MediaSlam Presents: One on One with Phil Ranta

January 16, 2023

Curt: This is MediaSlam, where we're talking about the intersection of design, content, and technology. I'm the cohost, Curt Doty, also known as The Dodester. Today, I have a cohost, Phil Ranta. COO of We Are Verified, Digital Talent Management Company and Digital Marketing Agency based in LA, California. They work with talent and brands that move culture among many things today.
Okay. So once again, I'm Curt Doty. I'm a branding and marketing consultant with Entertainment, Tech, and Fortune 500 companies. And I have to mention our sponsor today, Legacy Concierge, managing wealth in the digital age. Go to www.legacy-concierge.com to learn more.

So, Phil, your background is incredible, and you have worked for so many great companies starting in the MCN boom and moving to the head of gaming creators of Facebook, you're the CEO at wormhole labs, FullScreen's VP of Networks, and to top it off, a comedian, So -- Yes. -- so, today's topic, Phil, please elaborate on your history here, introduce yourself, and what is your POV on what's happening in the industry? 

Phil: So, starting by way of background, so I've been in the, let's say, creator economy for almost twenty years now with we're doing Myspace branded channel builds in 2006. And even when I was in college, when I was in film school, I was a huge Internet geek. So, paying for hosting to put our short films up on websites because that's what we had to do back then and did a lot of posting on new grounds, which everything had to be converted into flash in order to get YouTube style free posting. So, and then I did a lot of kind of riding wave, so I was working at beam emission for mobisodes and ringtones and wallpapers. I was one of the early employees over at FullScreen where we built the world's largest influencer network or is the world's largest for a few months there.
And I became CEO of Studio seventy one where we represented a lot of, you know, the digital space, including the Rock and Lily Singh and Rhett and Maligne. Then I got really in the game streaming. I've had a game and creators over at Facebook for a little while. Left to go start, a metaverse company. And now I'm over We are Verified really working on what company creation is going to look at, like, in the in the creator world.
So I mean, really, really exciting and diverse background when it comes to kind of figuring out what's next in the in the world of online business.

Curt: Awesome. And did you get a chance to go to CES?

Phil: I didn't, but I was very jealous of everyone who did. I actually had tickets to it about a big campaign came in that kept me stuck in Los Angeles.

Curt: Okay. Yeah. I did not go either. But what were you reading about and understanding of what was going on there and what were some of the takeaways that you feel were relevant or changed or have maybe impacted your business? What are your thoughts on what happened to see?
Yes. Yeah.

Phil: I mean, there was a fair amount of the regular boring stuff. Right? TVs that are cheaper, faster, stronger. Right? Repackaging of appliances that are more efficient or there was the oven that's got a video camera in it that's optimized for creators.
Like, a lot of that kind of stuff was there. What I thought was really interesting was the amount of chatter around AI and chat GPT and how those kind of AI machine learning trends are going to change everything. Right? So, there's a few things that are happening at the same time that although they're getting a fair amount of attention, I think, could always be getting more. One is AI and machine learning tools have gotten to be accessible and easy enough that they can start to replace busy work now.
And what I mean by that is, like, if you expect chat GBT to write the next great novel. We're not even close to that now. But if you want them to put together a quick form letter for a resignation or something where you just have to go in and make a couple of tweaks and it'll save you forty-five minutes of time. We're there. Right?
We have arrived. So really excited about the fact that everybody's starting to realize how important that is. At the same time, there's been a lot of big announcements around quantum computing, and there was some chatter about that, and people weren't paying attention because it's hard for people to wrap their head around. But that's going to change things, I would say, even more than AI and machine learning. And the two are kind of tied in.
Right? Because once quantum computing becomes more accessible than processing speeds, the chief of cheapness of delivery of product. It's all going to accelerate so fast that it's really going to overnight we're going to blink and we're going to feel like we're living in the future. It's all going to be thanks to that movement that very few are talking about right now.

Curt: Yeah. You know, I've been playing around with ChatGPT. I saw a great meme online and said, AI won't replace you, but the person who's using it will. So, I think it's important for anyone in tech and creative to rally. To really understand what's going on, how to play with it, and I feel it's an open book, meaning it's as creative as the creative person is that's prompting it. Right? So, it's all about what are the prompts and there's a lot of chatter around prompting and how to.

