Podcast: ft. Joe Pulizzi - Content Marketing, Community, NFTs and Social Tokens

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, since I started working from home, I'm almost always wearing clothes that I could just wear to the gym.

Joe Pulizzi:

No, I've fallen in love with long basketball shorts.

Brian Jones:

Ooh, nice.

Joe Pulizzi:

You cannot get enough of those. Because basically, that's my attire. My attire is I'm always... I have long basketball shorts on now, and then if I'm going to be seen by people, I'll throw on a polo.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, you were talking beforehand about how because of your commitment to branding, which when you said this, I was like, "Yep, that's absolutely a thing I should do, but don't," is wear something orange, right? It's like a uniform. The strength of a uniform is you don't have to think about it.

Joe Pulizzi:

Well, I think that Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg, they have it right, where we're expending... I guess theoretically, we're expending so much mental energy on things. What if we took that one thing off? I feel for people that have to look in their closet and say, "What am I going to wear today?" Really easy for me.

Adam Kerpelman:

Hey, everybody. It's The Data-Driven Marketer. Sponsored by NetWise. I'm Adam.

Brian Jones:

I'm Brian.

Joe Pulizzi:

And I'm Joe.

Adam Kerpelman:

Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us, and special thanks for our guest this week, Joe Pulizzi, who is author of Content Inc. and the founder at The Tilt. But, from here, I'll let you take it. Tell us what brings you to The Data-Driven Marketer.

Joe Pulizzi:

So, when you introduce me like that, I want to say, well, I grew up in a small town. I really want to give you the whole story. I've been in publishing for over 20 years now. I was lucky enough to fall into this practice area of content marketing. Instead of interruption, really focus on telling great stories, building an audience, and monetizing from there. So, I've been doing that ever since. And, started what was the... in 2007, what became the Content Marketing Institute. Still have Content Marketing World, is still one of the largest content marketing events on the planet.

Joe Pulizzi:

And sold that business. My wife and I owned that business. Sold that business in '16, and now started a new company called The Tilt, which is focused on smaller content creators trying to be content entrepreneurs. In the meantime, I've written seven books, one mystery thriller, six marketing business books, and the newest one is this Content Inc., as you've been mentioned. That's the 2021 book. And just dedicated to helping people figure out this content creation stuff that just continues to get more complex. You'd think it would get easier because we've been doing it so long, but it is not with the advent of all this new tech and crypto and everything else going on. It's just nuts.

Adam Kerpelman:

That's, I think, why we find ourselves where we are in terms of this idea of data-driven marketing and coming up with a whole ethos around it, essentially, because it's a completely different thing than just the creation of the content. They used to be way closer together, but every new channel just introduces a new layer of complexity. It gets more complicated faster than we come up with answers. We literally just finished an episode where we capped it off with asking everybody what they thought was going to exist 10 years ago that still doesn't exist, and there's still so much stuff. What it mostly boiled down to, we really thought it would be easier. It's not. Instead, it's getting more complicated.

Joe Pulizzi:

Yeah. It's tough when you realize, "Oh, I spent my life educating on this type of marketing, and what happened to that?" Now I have to do something else. I have to reinvent myself as a marketer, because we've got to do totally new things. Well, just talk about the advent of technology, which really has this movement from what people call web two to web three. That's what really is having me go down the rabbit hole right now with the fact that I never... Just basically, define web two. Web two, you're creating an audience, a publisher from the web two standpoint. You might talk about it from a software standpoint. But your publisher creates an audience, and that audience does really well, really loyal, because you've been delivering all this amazing content. You monetize it in multiple ways as a content creator, and then you have some kind of an exit, or you're very successful and everything's wonderful.

Joe Pulizzi:

Well, now, you've got web three, where you can't just take from the audience anymore. The mentality and the philosophy of web three is that it's not just an audience, it is a community, and that community you respect so much in helping build this thing, that you put in the processes so that community can financially benefit from them being an audience member or a community member, and that's where we get into all this crypto stuff and everything. But that's where, as a content marketing person, so anybody listening to this in marketing, that's where I think we're going in corporate marketing in a very short period of time, where we're actually trying to build these audiences around these niche topics that we have. We put in the tools to make that happen. But, the expectations of the audience are changing really quickly. So, how do we adapt to that? So, that's where I'm struggling with it. I don't know about you two. I can't read enough stuff to figure this out.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. So, I think before we hit that deep end, we should just pack it up and talk about-

Joe Pulizzi:

Sorry about that. Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

No. It's a perfect teaser.

