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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

97 subscribers in one week is pretty incredible, especially considering this newsletter only hit 300 subscribers last week. Special thanks to Michael Broughton! His LinkedIn post plugging the newsletter has brought a lot of new people here.

So if you’re feeling kind like Michael and want to give me an early Xmas present, I’d much appreciate you posting about it on your social channels!

PSA - this is the last newsletter of the year and will likely post the first one of the year on the 10th of January! Happy holidays to everyone and hope you have a great break.

🔌Plugs!🔌

🔌 I created a LinkTree to keep track of things I’m doing…when people ask me what I do, I’ll point them in this direction!🔌 An NFT art project I’m helping with is launching their 3rd collection on the 15th of December!

🔌 Early days, but if you're interested in getting ahead of the curve and sponsoring the newsletter - feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn. I've had some people reach out already, but I'll only accept those who I think will be genuinely engaging and benefit readers :)

Stories & projects of the week

Crypto Sponsorship in Sports…why is this different to other sponsorships?

There have been lots made of crypto sponsorships in sports throughout this year. There are a lot of people who think that sports entities shouldn’t be in ‘cahoots’ with entities that market unregulated assets.

To that I say, what about oil, gas, beer, tobacco and gambling brands?

What about democratised investing apps that allow people to buy stocks like AMC & Gamestop?Regulation is good, but it doesn’t always protect consumers. No one is giving you your money back if you longed Gamestop at the top.

Regulation in crypto will be good for this space, and it will come in time. It’s just that it will be, in the end, borderless and so will take a lot more time.

With all the above in mind, as I’ve said before, these aren’t just sponsorships.FTX have a 19 year deal with the Miami Heat, making their homes stadium the FTX arena on a 19 year deal worth $135m.That’s great commercially for the sports franchise.

But also, has anyone thought about the fact it could also be good for the fan?FTX gave a stadium full of people access to an NFT. For many, it’ll be their first one. That’s an incredibly powerful acquisition strategy. This is something most things just can’t offer at scale due to resources or lack of product/service that is fan worthy.

FTX here, are paying for virality and customers.That’s basically what any sponsorship agreement is. This is an incredible customer acquisition and engagement tool. The experiences that crypto entities can provide are pretty much like no other.But with any crypto entity, they have so many more levers to pull when it comes to engaging fans. The possibilities for them, are pretty much endless.In 2022, I think we’re going to see some absurdly creative marketing campaigns. NFTs are a blank canvas and pretty limitless in terms of what you can do with them, tech and platforms permitting. Creatives in marketing agencies are going to have field days when they get their heads around the range of possibilities here. When you next see a Crypto sponsorship that is large in numbers, don’t baulk at the size. Think about what those two entities could do together. I want to round off this bit by saying that there are bad actors and like in the previous newsletter, sports entities have a responsibility to really dig into partners that approach them. In the last newsletter, I wrote out a quick framework that would help most sports franchises figure out what to do when approached:

1. Who are the entity in question and are they reputable & legitimate?

2. What ways does this partnership actually add value to our fanbase and community?

3. Is this a money first partnership?

4. How authentic does this feel?

5. How are we going to provide education to the masses about what we’re partnering with?

6. Have supporters groups been talked to, in order to avoid bad optics?

These questions don’t require a lot of thinking or resource to answer. We’re going to see a lot of awesome things in 2022. On the other hand, I hope that Barcelona & Manchester City type blunders stop happening as sports brands sharpen up when it comes to dealing with crypto entities. These are waters that require smart and sensible navigation.

Crypto Deep Dive:…

Crypto Fans Rejoice, Gamers Revolt as Ubisoft Announces NFT Plans

On the 7th of December, Ubisoft announced that they were launching Ubisoft Quartz

Quartz will allow users to collect in-game NFTs called ‘digits’ - on one of their latest releases, Ghost Recon. Digits are unique, playable and feature an engraved serial number. They’re also tradeable and have provenance to show the history of owners for that specific Digit. Now obviously, there’s been a lot of controversies.

1. Gaming communities are up in arms, for a variety of reasons including environmental concerns

2. From their T&Cs, it kind of looks like the items are siloed and not tradeable/transferrable outside of the Quartz platform

3. Their YouTube trailer was taken off their official YouTube channel after 96% dislikes…

Before we get into some of this, this is not Ubisfoft’s first foray into the NFT space.Guess who was part of Ubisoft’s entrepreneur’s lab’s program in late 2019? None other than Sorare…Guess who created a Sorare game called one shot? None other than Ubisoft…

It’s fair to say, Ubisoft aren’t just jumping on a bandwagon here - they’ve been thinking about this for a long time.

Quartz is going to be backed by the Tezos blockchain, citing environmental concerns for the reason it was picked. This is interesting, but also not surprising. I really believe in a multi-chain future, much akin to what we have with cloud services in Web2. It also shows that from the outside in, people don’t really care about tribes. A lot of people believe a specific blockchain will lead the way for specific use cases, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty slim.

When it comes to the backlash - I’m pretty shocked by how little understanding, or want of understanding, the gaming community in general have when it comes to NFTs. I say shocked because a lot of people I've met at events & meetups are in fact game designers who love what NFTs could do to gaming. I was on a panel with someone making an NFT game for the BBC last week, for example.This is not going away because the loud few would rather shout from the rooftops about how bad for the environment NFTs are, or how dumb they are - whilst they sit at home with a £3000 desktop computer with which likely has generates more greenhouse emissions than any proof of stake solution.

One of the other points of contention was 2) the siloed nature of these in-game assets. But Cash App also built walls around their offering when they let consumers first buy Crypto. Now, you can buy, hold and send it where you want at will.

You can’t expect big companies to come out with the garden of eden. They’re going to plant a seed, and then iterate. Of course, I’m not saying here that Ubisoft will 100% open up that ecosystem, but I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

I've watched lots of takes on this by gamers/gaming content creators and every now and then they say "NFTs are dumb" or "NFTs are going to ruin gaming". It's beyond ignorant and the lack of willingness when it comes to taking time to actually understand what is going on continues to shock me.At the end of the day, NFTs are - for the most part - good for consumers. Especially, when it comes to gaming. These closed loops, siloed systems that make billions a year from consumers buying assets they use all the time in-game, but don’t own - will change. Regardless of the backlash, this isn't going to stop more and more entities from taking this space seriously.

More big stories & things to put on your radar

• It starts as a meme, then it becomes cringe. If you’re a fast follower, be careful.

• The Sports DAO, launched by CEO of SportsIcon Chris:

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’

• Nice thread by Kyle

• The CEO of Shopify just bought his .eth name for 30ETH….as they say in the industry: Probably nothing

• We’re really only at the beginning of what this means for people 

• Chris Dixon tweeting good things again

• Surface level stuff is not going to make it 

• PLT buy a pink bored ape…

Thanks!

Thanks for reading my first ever Sporting Crypto newsletter! If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends who might be interested - and share it on social :)