Phil: Right. And so, it's pretty fascinating. And the fact that people are selling prompts right now is probably the most hilarious thing that has happened in our world in a while.

Curt: Well, yeah. They probably prompt to chat GPT and say, hey. How can I make money off of chatGPT? I think we're heading towards ubiquity.
Just like on any platform now, social or Google or whatever, they're completing your sentences. Right? You're already correcting your writing and spelling. And so, you know, you can imagine this on a social media channel.
It is giving you a choice. Do you want to write this post or shall I write it? Meaning, the AI of the social media platform. And then say, you write that and then you enter your prompt, and then all of a sudden, it's writing your post. And you don't have to do anything.

Phil: Right.

Curt: I'm using it right now to do a lot of blogs and carousels. And, you know, it can give the bulk of what an article is. And but then, I always want to start it off with certainly the pithy headline and then summarize it at the end. To make it feel human or a little more humorous than it might be able to be. 
But, you know, I am using it. Definitely, I also give a credit give credit meaning at the end of the articles I will say, hey, this is a hybrid article partially written by Chat GPT -- to not mislead people that, hey, I'm writing everything now. No. It's like I'm getting some help from AI.
What are your thoughts about that whole thing about plagiarism, sourcing, citing, what's going on? What are what are the legal implications? I know on the generative AI side for, on the mid journey side, there’s a lot more controversy than what is happening on the writing side.

Phil: Yeah. No. I mean, our legal systems per usual are woefully behind. And frankly, I think that a lot of this stuff is so wonky that our court systems and our legislators don't care to be caught up. Right.
Like, I'll give you an example. Fair use has been a huge issue on platforms like YouTube, and the DMCA is very old and too crusty, and nobody wants to talk about it because it's a very hard subject. Like, if I make a video, and then somebody reacts to the video, should they be able to monetize it. That stuff is tricky. Well, there's been two cases that I know of.
That has actually legislated this. And one gave the win to the creator, and the other one gave the win for the person who created the original piece of content. So, it's the same way with this. Right? You need big data models in order to make AI and machine learning work.
And when I say big, I mean, massively big. Right? Inputs in the millions won't do. It needs to be in the billions. It needs to be looking at everything.
And in order to do that, it's you can't get a well licensed photo library or, you know, text where you make sure everything is cleared. It's just not realistic. It would cost a hundred billion dollars to start that company.

Phil: So, this this is where it starts to get really tricky because I am a firm believer that if you create an original piece of art and people are using in any way to monetize then you should have a case to make money from that. And, frankly, when it comes to a lot of the fair use stuff that's happening on YouTube or even what's happening with duets on TikTok. I feel like the original artist has been getting screwed for decades, and that's a huge bummer. The platform should have figured that out, and our legislators should have figured that out. And that's a bummer.
Likewise, in the AI world, I think that we're probably going to keep going as is for the foreseeable future. And, I mean, like, decades, and the people who are going to get screwed are artists. And their writers and their creatives. It's unfortunate, but I think that's just how it's going to net out.

Curt: Yeah. Do you say decades?

Phil: Yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, like, look at like, user generated content on the Internet is not something that's come around the past ten years.
No matter what the armchair pundits on LinkedIn will let you believe. Right? Like, blogging was really popular in the early nineties. That's been happening for years and years. And in these blogs, people were putting up pictures, and they were putting in links.
And, like, the idea of repair purposing and remixing content on the Internet. Monetizing that has been around for let's say, generously, it's been popular for thirty-five years. Yeah. You will not see a piece of legislation that feels like it's been addressing that in thirty-five years. And likewise, like, who's it kind of reminds me of the TikTok argument right now.
There's a lot of politicians who like to grumble about it. There are very few politicians who want to put forward a comprehensive bill that does anything but finger wag. Right? And it's because people are scared to death of making the wrong move on something they couldn't possibly understand.

Curt: Yeah. They don't understand it, and it is way overwhelming to even ponder the implications. Yeah. You know, there's the bans going on, the government side, with banning the use of TikTok on government phones. Right?
Right. University, phones or even on Campus. I don't even know how you start to moderate that.

Phil: Yeah. You're really looking at they could pass it and they could say keep it off your phones? Are they checking everybody? Like, if you're an intern at a congressional office, are they checking your phone to make sure there's no tip Tok? Like, come on, it's just it's not enforceable.
It's a regulation that at best is finger wagging. Right?