Brian Jones:

I'm biting my tongue, too. I'm like-

Adam Kerpelman:

You're making my job easy as a host, and the cool thing is, we've talked about this a hundred times, so I think I've got some good value for the listener in this conversation as well. But first, we should back it up. I think something you mentioned that's a good way in to this, what Brian and I call the technological cave paintings of the thing, taking it way back, not even worrying about the... The fundamental thing that happened here is as technology ate media, we ended up creating a two-way street. But before that two-way street, and even still today, on the two-way street, most marketing was interruptive. We're going to come to the place where you're doing a thing and make a guess that you might be the person that we want to talk to, and so we're going to show you a pharmaceutical ad.

Adam Kerpelman:

And, all the kids watching with their parents are completely don't understand what's going on at all. It's failures of segmentation around things like that. But, to your point, it was interruptive. And so, the content was Star Trek: The Next Generation, which Paramount was making so they could sell ads to these advertisers. And so, in a sense, it's the same as it ever was, but yeah, it was just, we're going to bait you out with something interesting, and then just hammer you with ads that you... high percentage you don't care about.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Right.

Joe Pulizzi:

Yeah. Well, if it was the '70s, you'd put everything into advertising, right? You had very few channels. You could reach a large amount of people. And so, you said, "Oh, okay, well, I'm going to advertise on NBC, ABC, CBS, and great, and check, marketing done for the year. This is fantastic." It was weird. I came out of college, studied rhetoric and communication and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and just landed at a business to business media company. And I was able to be a project manager in the custom media group. And what did the custom media group do? Instead of the whole rest of the company, so it was a $300 million company, Penton Media, and everyone else sold advertising. They sold exhibit space. They sold ads in magazines. And they started to sell ads online.

Joe Pulizzi:

Our little group was supposed to help these advertisers tell better stories through their own channels, which was just a new thing, even though it's been around for hundreds of years. It's a new thing to most people. So, we would work on Microsoft's magazine or Agilent Technology's webinar program, or started to get into blogs and then social media. And we had all this technology where we could now reach audiences directly. It didn't cost near as much as it used to because back in the day, if you wanted to have your own television station, it was a pretty large investment. So, you had to build that audience and do that. So, now you're getting into it. And I think I made the realization in... When was it? 2003, 2004, when we were starting to get into talks with Google.

Joe Pulizzi:

What's crazy is, there were 47 publications at Penton, business publications across all crazy things like heating and air conditioning, machine design, industry week, whatever the case is. And, we were getting into conversations with Google because there was the real thought of, "Do we let Google spider our webpages? Because we don't want them to go to Google and then to us. We want them to go directly to us." There was actually this conversation. So, good or bad-

Brian Jones:

That was the right instinct.

Joe Pulizzi:

Yeah.

Brian Jones:

It didn't play out for 10 years.

Joe Pulizzi:

I know. Isn't that crazy?

Adam Kerpelman:

That ship sailed.

Brian Jones:

Here we are.

Joe Pulizzi:

It was interesting. That was my realization. I'm like, "Oh my god, more people are going to use this thing called Google," and then ultimately Facebook and Twitter as we went to 2005, 2007. Well, how do those people get found? They have to create really good content. But they can't just do one-off. They have to do it consistently over a long period of time. That's what Google benefited. You couldn't game that system more and more. You wanted quality links, so it had to be really good. And that's when I realized, oh my god, all of these companies are going to have to learn how to tell better stories because most of it's terrible. Content is the one thing that companies create more of than anything else on the planet, and most of it is horrible.

