Web 3.0 campaigns, with many aspects a learning as you go exeprience, can throw up many hurdles, causing timelines to be extended by years
Cricket Australia started its digital collectible NFTs (non-fungible tokens) journey in March 2021 and took until April 2022 to announce the program.
On stage at AdNews Melbourne L!VE, Abhi Arunachalam, senior commercial advisor - media rights at Cricket Australia, said: “When we started out, we thought we would do it quickly, but it ended up taking us about 14 months to design the ultimate vendors that we did.
“What we learned was, it's very hard to learn about a space as you're trying to commercialise it at the same time.
“Through that journey, we realised that with NFTs your why is more important than your want.
“Because your why helps you answer what you're gonna do in the NFT space.
“So when we stepped back, the why we were doing it was because we wanted to grow the profile of cricket globally at a relatively low cost way.
“But to do that sustainably, you have to be guided by sort of the why principles and how you get there.
“One of the reasons we took longer compared to a lot of other sports is we partnered with our player’s union in executing this.
“We thought a big part of the reason people engage with our sport are the players that go onto the field.
“And it was really important to incorporate them so that we can have a longer term view of the sorts of benefits we can offer our holders and the products we can actually put to market as well.
“So that inherently brings challenges with it around working out the best commercial models between the league and the players. But once we did that and once we were on the same page, it was then easy to identify the experts that could come and help us.
“One thing I'd say is to be aware of any company that says they can do it all for you, it's very few and far between that people can satisfy all elements of your NFP program.
“We ended up partnering with two in a joint venture to get done. But we had expressions of interest from over about 30 people that wanted to get our business.
“There's a lot of people trying to establish themselves in this space. So doing the due diligence took a bit longer than we expected.”
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