Curt: Well, everybody

Phil: uses a TikTok and how would it ever

Curt: Come? Yeah. It's a scare tactic. They will likely make it more popular because it becomes Right? They are cultish.
Right? Sure. And be something like, hey. I'm getting away with it. They're catching me.
So cool. I'm going to invite all my friends even more so.

Phil: And it doesn't address the root of the problem. Right? Which is we still don't know how our data is being stored and used. Right? Because you hear from, you know, ByteDance.
Hey, everything is America only. Things you know, they're putting forward that everything they're doing is on the level, and the Chinese government is not going to hold of all this data. However, it's very public how Chummy Oracle has been with the Chinese government. So those are the big questions and those are the things that we should probably have a deep dive, and we should probably be having a whole lot of lawyers looking into this and investigators looking into this. And instead, we're being lazy and just ban it on government phones? Like, that's just it's not getting to the root of the problem at all because the problem is too complex.

Curt: Well, okay. So then does it fall upon the app stores to challenge some of the business practices before they even make it to the App Store? Is that where we can start heading off some of this stuff? Because they seem logical.

Phil: To be a gatekeeper but are they should they bear the burden? I mean, it's depending on a business to do something that will hurt the revenue of the business in order to do the right thing. It's almost always the wrong call. Like, it's just not going to happen. You know?
Like Google and Apple will take TikTok off their app stores when it is financially, advantage just for them to do so. Or they're forced. Right? And then I could see us at a world where government official just puts forth that TikTok is banned in America, and then they'll say fine, and they'll take it down. And there'll be a lot of mirroring and stuff that gets it here.
But there's also going to be an entire generation of people who love TikTok, we're going to be pretty pissed off. But I think that the what's more realistic is we're probably going to if we do want to go the route of getting Apple or Google to do the right thing here, or if we think that's the right thing, I think that it has to be, like, payments have to be cut off for it or, you know, like, there has to be a financial reason for them to not want to host that anymore.

Curt: Well, Apple did the right thing when they changed the rules on apps tracking you. Right? And that they took a big hit and revenue loss as well as all the companies that rule affected.
So it is possible it is possible for a company to do the right thing. Apple did it in that case. But, yeah, what is that? That critical moment that zeitgeist that makes them change the rules on companies like TikTok because, obviously, they're international, global company.

Phil: Yeah. And I also think that Apple having the tracking thing it was also them giving a little bit of the finger to the Amazons and the Facebooks of the world where they were getting a whole lot of data from the App Store that Apple is not participating in after the fact. I do think that even though that was ultimately the right thing is to give people control their data. I think for them, it was a financial decision and that they know that these brands are coming to eat their lunch. 

Curt: Awesome. So okay. So, we talked about TikTok.
Talk a little bit about ChatGPT. We'll see when ChatGPT 4 comes out -- Right. -- because that's supposed to be a hundred or a thousand x the computing power. So right now, you know, I go and chat GPT and I can't get in because you know, we're just too busy. So, what is I mean, obviously, huge popularity in the two months and since it opened, but if you can't use it, what are they doing to fix that?

Phil: Yeah. I mean, it's the fast-scaling issue. Right? They hit a million users faster than any technology I think I've ever seen. Right?
It was just absurd. It was what a week before they got from launch to a million users. It's just like, you don't see anything hit that unless it's something that has been marketed like, crazy. Right? 

Curt: They didn't market, but they worked on it for years. Right? Totally. And it was just a simple experience. Like, hey. Write this prompt. It's like, oh, yeah. Let me see what happens. Beyond that, I mean, it's just the simple premise and look at the impacts. It's like if there's a lesson to be learned about focusing the startups MVP and make it simple, easy to understand.

Phil: When ChatGPT was a weekend and they hit a million users, the first thing I did was remember every web3 company I've ever worked with because it was always what I was hammering is you're making web3 too complex. And people are like, no. People need to know about smart contracts, and they need to know about blockchains or to do this and I'm like, no, they don't. And when I when I sent that, I would send a little message being like, look, these people took machine learning and AI, brought it down to a simple gamified and useful experience that was also shareable. And made a very simple way to get in and made it as easy as talking to a human.
And now look, they were able to get a hundred million dollars or whatever investment. I forgot exactly how much Open AI was able to get quickly, but it was a lot of money, and it was by doing less, not doing more. Right? Give people a thing they can use where they don't have to learn it.

