Four friends, pushed closer together by the pandemic, came up with a plan to make it simpler to use blockchain technology to create loyalty and consumer engagement programs for marketers.
Nathan Hur and Samule Li were software developers at Atlassian and Canva. James Lin was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Kane Lu was at Microsoft.
They met at university and later shared an apartment. It was during the lockdowns that they came up with Plaza.
They have initial venture capital backing, enough to ensure they get paid, and have started working with organisations and agencies globally.
In the advertising world, they have the support of Simon Hadfield, adman and a recruiter for agencies.
They describe their venture:
Plaza provides software for agencies and brands to launch forward-thinking Web3 campaigns centred around real-world utility, community building and brand engagement.
This includes one-step consumer onboarding and integrations with existing brand marketing & loyalty initiatives across consumer platforms (eCommerce, social media, CRM and others). Plaza enables brands to establish a Web2->Web3 presence and seamlessly track consumer engagement metrics.
Using Plaza’s software, any agency and brand can begin to build a meaningful Web3 presence without prior expertise and development resources.
They see Plaza at the start of an adoption curve.
Lin: “It helps any organisation get into the blockchain space without a blockchain developer.
“And right now, the applications globally are largely in the marketing and loyalty space. So you're seeing a lot of Nikes of the world starting to implement web3 strategies.
“What we do is build software that basically simplifies it for any organisation to start exploring.”
An example would be player trading cards, where traditionally physical cards were traded.
“Now, athletes, teams, musicians, can launch their own digital tokens, which, as a fan, if I attend a Premier League game, or action, my badge can level up, it will unlock other awards and benefits, I can trade it with other people. So it creates a new ecosystem of engagement and loyalty for digital assets.”
Almost half of the top 100 brands globally have now launched in Web3 and there’s a big focus on consumer engagement.
Industries include sports, hospitality, eCommerce, fashion and retail, FMCG. Recent initiatives have included Starbucks, Hennessy, Adidas, Gucci and Shopify.
Companies and their agencies globally have built Web3 teams to service this growing demand.
But for many organisations, without the resources, face technical barriers to blockchain development, slowing down adoption of this technology and real-world applications. That's where Plaza fits in.
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