Jaime Schwarz
Appearances
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Gen Z onward spends more on their digital clothing than they do on their physical clothing. I'm not saying we're all going to be wearing just digital clothing in 10 years. I am saying they're going to be the same thing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
But then you also have all these problems with blockchain by itself. It's an arrow. It's a receipt that points to a file. And that's it. The only thing that came after that was smart contracts, which had royalties, which had like a little bit of rules. What I created was a grouped asset NFT.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I wonder. We can go down a brand naming exercise if we want.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I said, what if this is a master NFT that holds all the assets it needs across formats, across digital rights management, across provenance, value-adding provenance, adding utility and sentimental value like social value, so that it by itself has that same object permanence that all physical goods did, but with all those benefits of digital.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And then I had to wait and sit for five years because it was pending for that long.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Yeah, that's the promise that I was reaching for that NFTs just weren't delivering on their own. NFTs really are story baskets. What story is that object holding? And if you look behind me, this is a, right there, that's a sketch of Albert Einstein that was done on the boat from London to England in 1942 as a refugee.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. We are the first small town north of New York City. So I can get there in 12 minutes flat, but there's only 8,000 people in my town.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
It was passed down from my great aunt to my mother, sorry, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me. And we all have these in our houses where we have this story. It's an oral tradition that goes with the object. And it adds so much value, but it's just, you know, us having to hold that. Now the object can hold it. That's why Mark is starting in the art space.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
That's why I've been building in art because provenance is key. But apply that to a Nike sneaker. We have the sneaker heads. You buy a sneaker not to wear it, but to gain value from it, enjoy it while you have it, and then sell it on. You're not a consumer. You're a prosumer, somebody who consumes and then produces, adds value and passes it on. That's the supply chain not ending.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
That's the assembly line of value add continuing on. You put the NFTs in there. StockX is doing this. It's not like I'm inventing anything here. But you're enabling everybody with a transaction to be somebody who adds value. So these products get more and more valuable over time. Not like a circular economy where it's like, can we just survive it and get it to the next person?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
But actually a never-ending assembly line of value. That's where we can go.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
It is a real world asset as a digital twin. Buy that physical good, but make sure you have the digital twin of it that you're also going to be wearing in Fortnite or Roblox or whatever. Gen Z onward spends more on their digital clothing than they do on their physical clothing. I'm not saying we're all going to be wearing just digital clothing in 10 years.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I am saying they're going to be the same thing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Yeah, so you want the value of both places. I want the provenance of me going, wearing an awesome something to a red carpet thing, and then there's a PO app that says I was there. But more and more, there are these awesome events online that I want to bring the same story baskets to and gain provenance there.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And that's what centralized platforms should be focused on, being amazing hosts that have great stories for us to add to our products. There's a lot of money to be made in there, but not through control.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
right scarcity through the unlimited potential of bespoke customization um so if you have this you know the world where you go into where you know you're you're doing building something for free you're not building something for free that's a freemium model where they're getting you hooked and the value is you're going to pay eventually Or you are the product because there's advertising involved.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
They didn't let the... It's a...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And that centralized platform is using your attention and the attention economy to hold you. Just look at the invisible hands of the market. Google really meant it when they said, don't be evil. But the invisible hand of the market didn't. Send them the other way. It doesn't matter what you say. It matters where the market's going to send you because that's where the incentives are.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Come on back up. We got Sleepy Hollow. We got the old mansions. It's so much fun up here, man. Jamie, I mean...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So how can we change the incentives? You've got to move off a KYC economy where we know people to a KYP economy where the main characters are the products that keep going on. Then your marketing is all about making an awesome product that's a canvas for everybody to keep reusing, a story that everyone wants to be a part of.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I really, really want to get a stormtrooper with no background and build an amazing background backstory for my stormtrooper and then meet up with other stormtroopers and create some sort of reality show or whatever online. That would be amazing, but that would be value I added.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Well, we've, we've been, it's another one of those things where we've been seeing it coming in terms of like, if you look at stories, it's something successful, it gets sequels. It's more successful. It becomes a world building thing. You get books, you get the movies, you get the comics, it's all different mediums and it's a world building.