Curt: Yeah, great point on the web3 talk lingo language hype, everything that's been mentioned and pushed about web3. It is a confusing hot piece of doo....

Phil: doo doo. Yes. But there's still some things that are working at it and other things that are working at it are people who are doing just that. They're letting the backend technology be the backend technology and then give me a great experience.
Like the game Splinter Lands, A lot of people say, ah, play to earn his dead. Splinter Lands is crushing it. They've got hundreds of thousands of daily active users and tons of sales It's just a very kind of, like, nerdy Magic the Gathering style game. So that a lot of people are talking about it. But it can work.
It's just a really fun game where you can buy card packs that are like Magic the Gathering, and then you can sit and play all day with other people. And you get incentives for playing all day. And that's pretty cool. Right?

Curt: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it speaks to, you know, what I call the iceberg of marketing. Right? When you look at the tip of the iceberg that's above the water, that people see.
Right? Versus the mass that lies underneath the water, that is exponentially bigger than what you see. Your marketing message should dwell on what you see, what we see above the water. If you start to talk about what is happening beneath the water, under the hood, so to speak, you enter this rabbit hole of lingo and acronyms and technology that people don't understand. People understand benefit driven messaging. At the end of the day, how does this benefit me? It's like, I don't even know what a smart contract is, but if you have some type of service that's backed by a smart contract, built on the blockchain. Again, don't even need to mention those things. You just need to market the benefit of the service that you're promoting. And that there's some type of extra level of security. But, you know, that outbound marketing message needs to be so simple and clear, and benefit driven. Otherwise, people's eyes glaze over, their ears shut, and they just tune it out. Yep. Its tech gobbled-y gook.
And it's a shame because I've been on the creative side working in tech for years. And there's this classic battle between who leads tech or creative And I see that a lot of user experience design and it looks like that user experience design or, the "user experience" is the "customer experience." Customer experience is the brand.

Phil: -- Right. --

Curt: That's what people walk away with. 

Curt: The brand that lives around in people's heads. They don't need to know about how it's done or how it's built. That might appeal to investor discussions, maybe they want to buy IP. But in a consumer message, it's really about what is the experience? And -- Right. -- did I enjoy it? Was it quick? Did I have any hurdles? Just like ChatGPT was just so dumbed down. It was just ridiculous. And then you just needed to learn okay. Here's how you do prompts.
You know, just like Midjourney, which is a little more complicated. Certainly, in Discord than ChatGPT, which is just so damned simple. But there's this classic struggle between kind of the beautification of the design team or the UX team, which is really the product team versus the engineers and the tech. And the tech they love talking about tech.
Right? Because they're the tech geeks, and I, as somebody friends that are those guys, those women. But, you know, it can't lead the conversation. It can't lead the product development.
It can't lead the marketing of what this whatever product you're developing is about. It's this classic struggle between UX and Tech. And, obviously, they need to work together to create a product that user experience should be driving the marketing message, not the technology.

Phil: Yes. Yeah. You're talking about the "math and magic" argument, and that's tough. It's kind of like saying, well, what do you need in order to survive... the heart or the brain? You need both. Which one's more important? Depends on the product. Right? But I ultimately, what the biggest struggle people are having with a lot of these new technologies is that it's being led by the brain and not enough with the heart. And ChatGPT figured that part out, and web3 has not figured that part out. I guess that's unfair.
Top shot, I feel like figured it out first, and then nobody learned the lesson from them. Right? Where it's like, hey, its basketball cards, but they're videos. Cool. Yeah.
Does it deserve to be a billion-dollar kind of seller? I don't think it ever hit a billion, being hyperbolic. But, you know, it definitely did a billion dollars in sales over the year. Did deserve to do that much? No.
There was a lot of speculators jumping into hype. But it's a nice solid business, you know. And I feel like more web3 businesses that were trying to, like, build on top of hype instead of trying to build a nice stable business are just going to go away. And that's fine.
They should go away. And likewise, there'll be a lot of AI companies that are going to build on hype now that are going to be too obsessed with the AI of it all, and they're just going to go away. And chatGPT will survive because it's trying to be the Google event. Like, how do you make it the first destination? Or if somebody wants a...