Joe Pulizzi:

So, I was like, "Oh my god, this is going to be a big area," and that's why I left in 2007 to create Content Marketing Institute, because as we were getting inundated with, "How do I do this, and how do I staff up, and what tech do I use?" And all that. And, "How long should I expect results for? What are the key performance indicators I need to look at?" That's what we were getting into. So, it's crazy that that was only 20 years ago that people started to realize that, "Oh..." Content marketing didn't even exist until 2007 as a name. There were no content strategy folks. It was all new. And here we are today. Every enterprise you look at probably has, what, 10, 15, 20 content titles of some kind.

Brian Jones:

Yeah, I love a comment Adam makes all the time that every business has to become a media company now, or every business is becoming a media company now. An angle I really like about it, and this is different depending on the industry and the business and the business type and stuff, but a lot of it, especially in the space where we operate and where a lot of our listeners are, in B2B, it's educational. And my background before this company, before I was even in marketing, was in manufacturing, and I actually got a ton of those magazines from Penton, and we worked with Penton at my last company with partnerships in media. And I kind of accidentally found my way into marketing, but it was so interesting to see how much the storytelling really just drives absolutely everything in the modern world. When I started to uncover that, "Wait, the reason I get this free magazine that was super relevant and helpful for me starting my job as a mechanical engineer and had all this useful stuff in it, the only reason they make that is because they had ads in it," and they got my demographic information when I signed up for four of them. It started blowing my mind.

Brian Jones:

And then, how the capability of marketing to allow more businesses to grow now... If you look at marketing... This is something I think people overlook. If you look at the marketing that you were describing where you only had a few channels, you've got TV, a small business can't afford to advertise on television for the most part. Maybe a few big companies in your space, a law firm. But the fragmentation of channels has allowed all these other businesses to grow and to enter into the world, and all this competition developed, and all these new products and technologies and capabilities. That's the neat side of marketing, just going nuts now, right?

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, yeah, and like you alluded to, it's doing what we in crypto call fractalizing, which is a much better representation of what you were just describing, Brian, which is everything gets more granular, but it gets more granular from itself. It's literally fractalizing.

Brian Jones:

Right, into same shapes. Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

And the system is finding the layer at which there are enough communities to sustain itself, and then it will stop chasing more people onboarded and put into communities that make them happy. But that's a philosophical rabbit hole you can go down if you want.

Joe Pulizzi:

Well, what's crazy about this is the fact that if you... Let's say you wanted to create a blog, and you're an individual, and you focus on a particular audience, and you find this niche, and you want to be the leading expert in that niche. And you're going up against IBM. I'll put my money every time on the individual than I will IBM. Too many politics. Too many people wanting different things. "Oh, we can't talk about that. We can't be authentic about that. We have to show that. That's not the colors we use. That's not the right branding." But the individual one can totally be themselves and say, "Hey, this is the truth. Listen to me." Or focus in areas that the large company can't. So, that's what you're doing-

Adam Kerpelman:

You're doing a lot of-

Joe Pulizzi:

You go into big companies and you're trying to teach them, look, that's your competition. Your competition is not just the four or five people that sell the product you sell anymore. You're up against everyone on YouTube and Google and all the podcasts, and Twitch, and God knows what else now.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. They're eating your attention stream.

Joe Pulizzi:

That's right.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah, so... Oh, man, there are so many... Okay, so I want to keep walking through. So, we got from that to web one, which was essentially still just a broadcast medium, because you could visit websites, and yeah, you could find them on Google, and Google was sort of starting to play with sending you places. Web two was the explosion, because that's the back and forth, where Facebook is actually paying attention to your second to second engagement with the ads. They really know how those messages are landing and stuff. And now if you go run ads on Google, I think I said it before we started talking, being an ad agency used to be a lot more, "Okay, we're going to come up with the story for this big push, and here's what it's going to be, and it's going to run through all the committees," and blah, blah, blah. We don't have to do that anymore. Now we just come up with the 10 best ideas, and we put them all up and test them. And that's the data-driven thing, right?

Joe Pulizzi:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Kerpelman:

That's what web two enabled. And then, web three makes it possible for every single one of those tendrils to be a loyalty program. These things are not brand new things. We've been doing frequent flyer miles for a while. Web three just makes it trivial for everyone to have a frequent flyer mile that's actually worthwhile, and then technologically, there's no reason that can't also just be shareholder stock. So, imagine getting a trickle of IBM stock for using IBM. It would only increase loyalty. So, that kind of gets us to the crazy web three stuff, I feel like.