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And you get a fan fiction, non-sanctioned stories that everybody's doing and they allow it to happen, but not on an IP level. Right now, I'm working with an amazing author, Yanni Payne, in his book series, In the Shadow of a King. It's like 24 meets Star Wars. It's all on Earth, but it's just like post-apocalypse, everybody trying to work together against the big bad guys.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And we're taking that story and recognizing with the world building, this isn't just about saying we want fans. This is about how the fans engage in the story. So what we're building is a co-creation model there. Yanni and I connected over that term, co-creation, where he said, I want my fans to be a part of the story. I'm just making the seeds, the beginning points.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I've got so many characters across so many different parts around the world that I'm living out in all of my different storylines. Once again, think 24. It's just, oh my God, who's doing what? that we're building the system where you read the book, it comes with a bookmark, the bookmark is your access to the AI, so you can have a conversation with the book.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
The book determines if you're a fan enough or not to get into the Discord. The Discord, you're now with other fans. The fans will determine if you are worthy of writing your own fanfic that they will then upvote. And if it's upvoted enough, your fanfic gains access to a fourth-level character. And the way I would say that is look at Star Wars.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
A lot of people died to get the plans for this Death Star. What'd they do? They made Rogue One. Then you saw the story of Rogue One. There's that guy who was running the rebellion. What'd they do? Made Andor. A story off a story off a story. There's fourth level characters sitting in there that Disney should have no problem giving away access to super fans for.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So there's a bridge that can be actually made between fanfic and IP. And that's what Yanni's building. He's the first author slash. He also has a first look with Warner television and a movie he's been writing. It all goes together where he's saying, I don't want fans. I want co-creators become a part of my world. And that's now possible.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Yeah, and there is a 90-10 rule about user-generated content. Usually everybody's consuming and there's a few people who make. But when you're incentivized to make, when we're actually growing up in a world where creativity is probably the only thing left that AI won't take, where's the economy? We need a co-creator economy because there's nothing else left.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I basically am trying to force everything under a made-up industry I call company betterment. So we are all familiar with the betterment industry and how that works for us. But as you heard from brand therapy, this is about the personification of the brand. So what can you do on a company level for betterment? And the big access point is adaptability.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So most companies statistically pay for digital transformation and then 70 to 80% of them don't implement it. The average age of a company has gone from over 61 years to under 18 years in less than half a century because change is happening faster and faster and companies are getting worse and worse at it. We're all Kodak. We just don't know it yet.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Well, that's exactly. So that becomes a thing where we can talk about saying, okay, your company needs to become mindful. Brand therapy is there to not just help you find product market fit, but to recognize product market fits a moment. It's always lost. We have product shift. We have market shift as disciplines. Where the hell is product market shift?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Okay, geez, I was the son of a clinical psychologist and a fundraising activist. I ended up trying to be a clinical psychologist like my dad before me. And the siren song of advertising came calling and said, you know, just wake up at 10 o'clock in the morning and wear a t shirt and make shit up.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
That's what brand therapy really offers, that ability to have a mindful company. And then, thanks to my co-founder, Chris Huard, myself, creating the Team Flow Institute with an amazing research team, too many people to name, actually, but check them all out at teamflow.institute. We worked with Dr. Jeff Vandenhout, who built the team science of in-person team flow over the last decade.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
He was on part of the solar sail team that went through the desert. How the hell do you keep that team together? And then he started building TeamFlow from there. We're focused on decentralized TeamFlow.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So a mindful company that's now able to work with its employees to restructure around support instead of oversight, on progressivity, not productivity, the consistent betterment of the team, around taking AI not to just automate away their work, but to create a collective intelligence system
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
that a retrained manager as a flow facilitator has access to, not to just say, hey, what's the input output that we can do faster, but to find all the human hidden frictions, because work is still for humans. And there are a collective amount of human frictions across, and this is Dr. Vandenhout's work,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