Curt: Robot to solve their problems, they ask that first. Oh, it will replace Google. I'm sure that I can't imagine that Google isn't shaking in their boots because, you know, Google's been around, obviously, for so long and, you know, the research on Google is you do a search, and you bring up a bunch of links and articles. And if you're going to write an article, you then have to cull through all these links to write it and this it's a two-to-three-day process of writing something, citing everything that you find, and writing in a way that isn't plagiaristic, if that's right. And then, that's a three-day process where if you just ask or prompt chatGPT. No. Just write this article on this, you know, the civil war.

Curt: What led to the civil war, just something as broad as that. And it'll just write it, right? It's not a research endeavor. It's a prompt endeavor. And why would you go to Google after that? Maybe to double check some of the stories or some, you know, you reconcile some things, but why would you go to Google? Yeah. A lot of your primary skills, you know, and if you write, not everyone's a writer. Right? But there's certainly the student community, which, is drastically affected by chatGPT. How do you ban chatGPT from campuses. Talk about TikTok. But, yeah, I think it's going to replace search. 

Phil: So, I tend to agree. And I think that what we what we're still waiting on is what's Google's competitor in chatGPT that they're going to launch because it has been pretty well documented that they've been knee deep in their own research and development. And I have a feeling that in the next three months, we're going to see something from Google that is probably like ChatGPT, but a little sexier. And then the war will be on. But, yeah, I've tried to Google things lately, and it's ruined. And what ruined it is people have gotten too good with SEO. And it makes it so the websites that are full of ads who have a ton of money are the ones that surface to the top. And those are just terrible user experiences. Like, have you ever tried to Google a recipe recently? You will find a website that where the recipe is at the bottom of a long page that's full of ads where people are telling their story about how their brand would create it directly.
It's just because they optimized the hell out of the keywords. And it's a terrible experience. I'd rather just go to a chat GPT and say, how do you make the give me the recipe from the world's best onion rings in an air fryer and make sure it uses Panko instead of flour. Right. Like And then that's without a perfect thing, and I don't have to wade through abs.

Curt: Yeah. I just experienced that with making a pot roast and it was hey I just need the ingredients. Okay?
Just where are they, like there's all these pictures and videos and ads and it's like, oh my god. Yeah. You have to scroll down.

Phil: Like YouTube, the same thing is happening. Right? Let's talk about what mister beast has done that's terrible for the YouTube market. Because everyone likes to talk about when he's done that's good. I'm going to take shots fired right now.

Phil: He is so focused on optimized content for the platform, and it made other people really focused on optimized platform for the content but it's no longer about good content surfacing. Right? It's like, how do you make the brightest thumbnail and a b test it and, like, he has very publicly made that the game. That's a huge bummer. And frankly, it's the death of art because it's making it about how you make it so that we're tricking people into the click, and then tricking people into hanging on and constantly keeping them from getting what they want.
It's like playing a psychological game rather than having awesome content surface. So now if I go on YouTube and I'm just like, hey, I want to watch a funny comedy video. Impossible to find. Nothing is funny anymore. It's charming.
It's optimized. It's gamified.

Curt: Right.

Phil: Sometimes people yeah. They're oftentimes people are like, I would say, okay. What bucket would you put Mr. Beast content in? Drama, what is it? And almost everyone across the board says comedy.
That might cool. Show me one scene and one Mr. Beast video where you laughed. Show me a joke. Nobody could do it because it's not comedy. It's just optimized.
And it's the same reason why I'd like so many people on TikTok are getting really popular, literally stealing stand-up comedian bits and then reuploading them on their platform. 

Curt: It's the same thing. They are dead pan as they're lying down on a pillow. Right? Exactly.

Phil: Yeah. It's just like people, like, curating the best moments and because they don't... that it's optimized for the platform in a way that the stand-up comedian doesn't know or doesn't have a reach for, It's all a bummer. Yeah.

Curt: It's a crisis of originality. Right? You know this well.

Phil: Why even bother creating anymore? If curation is how you get popular now, why would creators create? If I'm going to make a piece of art and it's just going to be scraped for AI. Why do I create the piece of art? If I'm going to be a stand-up comedian, then everyone's going to steal my joke and then make it their own, like, it just leads this whole culture of what's the point of doing any of this stuff?
And then we're all going to focus on how do we get famous rather than how do we create great stuff. And that is a huge bummer. I would much rather have a world where the algorithms are trying to really surface originality and we don't have that anymore. Right? Let alone copyright laws.