Joe Pulizzi:

No, you're right, but I think if you look at web two and the domination of the platforms, where we're all the product, and three... So, we are all the product, and who's making all the money? If you look at what's happened in the stock market over the last four years, where you have Amazon and Google and Apple just making a disproportionate amount of revenue and profit compared to everyone else because they are fleecing our value. Web three, to me, theoretically, philosophically, I believe that some of that power reverts back to the individual. That's what I want to believe. That's where I think that if you are a marketer today, we've got to start thinking about that kind, because we've talked about it forever, but we've never really had the means to do it, where we would say, "Okay..."

Joe Pulizzi:

I've got a thing in the Content Inc. book called the Subscriber Hierarchy, where you have all the different places where you can build an audience. You can build an audience on YouTube and Twitch and Facebook, and then podcasts, and then all the way up the ladder to print magazines even still today and email newsletters. And I'd say you have to move up the subscriber hierarchy, because at the bottom, you have no control, you have no control over the algorithms that they have, and they could shut you down at any time for any reason. So, you don't want that to run your business where you have no control. So what do you do?

Joe Pulizzi:

And I would say, okay, good. You create the best YouTube channel on the planet. What do those YouTubers do? They figure out a way to create email subscription programs, because at least they have that opt-in permission, and then they have some data that they can use ongoing instead of what YouTube has all the power, can monetize that in any way they want to, and then you get into all kinds of different revenue streams. But now, we've got other things, like you were saying, Adam, with crypto and God knows what else coming down the pipe.

Brian Jones:

You bring up a great point there, too, that's different than how we typically talk... or at least how I think about what we mean when we say data-driven. I'm usually talking about the analytics behind the scene and how you make strategic decisions with your marketing content. But you made a great point there about what is the data that makes your brand valuable. In that sense, I'm running a YouTube channel, and the data that makes my brand valuable is the content I've created and then the people that subscribe to me. I don't own the people that subscribe to me, like you just said, on YouTube. Google owns them. Google monetizes them. Google makes the money off of them. You get an email newsletter going, maybe you use Gmail, which is free and ad-driven and there's some goofiness there, but you now own your audience in a way, too. And that then plays into this web three space, but I'll pause at web three, and let Adam keep driving.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, so, a really good contemporary example that doesn't even get us to web three necessarily but just happened as of the recording of this, OnlyFans, which is a big creator website, that to be fair, has found its niche among sex workers, just was going to put in the terms of service language that would cause most of the sex workers to have to leave.

Joe Pulizzi:

Yes.

Adam Kerpelman:

And by sex workers, I don't mean it's a payment conduit for prostitution. They literally just make pornographic content. And, the community got so angry so fast that they pulled back after three days. And part of that was literally people on OnlyFans were going, "That's cool. We'll just go to Fansly." Because with two clicks and 10 minutes of work, they just move to another platform that does exactly the same thing, which is not really a thing that existed for first-wave web two. So, there's a thing that's happening at the same time as the crypto thing, which is platforms are becoming more and more beholden to their community.

Joe Pulizzi:

That's true.

Adam Kerpelman:

Because Facebook pulled off a front-running, amazing move of scooping up all the college students in the country over a five-year period while they didn't have competitors that didn't suck. And now they have a thing, but I used to always say the one problem... and this is funny, because I read when Facebook went public, I read all their disclosures, and as part of those disclosures, you have to very carefully list all the possible risks to an investor in giving you money, and their biggest risk was literally everyone might leave our platform at any time.

Joe Pulizzi:

My Space.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. Hasn't happened, but it could.

Joe Pulizzi:

It absolutely could happen.

Adam Kerpelman:

We're getting to a granularity now with this stuff, where OnlyFans felt that pressure so fast. Tumblr actually folded because they took porn off.

