Jennifer Van Dijk
Appearances
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Personally, I would love it if toys was our smallest revenue channel, because it would mean we've succeeded as a brand to be able to, you know, make the core collector happy with the best stuff, but also make a business out of the other revenue that we have in our platform.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
How do you really become a fan of something? I mean, Zach and I both spend so much time in the sports business. We love fandom and we just apply it here.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Demented Disney.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
This is one of the three that we did with Ganga, the artist that Zach just mentioned. And what's interesting is this is actually a perfect illustration of a combination between a series of toy that we do called a choppy. That's like the sort of eye and mask thing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
But also with an astronaut, which was the integration with Ganga's character that he has drawn, which is more of a sort of astronaut type character. So it was a perfect combination. And as Zach said, we did three different versions of it. One that we did in extremely limited quantities that sold out immediately. The other two in slightly less limited quantities, but still small.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Those also sold out pretty fast.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
So, you know, and that's a, that is the ultimate, I think, um, spreadsheet project is, you know, how rare is rare enough. And to be honest, it is some, you know, map magical equation between the size of your audience and, um, quantities that you should make. We have in our history done a lot of different experiments with scarcity.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Zach and I have in the past year really started to change the approach to be though to go more and more rare for these types of toys because they are so valuable. When they're in the smaller quantities, both for us in our business, but as well as for buyers and the secondary market, which is a really interesting and thriving opportunity for everybody.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
It's a fantastic question because it is the core of why we call ourselves an IP or a media company, because that is our, that is our asset. That is our value. And that is our goal is to be larger than kind of any one tool to bring that to fans and toys and our high end collectibles are unequivocally a fantastic brand opportunity to connect deeply with a community.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
The reality is that we were born of TikTok and we were born of the Internet. Our two main characters, Janky and Googie Mon, are the ultimate schemers. Janky is sort of the lovable idiot. Googie Mon is the, you know, semi lovable and always interested murderer.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
We would argue the same is true for our experiential space in Vegas, for our game on Fortnite, for our social media content and our longer format stuff. All of those things become very important tools for how we grow and expand the IP that we build and want fans to love. It is unequivocally brand.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
unequivocally. And there's really kind of two components that we balance in our business. The first is really this, how do collectors work, right? What is the way that a core collector base grows a brand? And I learned this when I was in the NFT space at Dapper Labs. The biggest collectors, your most avid collectors, are actually the ones that attract the most attention and others to your brand.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
So it doesn't work where it's like a concentric circle outward. It works where the whales or your biggest collectors bring in kind of the fringe. So it's almost like from the furthest out is attracted in by your core collector group. And so it is incredibly important for us, and Zach articulated this too, to keep that core collector satisfied and happy and intrigued.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
That's one dynamic in our brand. And that also has the scarcity and the revenue limitation to it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
At the same time, our mass reach and our collection of targeted segments that make a mass on social media platforms and other larger format vehicles is equally important to us because that also brings new people into the funnel and gives us, if you will, the currency to be able to spread that IP through other channels that will make us revenue, right?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Personally, I would love it if toys was our smallest revenue channel because it would mean we've succeeded as a brand to be able to make the core collector happy with the best stuff, but also make a business out of the other revenue that we have in our platform.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
You know, and it's a combination for the ages that really just locked into the core of what Gen Z on TikTok wanted to see and wanted to be. And we have taken their storylines and their dynamics and grown their character galaxy in a way that has fuckery at the core. That's just who we are.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And it's funny. And that's exactly what this is, you know, and no matter what the adventure is. And then they became playable skins in Fortnite. And the the audience really just took to it because they could actually now help create the fuckery.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Ryan, you asked if it hurts the brand. I think the question is whose brand? Because we're only going to do it in our fun style. And if it works, I mean, the Mercedes example, if you look at the content, the content is actually a story of turning a standard sort of dashboard bobbing dog into a cool kid.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And that's because Janky and Googiemon take him to the stars, you know, and kind of make him cool. So it's really a transitional story as well. By the way, that was Mercedes' best performing campaign for people under 35 that year. So, you know, it's balancing the edge with the audience. They did a glam up of the dog.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Yeah, so Vegas is really the start of a whole new level or chapter for Superplastic. This idea was incubated about a year ago when we discovered a partner called Area 15 in Las Vegas. And Area 15 is... I think they have 100 acres of property, about 25 acres are developed into sort of a Burning Man meets mall experiential location. And it's great because it's just off the strip.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And it is literally an oasis of all these types of different experiential venues that you can go spend time in and engage with. And what it became for us was the perfect way for us literally to take our characters and our worlds that were born of social media and bring them to audiences and fans in real life to continue those narratives.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