Curt: Going back to 1978, which is still cited. By putting a circle c on something, you feel that it's copyrighted and protected. Okay. No. It's a scare tactic, and that's completely ineffective at this point.
I want to go back to your point about the whole A/B kind of JPEG testing in terms of thumbnails. You know, I think Netflix was a great example of the death and destruction of Key Art, which, you know, I spent many years in the movie business doing posters and marketing for movies. And it's an art. I mean, it's like incredible artists that do it. And great culture and history and graphic design and marketing.
And Netflix, because they had all these eyeballs and these little, you know, horizontal thumbnails, and they could tell what people were clicking on. They could put out a hundred different scene grabs with the title on it, color variations, and all of a sudden, they had all this data on what really worked. And it just destroyed the notion of, no, here's this iconic movie poster that's used to market the movie through the end of time. Right? In the movie business, it's like you do that film poster. That's on your permanent record for good and bad. Yeah. A permanent record,

Phil: Meaning?

Curt: It enters this lexicon of film marketing that lives forever. And then yeah, not so much. We're going to have a junior designer or an intern or a vendor offshore that will do these things for maybe a hundred bucks each and just slap a logo and then kind of localize it with the different language, you know, versions, make it international, and then just see how it works, you know, because, when you're doing the big scroll in Netflix, you see one thumbnail and then further down you see another thumbnail and they're like, whatever is we're just trying to get you to click. Right?
And they're just going to put it up. They have that huge database and experience to actually do it. And in terms of creativity, I mean, it's just really killed that notion of this iconic movie poster, maintaining its digital after life, whatever after that and that it lives on forever. And it's like, yeah. Netflix said, yeah, not so much.

Phil: Yeah. It's optimize. Optimize. But I think that the good thing here here's where I'll swing it to a positive note. Is that these things have ebbs and flows. And when things become too tedious and optimized and annoying, there is a return to authenticity.
I would just, like, look at the independent film movement of the nineties. Right? all of a sudden, there was just too many blockbusters and big, big, big, and everything felt like the same and kind of boring. And then, you know, Doug Limon and Quentin Tarantino, and all these indie directors exploded out of the scene in ‘94 and went, like, look, we can take low budget. Like, I didn't read Robert McKee's story, and I just made something that was cool in the theater of awesome. And then companies I know you can't say the word anymore, but companies like MiraMax were able to grow and make a lot of Indie's and all of the academy awards forever. I think that likewise, I think the rise of TikTok is a lot of this, is that YouTube just stopped feeling authentic. It just felt like it was a lot of influencers playing the influencer game.
But if you go to the TikTok for you page, you still see a lot of weirdos doing weird stuff into things and it's fun, joyous, and creative. YouTube started losing that. But I do blame a lot of YouTube on that. And I think that that is a bit of a rebellion that will hopefully be recovered by YouTube when YouTube short starts monetizing and starts dominating that market too.

Curt: Yeah. I think YouTube Shorts was a great move. And I think they are kind of killing it in their own way and it's certainly a direct competitor. But on that note of authenticity, I would also cite the return of Vinyl. Right? Right. They have now surpassed CD sales, and that is that's insane and so cool. Right? It's no longer the kind of the hobbyist thing. It's like music sales of physical is declining and vinyl just happened to take the lead that might be a force factor there.
But at the end of the day, the numbers are there. People love vinyl, oh, that's old school. And -- Oh, yeah. -- really cool. And, actually, good audio.

Phil: Right. Totally. I think that a big part of that too is there's a collectible nature to vinyl that just never caught on with cassettes or CDs or Like, the fact that people feel like if they have it, they almost have it like a sports card. 
And by building that into the culture of vinyl, it really does feed this idea of everything that I have as sentimental value, physical value. You know, there's a lot of limited different pressings and drops, and there's a certain amount of clout with owning all four copies of the new Taylor Swift Vinyl that came out with the different colors. Like, there's a game there as well. So, And I think that collectible culture is going to continue increasing.

Curt: Well, let's talk about collectibles because NFT, part of that web3 universe, you know, recently took a hit. Yeah.