Brian Jones:

Well, Facebook's got a big problem here in the hierarchy of all the platforms we're talking about. They don't enable you to make money directly. They don't care. They take everything out. Google lets you monetize ads on YouTube. I don't know how effective that is for most people. Probably not very effective. But then you have a platform like OnlyFans which I'm not super familiar with, but I'm assuming it's got subscription processes built in, and you can built your mini empire there, and then they help you with their business model, which is pushing us towards enabling businesses more and more, but it's also giving more power over to those businesses.

Joe Pulizzi:

There's so much to unpack here. This is where we're making mistakes as marketers. So, you gave the OnlyFans example, and they say, "Oh, well, we'll go to another..." Well, no. What you should do is say, "Okay, I need to plan right now. I'm building my audience here, and I need to plan on how to go without those platforms that can turn me off." That means getting in tech like you would get your email tech that you can port from somewhere else that you can control a little bit more, so that you can generate up to eight, nine, 10 different ways of monetization.

Joe Pulizzi:

When I look at a content creator, and I want to see their maturity level, most influencers or content creators are just generating revenue one way. They're, "Oh, I've got YouTube advertising," or, "I've got this social media influencer deal with xyz company." But, the more mature ones, media companies that know what they're doing, they're going to say, "Oh, okay. Well, I have advertising and sponsorship that I sell directly. I do have my own conferences and events. I do my own paid subscriptions and premium content. I've got my affiliate program that I run. I have donations over here."

Adam Kerpelman:

I sell tee shirts.

Joe Pulizzi:

Yeah, "I sell merchandise." Exactly.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Joe Pulizzi:

Or, "I've launched my own products. I also have my own consulting services." Or for marketing, "I generate this loyalty program through..." Whatever the case is, we're always thinking of... We've been falling into this trap of saying, "Oh, we've got to be on all these platforms," when really, what we want to do... Yeah, use them for whatever you can, but you've got to figure out a way to get off of them as quickly as possible so you can control your destiny a little bit more.

Brian Jones:

That's a great point.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, this tail that we're spinning so far in terms of this ecosystem, OnlyFans is, to people that are really crypto purists, in terms of the idea of a bankless society and replacing money with the cryptocurrencies, OnlyFans is just a conduit to provide these performers with some... Let's be very fair. If anyone's used OnlyFans here, pretty crappy publication platform that lets you publish pictures and videos and stuff.

Joe Pulizzi:

I don't spend as much time on OnlyFans as you do, so I can't say.

Adam Kerpelman:

In the name of research. What it is, is a conduit to credit card companies, because it's still hard to get a credit card to let you accept payments if you're just a person.

Brian Jones:

That's a horrific limitation in business right now.

Adam Kerpelman:

Crypto takes that out. And so, the explosion in web three about what you're talking about makes it so that you can have that value live wherever you want. You can have frequent flyer miles that are freely traded-

Joe Pulizzi:

That's right.

Adam Kerpelman:

... and used instead of cash to pay for your services the same way the frequent flyer miles are, but they'll live on the blockchain, and that's really the fundamental thing that's happening with web three we don't really need to talk about, but that's the shift.

Joe Pulizzi:

But it's important, before we go way off the reservation on this, because I've been talking about all, "Oh, the social media, the big Facebook and YouTube, they're all bad." They're not bad, but that's how I'm painting them to be. But 20 times worse are the payment mechanisms behind it, because your whole thing with OnlyFans and if you want to get back to what happened with PornHub before, the people that were driving those decisions were at the MasterCards and Visas of the world, that are the ones that are dictating this.

Joe Pulizzi:

So, the point is, we're beholden to a lot of institutions, and it sounds like the three of us are for any way that the individual or the company has more freedom to choose different paths of monetization than just saying, "Oh, I have to go get support from this other big institution," or, "I might do this, that, and the other, and they can cut off my funding," which is what happened with these OnlyFans people. So, there you go.

Adam Kerpelman:

And so, I have one linking bit to hit, and then I think we actually get to NFTs and coins and that kind of stuff. So, the thing that I witnessed in my last year, and then ongoing in advisor capacity working with crypto projects, is the emergence at the far end from where we are kind of living in this conversation right now, is the idea of marketing eventually morphs into what they would call meme-driven development, which is... And, these days, the term meme has been co-opted, like we think of the images that everyone is imagining right now when we say memes. But, it's an actual academic term for the proliferation of ideas through a community and how they recombine and stuff like genes do.