collective ambition, audacious team goals, aligning personal goals, open communication, high skill integration, and psychological safety. If you have those and you have them in a good enough way, you'll feel four different senses in your team, unity, progress, trust, and focus. And if those actually come up to the fore enough, team flow emerges. That's his model.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And that's what we've applied into a decentralized way. So you're more purposeful about your like in-person time, your live time on video with a lot of body language. Like 7% of our communication is words. The rest is tone and body language. That means we have to record this and get sentiment analysis out of this, not just the AI otter talking.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And then when you go from there, you have a company that's capable of changing, capable of absorbing digital transformation. And so as the co-founder of Parallel Worlds, as a CSO, I have positioned that company as the world's first spatial transformation company.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So a company that's now mindful enough to be able to understand how to change, the platform to be able to do the adaptability, and then finally, the change. So that's how those three companies come together. And frankly, Mark is just, I'm a guy with a patent. I'm not Nike. I'm not Apple. I have to build. I've got to get stuff in market.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So Mark and Mark DJ are there to get really stuff in market and to get the first use cases out there. Parallel Worlds is doing it too, and so are others. But it's like, I can't rely on any one company. I've got to keep building until there's real traction there.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Uh, and so I went to SVA and then Chicago portfolio school, then Miami ad school, which took me to San Francisco and London and Amsterdam, and then internships in New York. And that's where I finally landed, started junior copywriting all the way up to creative director across a dozen plus agencies with over a hundred brands before I said, what the hell am I doing?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I don't think I could say it better than that, honestly, except for the one added proof that how much money went into NFTs and out in one year? Two trillion with a T dollars went in and out of the art market. or the NFT market, whatever you want to call it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
That's a lot of people sitting at home with nothing to spend their money on, a lot of government money being handed out, and it just went into NFTs, along with a lot of other things. I co-founded seven startups before all these other ones, and one of them was in gratitude tokenization for essential workers.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
That's how I ended up working with Chris, because we're taking gratitude tokenization and using it for building the TeamFlow Institute. Everybody was trying something. We are a nation of entrepreneurs. And it's amazing to watch how many people just said, this is my time. And now, past 2023, it's now more stable to be an entrepreneur than to work for somebody else.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Oh, yeah. And there's a lot that awakening. That's a lot of just shared inertia that we had from the time when all you had was maybe two or three jobs in your life. And we're at the point where we're at six or seven careers in our life now. Of course, that's true. We just don't want to think about it that way because we need stability. It's in us. It's human in us.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Answer the human needs and you'll find all the answers you need in any product development.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So I've been on this journey for a while of not knowing where the hell all this was going, but saying yes. And just, you know, no is the enemy. Just say yes and we'll see where this goes. And only in the end of last year did I realize what all of this could be working towards. And that was a legitimate way out of late stage consumerism.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
In this environment, we define ourselves by the brands that we surround ourselves with. We've already passed luxury on from like gold and diamonds to brand. It's just, what am I surrounding myself with? And there's your social cred. And then you just consume more things and that's who you are.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
With what I've been building, and I know there's other people out here, I've been trying to find them everywhere. In a co-creation marketplace, the invisible hand of the market changes. It uses a different human need. It's consumerism. It's greed. It's about yourself and showing that off. And that's a very American thing. I'm not saying this is everywhere.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Uh, and it just felt like marketing was not the answer. It was just breeding hypocrisy. If you're just telling a story, you're not telling authenticity and then the market forces aren't letting you. So how did I figure my way out of that? I discovered product market fit and that became my new philosophy. And I fell into the startup world and started servicing clients directly.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
But in a co-creation environment where you're doing this adding value things and products keep living beyond you, we're in a different place. We're in a power of legacy where you no longer value yourself by the brands you surround yourself with, but by the legacy you leave behind in the objects that live beyond you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Legacy is pretty damn selfish, I have to say. It's just one of those things that only kicks in as we retire.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Now imagine you getting paid for a lifetime worth of legacy buildings.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
That's what I've been building.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
No face melting, please.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
technology is advancing but i feel like people are collectively changing too consciously and they're there's a little bit of a cycle you're grabbing onto a little bit of a cycle the tech enables a culture to change but the culture determines where it goes and then that culture affects our strategists because culture each strategy for breakfast but at least we can take that information and then go back to product development again and then that new tech will change more culture and we're in that