Phil: And

Curt: you know, talking about tech and nomenclature, it seems like an NFT, as a name, was certainly a throwaway. Again, speaking to the technology of what it is versus what it does. Yeah. Digital collectible. Right?
Curt: Do you see a shift there in kind of the renaming of these things, you know, when Trump launched his cards, you know, they were positioned as digital collectibles. You know, he sold them all, of course. And a lot of copyright violations in creating them, whatever. You know, is there shift in terms of marketing and nomenclature and is NFT culture dead or is it evolving into something else? 

Phil: It was always a bad name or oh, I'm checking the Donald Trump floor price right now. It's a point one eight. So, a lot of people lost a ton of money who bought these Trump cards.

Phil: What are you going to do? Yeah. I think so I was working with a buddy of mine. I blockchain collectible company before NFT as a name, really took off.
And at that time, we were saying blockchain collectible so that people could understand about we were saying digital collectible in all of our materials for consumers. I think that's where it's going to go back to. And I think that even a step further than that, I think, eventually, it's just going to be positioned to whatever piece of digital content it is. Right? In games, it's always been DLC or skins or you know, weapons or whatever you're buying.
Yeah. So, it's just going to have this new suite of kit. Right. Exactly. Like it.
We don't call, you know, bubble gum, you know, that gelatinous chewing materials right about life. Right. Or consumer packaged goods that are chewable. Like, we just call it bubble gum. But I think that eventually, we're going to get to the point where we're, like, hey, look. Now you're buying a Fortnite skin. And guess what? If you get sick of playing Fortnite, you could sell it back. And if somebody buys it, then you get some money. And if people hear that, they go, like, oh, okay. So, you're just adding capability instead of making it sound like a cash grab, which unfortunately the board apes of the world and everything made NFTs sound like an investment, which sours a lot of people. Oh, because then when you talk about life, oh, well, now you know, if you like, when I position it this way, people get really exciting. I'm like, you buy video games. When you're done with the video game, you sell it back to GameStop and you make what? Ten percent of what you get back.
And almost every gamer in the world is like, yeah. It sucks. I play it for a week and then I I'm out that forty-five bucks. I'm like, well, what if instead when you buy that game? You're able to just sell it digitally and you can get a lot more of it back.
And maybe even make more money if it's popular. People go, wow. That's pretty cool. Right?
Phil: It's blockchain technology actually. When you explain it that way, they start going like, oh, okay. So, this is actually something that's for me. It's not for the company. It's something that actually gives me the positives to go out and actually own the digital assets that I have.
It's like when you explain it in those ways that they go, okay, this is something that actually helps me as a consumer. But everybody hears NFTs in the gaming world. They think, like, the worst of consumerism. Right? Like, people buy speculatively in games being designed to drive more microtransactions. That's dangerous and scary for them.

Curt: Yeah. There was a meme once where it had a Will Farrell shot where he's screaming and the copy was, “Does anyone want to buy a JPEG?” You know? And it's like, yeah. It kind of sums it up.

Phil: Yeah.

Curt: And, yeah, the hype, the yelling and really what it is. And it was just very empty. But there is this culture of buying. There is a culture of transactional purchases of some type that doesn't have to be art. It can be a comic book.
It can be comic book art. It can be a video. It can be many things. But the sooner we get to describing what you're collecting or offering it as a collectible and shed this nomenclature of NFT, I think, then we'll finally get somewhere. But there is a culture that could cop to they've just been misled. Right? Right. I've talked with other NFT creators, and they say, yeah. They say it was a throwaway name. They just wanted to hype industry and then walk away from it. And it's like, well, yeah, they that's what happened. But it was just a culture and a transactional business that is out there. And I think it's just this brief shifting and reprioritizing and renaming of things to reinvent it. I think that's how that culture can be saved and nurtured. Yeah. I follow Gary V a lot. I know he launched an NFT company, and then very quickly, he changed it to a web3 company. Yep. Lost the nomenclature entity. Because he's a market. He said he saw what was going on. It's like, yeah. No. We can't use that as the name of the company. 