Adam Kerpelman:

But the idea in open source crypto development right now that seems to be winning most of the fights is literally don't build anything. First, start with an idea. And when you say it that way, it's really obvious. But then you go get more people who believe in that idea, and then you use the memes and the story to drive the whole thing from the very start, and you end up pulling together a cooperative community of people who all care about the thing that you want to work on. It's not really new, but the money piece lets you all really have a verifiable share in what you're doing, and is resulting in us solving all kinds of open source problems that we couldn't solve with free software and nonprofits that limp along, trying to maintain them. But if it's all meme-driven, that's means it's all marketing-driven, and I can't believe that none of these companies have marketing departments yet.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, that's my main soapbox in crypto, but it gets us to this whole thing, which is this is why the NFTs and what you call the creator coins are blowing up, because with the right few button clicks, it's borderline trivial to create a thing where it's like, "Hey, you guys all like me on OnlyFans? Go do this thing, and then there will actually just be an indication on an open crypto market of the value of my services relative to you owning some of that coin. But also because you own the coin, you get some of that value." It closes a loop that has been a one-way street for so long.

Joe Pulizzi:

The financial system was never available until now.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Joe Pulizzi:

The groups and the collectives were being built, but now you've got this underlying, we can all profit from this, is a fairly big deal. I've been talking about... It takes Content Inc. to the next level, because the whole idea with Content Inc. is, don't build a product. Go build an audience first. Where can you be the leading expert in the world? Go build your blog, your podcast, your event series. Whatever the case is, build that audience, and then once you get to know the audience so well, they will tell you exactly... and you set up your listening post correctly, you get the correct data for this show, then you will know exactly what products and services that you should launch.

Joe Pulizzi:

And now, if you tie that in with whether you call it community coins or social tokens or NFTs or creator coins or whatever the case is, they're not only getting value from the... extracting value from the content you're delivering, but they are going to be financial benefited from being involved in whatever level that they have from having so many coins or this NFT... I was the first one to look at Gary Vaynerchuk's VeeFriends project that basically he has this big event, VeeCon. He's got 10,000 tickets to the event, and they're all tied to artwork. And I was looking at them like, "I don't know." And now, of course, now I think they cost $60,000 to get one, maybe more than that now, to get one ticket for this event. How crazy is that?

Adam Kerpelman:

It could be worse. My problem, because I have a full-time job and a family, is that I can only pay so much attention. So, I'm six days behind. And so, I missed out on buying into Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Joe Pulizzi:

Oh, I know, so did I.

Adam Kerpelman:

When they were affordable. And it's a really crazy... So, these are cartoon pictures of apes that are programmatically minted with a certain set of attributes when you mint it, which costs however much it costs at that point in time. And people are using them as their avatars on Twitter, and then the fact that you use that avatar, and they double check against the crypto record to let you into chat rooms and stuff. And so, they actually have this yacht club made up of Board Ape avatars, and they're hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy into the yacht club now. You can watch what they're doing in the community. They're giving money away and working on compelling projects, and it's really interesting. But it's a community project. It's cooperative owned by all the people who built it.

Brian Jones:

It's amazing how much more complex all this stuff gets now, right? I love the way you both tell this story of community comes first now, and I've seen that working with you, Adam, on some of the crypto communities that you've professionally worked with, where you've been supporting, and I've just been observing. But, it really is just this-

Adam Kerpelman:

Community management, literally.

Brian Jones:

... wild shift now in... I'm in outer space now with my comments, but there's this wild shift now in just how fundamentally we do anything anymore, right? If you want to start a business now, you can absolutely... and most people will, and probably should, just start a traditional business, but you can also do this thing now where you build a community, much like a kid builds a Discord channel to watch them play a video game, and it's people that genuinely care about something, and you don't have to go hire people. They find you, and they get involved in the concepts and the stories and the imagination of something that you can then as a community build together with the structure of a financial system that actually only cares about the community now instead of just caring about the owners of these big systems that we all think we're part of, but you're really not. Once you get in and look at how the economy works and how finance works and how the tech works, most people aren't involved in it. You're no better than a Facebook user who is getting monetized for ads.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. You can vote with your dollars, but it's a drop in the bucket if I switch from Pepsi to Coke because I'm grumpy about their political stances or whatever.