So we've opened what we call the Dopamine Institute for Pleasure Research. At Area 15 in Las Vegas, opened a week ago. It is part incredible retail store with our toys, as well as with our Vegas specific dopamine specific product. But what it is, is also a ticketed experience that where you become part of the action, you become part of Janky and Googiemon's latest scheme.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
which is to suck your dopamine out and sell it back to you. That is their next get-rich-quick scheme. So when you step inside, you are immediately transported to sort of a back alley in Queens, just where we all want to be, right? And the location is authentic graffiti. It looks like an off-track betting location, if you remember what those look like. That's sort of where you start.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
You go into a room that looks... then you go into a room that looks like the DMV even worse. And you're like, wait, where am I? And all of it is to get you into this scheme of theirs, where you are a test subject, that they are putting you through different trials for, how you elicit dopamine so that they can quote capture it and sell it back to you. How do you elicit dopamine?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Exercise, dancing, telling the truth or lying, being creative. So we have different rooms. And by the way, you go through this experience with a group of friends From start to finish, it's kind of all pulsed through. And you end up in this really funny story where you have to do certain physical things to engage with it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
But then the scam is revealed in the last room and you end up in the control room where they've been monitoring you the whole time. And in that room, we've integrated a whole bunch of cool stuff where you can actually mess with the groups behind you and you realize that the groups in front of you are messing with you. It's truly interactive and story driven.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And we've even integrated some AI characters where you can talk to our characters for as long as you want. All kinds of different stuff to really bring people into the world.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
So it's like, it's a demented escape room, except we let you out.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
For sure. I mean, you know, back in the original days, the stuff we probably watched as kids, a lot of it was hand painted and drawn, etc., So fast forward through into kind of where we sit today. We actually sit at a really interesting moment where animation is undergoing an incredible evolution.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Absolutely. You navigate the experience with an RFID wristband in every room, and you end up finding a whole basket of goodies at the end when you download your wristband. That's cool.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
The fun part, too, for us is that Area 15 sees about 3 million people a year walk through their doors. So the overwhelming majority of people that are going to come go through our experience or be in our interactive retail shop are new to us, right? They may have heard of us, but they don't know us.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
So I think we've achieved that mission again of satisfying the core fans with something really cool and a new adventure, but also really indoctrinating those who haven't heard of us yet.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Absolutely. So, look, Variety Magazine called us the next Marvel, Supreme, and Disney combined. And that's the mission. Billion-dollar platform for the new generation of We've got the characters in the universe. We continue to develop more of them. We have the cool factor of the supreme brand nature.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And now, frankly, with the opening of dopamine and the experiential, it's our first step towards Disney. And those are, you know, $100 billion companies. So we see no limit to the IP potential and the ability to continue to engage fans and immerse them, you know, into the worlds along the way.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
But that's exactly it, right? Like this is not your father's, you know, amusement park. And this is not your father's IP brand. I mean, and that's the fun of it. We get to create it. You know, my experience from the sports business was always working with the best IP on the planet. And the best IP on the planet comes with guidelines and guidebooks this thick. Superplastic doesn't.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Superplastic is a world that we get to create what fans want and what we think is next on the horizon, and that's the fun of it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
The sort of last couple decades have been dominated by very high-end professional tools, Maya and those types of things. And they create beautiful professional level, you know, theatrical level animation that takes a lot of time and a lot of money.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
So the best way is to go to superplastic.co, C-O, products, dopamine. The other aspects are follow our characters, follow us on social. We are at jankyandgoogiemon on TikTok. We are at superplastic on YouTube. And we do have the character channels at jankyandgoogiemon on Instagram, but at superplastic on Instagram will get you there too.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And then the emergence of the dominance of video game worlds and especially massive multiplayer worlds has started to push a new kind of animation from a different direction. And that's really based in platforms like Unreal Engine or Unity things where you can actually world build, not just sort of character sketch, right? And these things are colliding in a really interesting way.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Frankly, we're sitting right at the middle of it because we produce a lot of content in Maya and equally have a whole pipeline built on Unreal Engine where we can use our characters in those things. It gives us a different level of flexibility because the reality is you're publishing content now across so many different types of platforms.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
