourced, she added. So the broader macroeconomic trends have made less of an impact on Decrypt Studios’ clients.
Advertiser KPIs come back to community and engagement, a core tenet of many Web3-focused projects. So Roazzi-Laforet’s team will create Discord channels and Telegraph chats for advertisers to try to foster conversation and hype around their clients’ pre-launch campaigns.
“You don’t need to target via pixels anymore because it’s an imaginary person half the time, right? We don’t pixelate our site – I don’t care about that. But I do care about the Discord channel, what’s the engagement? Who’s talking ? Who buys? Who comes back to be a brand loyalist?” said Roazzi-Laforet.