Joe Pulizzi:

I've never seen... We talked about it before the show, but when we launched our creator coin, community coin, whatever you want to call Tilt on the Rally Network... We were in this because my focus is on helping content creators become content entrepreneurs. I knew this was a thing. I wanted to be in on it. I'm like, so let's launch it, let's do this. Let's build our own currency economy, whatever the case is. Is this a thing? I have never seen the type of... it's not fanaticism, but it's the fans. It's not just an audience. These are fans, where they're sharing the stuff that we're doing and they're part of it, and we've got different levels set up for access, like you were saying with the Board Ape Yacht Club thing. You can do the same thing with coins. And we have a Discord group. And these people are helping...

Joe Pulizzi:

I remember when we started, and it was, "Please ask a question," whatever. Now, they're all helping each other. It's therapy time, and they're all together, we're all trying to work through this problem together, like you said, Adam, with the collective, and that technology now is affording that. So, I don't want your listeners to be totally bored by this conversation, but I literally have been in marketing for 20 years and this is blowing me away.

Adam Kerpelman:

No, it's-

Joe Pulizzi:

Because I've never seen this type of enthusiasm over somebody saying... I said, my podcast, Content Inc., I sent out a note, I'm like, "Hey, I'll give everybody one Tilt coin. I really could use some reviews. I'll give everybody one Tilt coin if you go review by September 10th." I came into my email inbox this morning, and it's jammed with reviews for what people think is fake currency. This is a thing.

Adam Kerpelman:

The thing that I try to explain to people that are more on the traditional side of this stuff... It's kind of a two-piece way of saying it. One is aspirational, so we'll start with what is sort of the second one. The people that are involved with this right now more than likely graduated college into the first financial crisis. They have not had an opportunity to 10x their wealth like Boomers did ever. And Boomers got three or four of them. I barely caught the tail end of the dot com 10x that happened, but we've mostly not gotten a chance to do that. So, the idea of growing wealth in a way other than grinding away at your job so you can pay off your loans doesn't exist for them, except in this space, which is why they're so consumed by it.

Adam Kerpelman:

At the same time, on the engineering side, I have not since the advent of the web and APIs for Twitter and Foursquare and all that kind of stuff seen something consume the creative energy of all of the smartest people that I know all over the world.

Joe Pulizzi:

I totally would agree with that. We've got so many incredibly smart people.

Adam Kerpelman:

And that's all I got. That's all I got, except, there's no way that doesn't win the whole world. Right?

Joe Pulizzi:

Let me ask you this question, because I'm having a tough time with it. When you get together, sparingly or whatever we're doing during COVID times to get together with people... I was at a gathering the other day. There was about 20, 25 people there. And I looked around, and I said, "No one else here has a MetaMask wallet."

Brian Jones:

Probably true.

Joe Pulizzi:

No one has an NFT. No one has crypto of any kind.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Joe Pulizzi:

And I'm thinking, okay... And by the way, there were some people there that work really hard in their jobs, and they have for a long time, and real jobs. And then, I know of situations, like you were saying, Adam, where you've got some kids that have been struggling for a while but now they've just paid off their $200,000 student loans because they picked up some early NFTs and sold them.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Joe Pulizzi:

Done. Or they picked up a crypto punk in September of 2020, and now it's worth a million dollars. But this other group doesn't know about it. That's where I'm like, oh my god, we're in two different worlds in. I have Eth. They have dollars.

Adam Kerpelman:

The hopeful signal there is that when I am at those gatherings and I mention that I advise a bunch of crypto projects, that's all anyone else at the cookout wants to talk to for the rest of the time that we're there. I just end up answering weird questions about Bitcoin. I don't know if that's the nerds I hang out with, or the state of the world right now. I go to the gym and they're talking about it on CNBC. So, it's real.