that sometimes you need a little bit of both, the high end and the sort of medium. But then we're sitting on this precipice of where it's going to go in AI. That is, I think, really, really exciting as well.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
It's so true, though, the layeredness of it all. I mean, our characters actually... garnered 22 million social followers, never saying a word. And so they were Tom and Jerry in that way, right? And it was really in the development of our TV show with Amazon and in the development of our experiential that we've started to figure out, well, what do these guys sound like?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And by the way, what would they say? And how does that add three more layers?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
to it and you know the there is something very precious too about the voice of a character that I think we have the flexibility to play with so for example you know if you think Ren and Stimpy's voices if you hear something that doesn't sound just like them you feel oh that's authentic I'm out for us we we have a little bit of the flexibility to play with what
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
these characters may sound like, you know, again, the sort of, are we, are we messing with you or are we being serious? So we've been experimenting with a lot of different types of voice models and different things. Um, and again, the ability to create these things cheaply and scalably AI is a natural solution for us in, in a lot of that.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Um, but it just opens up six more levels when you start adding voice, but you gotta be funny then you gotta be funny.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
We believe in that deeply in every platform, right? I mean, we just published a TikTok post for Thanksgiving that was one of our better performing posts of the whole year. And like, if you know who our characters are, it's edgy, funny, but you get it. If you have no idea who our characters are, you might be like, what did I just watch? So it is like, if you know, you know.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
So much is cooking. We are cooking with Crisco right now. Just launched a new location in Vegas. Yeah, it's cooking.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
It is. There's temptations all around that could really mess the business model, right? And at the same time, investors and everybody else demand growth and we want the IP to touch as many people as possible. So balancing those things is a really interesting opportunity. But like any audience today, no matter how big it is, it's really composed of segments of smaller audiences.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And ours is a perfect example plate in that sense, in that our big audience is actually composed of
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
of subgroups of people that are really into gaming, into art, into fashion and music, different parts of pop culture, not every part of pop culture, you know, but certain segments, adult comedy and anime fans even, you know, and that also, when you look at it as a grouping of smaller, you know, segmented audiences that have this beautiful Venn diagram of overlap, then you start to add in geography, gender, age, at the core of it,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
is a Gen Z or young millennial consumer that if you watch our content, is equally split gender, male, female. If you buy our toys, you're probably more likely male, slightly on the older side of Gen Z. But really what we try to do and what Zach does so brilliantly is help identify who we're speaking to with what angle because our company can also at the same time be so many things.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
I wish we had a better story for it. It was really quite a random combination that our founder, Paul Budnitz, created. He was the founder of Kid Robot. And when he was ready to start a new company, more character and IP driven, he wanted it to be super. And somehow he landed on Superplastic.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
Yes, yes and yes. What's so interesting is if you think about what's happening in the world today, there are avatars that all of us play in games or on social media or things like that. There's characters that we all love from different parts of our lives. We've talked about a few today. This idea of a character is really strong in our culture and in our world today, but
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
In so many ways, a lot of them are thin as a cracker in that, you know, like, sure, there's a ton of characters, but what do you really feel? What are you really a fan of? And what makes that difference? And that's something we spend a lot of time thinking about, which is like, okay, Janky and Googymon and their galaxy of characters, Daisy and the Little Helpers and everything else.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
People know them. We've achieved that mission. But now the mission is to get people to really know and love them. And that tracks in a couple ways for us. Like kind of any good plot, right? You're either ever always developing character or advancing narrative. We've developed character. with this group. And now we're going to advance narrative.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
The Power of Social Brand Experience & Collectibles: Superplastic Launches Dopeameme Institute
And that's why things like dopamine Institute for pleasure research are so fun because you're physically part of a scheme. You're part of an adventure to develop narrative with our characters. Meanwhile, we're back in the factory developing new characters too. You know, that, that will eventually be ready with audiences to go out for more adventures, but we kind of think of it that way.