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Not only collaboration, but my co-founder Chris's favorite word, co-elevation.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Co-legacy building, yeah. Just co-everything.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I do too. Yeah.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I'll take it very much. As an old philosophy major, I am giddy inside.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Best place to find me is on LinkedIn, Jamie Schwarz. You'll see a smiling, bearded man looking at you. And you'll see on my banner, Team Flow and Brand Therapy and Marked all just flying across the banner there. So I'll see you all on LinkedIn. And if you're curious about brand therapy, brandtherapy.coach.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
As you know, ad agencies, there's like a, what, six degrees of separation between you and the decision maker. I was finally having conversations with the founders and having longer and deeper, meaning, purposeful conversations. And then one of them said to me, this feels like therapy. I said, it's not therapy for you. It's therapy for the brand. What the hell is brand therapy?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Thank you very much. And I'm happy to come back anytime and dive deep into those mindfulness exercises.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
It couldn't even finish the sentence. I was just like, light bulb, I've got to figure this out. And it built the discipline from scratch. And it took a couple of years of just figuring out what the hell does brand have to do with product market fit? Well, what if it's the go-between of product and market?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
What if it actually sits as a voice that can have two ears and one mouth listening to both sides and speaking to both as one? It can be a chief purpose officer, the employee that can never be fired and never leave, which actually makes it the real boss, even of the CEO. So psychological trick, longer conversations led to, let's get that brand voice in the back of your head.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Usually you want to get voices out of people's heads in therapy. In this case, we're putting one in. We want the brand voice to be the voice of conscience back there. So when you run with scissors, you know you hear your mom's voice still. When you're running a company, of course you're running with scissors 24-7. Whose voice should be in the back of your head? The brand voice.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Whoa, hey, stop looking myopically from your limited perspective. Step back. Think long-term. You do that with all the stakeholders, you get stakeholder alignment automatically because they're all answering to the real boss, the loudest, strongest ego in the room, the brand. So that's, I guess, the journey that got me to before Web3 came knocking and turned everything upside down.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
But that's where I got to from there.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Business is still a human affair.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
You can't talk to somebody until you've spent the time to listen to them. Nobody will tell you the truth until you've given them the psychological safety, which is space. And you can't do that until you just give it to them.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Well, if you don't have a direct connection, you're just talking past each other to the person you think is right ahead of you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Yeah, well, I mean, remember what I just said before about thinking myopically just from your own perspective. Everybody's in their own little industry. There's so many damn silos in marketing that we're really only concentrated on what we're incentivized to be concentrated on. And performance marketing came out of analytics. Where'd the analytics come from? Social media.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So you have to go back to that moment that we all went, what's Friendster? What's this thing? What do I put on MySpace? Yeah. You know, the first campaign I ever did for social was a MySpace page for a fake band for re-bringing back LA gear in like 2005 or something. And we were like just discovering this out and it was all good while we just, you know, had a feed.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
But as soon as the algorithm came in, as soon as we really understood data and everybody became their own persona one of one, here's this hyper-targeted list. Oh my God, the list of variables that you are defined by. So much so that you can click three things on a webpage and they know who you are. just based on that. Well, okay, now we've got data. Now we've got hard data versus soft creativity.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And there's that famous line, I'm spending twice the amount of money I should be on advertising. The problem is I don't know which half.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
You know, like I get that with the soft advertising because it was TV and it was one way. But what did social media create? As soon as the brands that were brave enough started it and the brands that had to afterwards followed turned on the comment section. became a two-way street. Asynchronous, but it was still, customer service became Twitter. We don't even think about that for a while.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
That means the companies gave up on customer service. They stopped giving us phone numbers. You can't call Netflix. You can't call Google. But you can yell at them on Twitter until they pay attention. So everything came down to social media value. We created influencers and there's a value in how much cred you have across all these platforms that you don't own.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
The credit's owned by those platforms. So you're at their mercy still. So all of that being said, I know that's a little bit of a rabbit hole. Everybody's building that up where they're doing KYC and they've got proof. And what's the other line? You only get paid for what you can measure.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