Brian Jones:

It speaks to how early it still is. If you've been watching this for almost 10 years now, since the original release of the Bitcoin Whitepaper, it feels like we've been at this forever, and we're like, technology advances so fast, I can't stay up to date, I'm falling behind on Bitcoin, but it is such a new technology that it's hard for even the three of us to explain certain things to each other if we haven't read the latest release or the latest shift in some code base that backs the token. So, it's a wild opportunity right now to, in a strange way, rebuild the entire world's financial and software structure, and community structure, at a time when we need to do that for some other big reasons.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, and that's a perfect transition to the third point that I always make, which is, also, if you're talking about a younger generation here, the idea of having arbitrary storytelling where you have to do tasks for which you earn arbitrary points that you maybe care about even though they're arbitrary, you don't have to sell that to somebody who grew up playing video games. I wanted to earn Mario points just because.

Brian Jones:

That's right. Very true.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, when you collide that with the meme-driven development thing, it's an excuse for me to talk about my favorite project I've ever worked on that continues to go, and it's so super exciting. It's a developer... It's owned by a DOW, so it's all crypto... all of our shares and how we own it and everything is all done with cryptos, and how we do governance and stuff. But we run everything like the whole world is a role-playing game. So, like I'm a mage or whatever in there, and somebody else is a warrior, and it's just-

Brian Jones:

That's your job title, right?

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. Literally, my job title in there is Rogue, which just lines up with legal, like business affairs and marketing.

Joe Pulizzi:

Awesome.

Adam Kerpelman:

Whatever, right? That's where this stuff is going. Yeah, unfortunately, I rambled long enough on that that we're out of time, but this was amazing. I didn't expect [crosstalk 00:38:54].

Joe Pulizzi:

Were we even on point with your regular show?

Brian Jones:

Doesn't matter.

Adam Kerpelman:

Who cares?

Brian Jones:

As long as we get to cryptocurrency by the end.

Adam Kerpelman:

It doesn't matter, because this is the manifestation of data into value that you can give back to your customers, which is going to win everything. So, you all should be paying attention, because you should have loyalty programs, and they should be running in coin networks. If not now, they will be eventually. Mark my words.

Joe Pulizzi:

Yeah. I just tell people that, look at me, I'm like, look it. Go get a MetaMask wallet. Put $100 in, and go buy some stupid NFT, just to see the process. Just to start.

Adam Kerpelman:

I'm up to 10 or 20 people that I ping every once in a while and go, "How's that Eth doing for you?" And they're real happy because it's appreciated like crazy.

Joe Pulizzi:

I got in, in 2017, like a lot of people, and I felt really late. But still, in my friend group, the only ones that have it are the only ones that I talk to.

Adam Kerpelman:

But as some influencers in this space would say, that virus is spreading.

Joe Pulizzi:

It is.

Adam Kerpelman:

Which they used to say before the pandemic. Now that I repeat it, it sounds tactless.

Brian Jones:

It was tasteful before, and so it can still continue being tasteful.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. Anyway, Joe, this was awesome. Thanks for joining us on here.

Joe Pulizzi:

Absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:

Where can people find you?

Joe Pulizzi:

Yeah. TheTilt.com.

Adam Kerpelman:

If they want to tap in.

Joe Pulizzi:

Yeah, we do an email newsletter twice a week, talking about content creation, if that interests you. And of course, we've got our own creator coin, Tilt coin, on the rally.io network. And then I better mention, Orange Effect Foundation, that's our not-for-profit foundation where all the funds that I get in, we've been doing this since 2007, goes to families that can't afford speech therapy for their kids. And we're in 34 states right now, and we've got grants going out to about 250 kids.

Brian Jones:

That's awesome.

Adam Kerpelman:

Man, even the idea of effectively building that feedback loop is a crypto topic we could chase for like... My last project before the consulting was trying to build a feedback loop between a coin and social justice causes.

Joe Pulizzi:

There you go.

Adam Kerpelman:

Anyway, thanks a lot. Thanks everybody for listening. Like and subscribe to this, wherever you found it, wherever you're listening. And yeah, this has been The Data-Driven Marketer. Sponsored by NetWise. I'm Adam.

Brian Jones:

I'm Brian.

Joe Pulizzi:

And I'm Joe.

Brian Jones:

Take it easy, everybody.