So the guys who could get measured were the ones who were getting paid more. And the advertising industry had already stupidly, in my opinion, separated the creative from the media buy. So creative had to sit on its own for how it's going to make money. And it just turned into, you know, bill, bill, bill for hours and hours and hours. And that obviously was going to blow up in everybody's faces.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
But once that happened, the media buy was over there. That analytics went that way. You just take your eye off the ball of creativity. And once you take your eye off the ball of creativity, you take your eye off the ball of humanity, which is what you're actually doing, connecting with humans.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And then it's just you're arguing over tweaking about a color or a font size or where the logo goes because it moves the needle this much. And when you're looking here, you're moving this. Wow, huge moves. You forget about this. The whole shebang that's like everybody's actually looking at. The meaning behind it, the relationship between the consumer and the brand. There's a relationship there.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And then it's too late.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Not at all. It really is a matter of, are you building a relationship of transaction? Or are you building a relationship with meaning? And both are fine. Just recognize what you are. One of the things I had to build in brand therapy was a relationship spectrum and for brands to admit where they actually are on there. Are you product focused? Are you commodity focused? Are you brand focused?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Are you purpose focused? Are you tribal? Letting the community tell you where you have to go. Just be honest about where you are on there and then act accordingly.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And that's what you were doing, Chris. Tell me what you knew about NFTs when you said, this is going to make me some money. What did you think they were?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
As Ryan and I both hold up. Well, I have a much older brother who collected back in the 60s, so we got the benefit of this. But I also ended up marrying the granddaughter of the art director of Topps, who actually was one of the inventors of Kazooka Joe. Didn't know it at the time, but hey.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Fanatics bottom. So it's a whole ballgame.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Yeah. But for, yeah, the whole thing with NFTs, like I totally agree with you. Like, first of all, it's not art. Uh, and people are saying like, you know, here's a whole bunch of algorithmically created characters. You're kind of hurting the art space by just claiming this. Cause that's not where your value is coming from. And you're very right. You are claiming creative community space.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I love the Bill Murray one. That's a, that's a great, uh, NFT group where they're just like, everybody gets a meet him on a golf course once. Cause they had an NFT of him. Um, but that's like, so what that's a membership card. Like, what are you actually getting with this NFT? Yeah. Where's the value? The thing that it actually did was allow us to own digital media.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I guess I should also reveal that I'm a Gemini. It makes a little more sense now. Hey, guys.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
You can always right-click something. But now you could actually say, no, no, this is mine. People can still steal stuff, but it's this is mine. This says so. That was humongous. There's a reason why all the nerds behind it were like, this is game changing. This is huge. We just went through the digital revolution. And at the other end of that came what Napster that destroyed the music industry.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
Everybody's right clicks, everything, everything lost value. And we had this horrible race to the bottom where if media can't hold value because it used to be based on scarcity, we had to pay for the package that would hold the media. And now we don't. And now NFTs with a promise to bring it back. My God, I get royalties every time I resell this. Yeah, that sticks on chain.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
And so before all of that happened, 2017 was like the ICO craze and blockchain was still just like Bitcoin. And I think CryptoKitties had just launched at Denver. Like nobody knew where any of this was going yet. I was still fascinated with Pokemon Go and just saying, but I don't own anything in there. It's the same thing all over again.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
We've got centralized platforms that tell you you're owning things, but all you're doing is licensing a use of it. The guy that owned At Music at Twitter, Musk just took it away. He said, because it's mine. They're all his. Of course they are. This is a centralized platform. Where's the ownership? That was the idea behind the patent. I was stuck in the brand space.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
I was really living inside of there, really living in the hypocrisy of marketing doesn't work on its own. How do we get back to ownership? I lived through that entire decade of social media going from this cute little thing where we were coming together and meeting people and...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
It was just a lovely little web 1.0 world into this centralized behemoth of oligarchies that controlled everything and controlled your oxygen because products couldn't have object permanence without the platform. So that's what NFTs were going to do. Give us an open web again with true ownership. So when I filed, I was really just focused on how do we get that mark of authenticity?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Shift in Digital Ownership: Exploring NFTs and Brand Therapy with Jaime Schwarz
If we have logos and we have digital products, why can't we make the logos interactive and smart and give them responsibility so that they can make sure that the object is saying, yeah, this is the authentic one. I don't have to go to Chinatown and buy the thing that almost works in a digital copy and paste world. Everything's one for one. You can't tell the difference. The NFT does that.