Phil: Totally. This reminds me very much of the Internet in early in the early nineties e commerce. Right? So, when e commerce first started blowing up, everyone went, that's a cool idea. I want to buy products online. And what happened, there was a million scam sites that launched that were just trying to steal your credit card information. So immediately, there was this scare of, like, don't share your real name on the Internet. Don't share your address. Don't share and that was most of the nineties people were saying that. But because the market was led by scammers, and what it took was for the Amazon's of the world to start growing and building that trust and eBase of the world to start growing that trust for people to go, or for that matter, PayPal really launching where you've got and that extra layer of protection. And then people went, okay, few. I can exhale a little bit because it's a safer market. The same thing happened with web3. The scammers all came in and they stole as much money as they could, and it made everyone look at the depth of this market. And now what's going to grow out of it is people like, what Starbucks is doing with Odyssey.
It's got a blockchain backing. It is web3. You don't need to care that it's web3, that it launches, then people will slowly start to realize that they've got a quote unquote wallet tied to their digital identity or they're storing these digital goods, that will be useful. And then there'll be people who solve the display issue where you could actually show off digital assets in an interesting way. And make it social and make it interesting.
And slowly, this market is going to come around. And it's not going to look anything like the web 3 market of 2021, which was mostly scams.

Curt: Yeah. You know, crypto and NFTs, those were the biggest things that led the web 3 movement in this very recent past year. And, obviously, the ball came crashing down, not completely. But if you go back to the roots of what web3 is built anything built on the blockchain. Those two things were just, again, the tip of the iceberg of all the possibilities.
And how it can affect and help industries. And I think, you know, whether Web3 has to be repositioned and companies need to get a lot more creative in terms of their marketing positioning and use of the blockchain to reinvent the market because you know, blockchains that dead. Right. It's these scammers that came in and abused the nomenclature and built hype in a very flimsy, thin way that kind of really did. So, there's just like that gap that you talked about between the birth of the Internet and then the adoption of e commerce. I mean, that took years. Years. Years. Years. It could have been could have been instantaneous. Right? Totally. The technology was there from day one.
But all the distrust that came out of it had to be forgotten and replaced with other meaningful iterations, meaningful businesses, purpose driven, benefit driven, copy and services that all of a sudden became simple to understand, and the tech talk dies down and it becomes this simple experience, more transactional. It's like, oh, I can do that. Oh, cool. I'll do it. Right? Because it's that it should be that simple.

Phil: Right. No. Absolutely. It should be. But yeah. it's the problem is that like, I don't want to make it political like the Trump's of the world. Hey, I'm selling this thing. It doesn't really have any value, but it's a collectible. People go collectibles. That might raise in value.
And then people buy it thinking that they're going to make money off of it. It immediately dumps in value and people are left holding the bag. 

Phil: And that was repeated thousands and thousands and thousands of times. And that's going to take a long time to recover from. 

Curt: Yeah. And then he made his four million dollars. That's what was important to him. That's all he cared about.

Phil: Exactly. And, like, he gets to put that right in his box It's not going any common. Like, he was one offering as the utility of it. Like, a sweepstakes where one person wins a round of golf and one person wins a dinner. It was like, the total price value in terms of service like fifty grand or something abysmally low. And I'm just looking to my crystal ball here don't think anyone's actually going to get that round of golf with Donald Trump.

Curt: That's going to actually happen, right.

Phil: But, you know, in terms of, like, so what is everything that's wrong with the business? I think that that exemplified it and hopefully that's the last one of those that makes everybody go, okay, that was the death knell of NFT's is a speculative asset. And now let's really focus on how we can build this into something that's valuable beyond just like own it and hopefully sell it for more. Absolutely.

Curt: So, let's talk about We are Verified a little because, you know, you're this company now and working with influencers. What is going on in terms of implications of TikTok, web 3, DRM, copyright, infringement, how is that affecting your stable of talent? What are their hopes and desires? And how are you managing all that?

Phil: Yeah. It's been interesting because I was in creator management for a long time, and then I left for a while, and now I came back to it. A lot of people are like, whoa, that's weird that you're taking a step back to your career, but so many things have changed that I couldn't stay away. One of those is, of course, my CEO, my business partner in this Jordan, Warona, He's an expert talent manager, and he's handling the talent management side masterfully, and they've got a hundred talent under management, three hundred million followers. So that part's clicking. Where I'm really coming in is to figure out what the future of talent management looks like and what partnerships and structures need to be built for that. I see it really in three different ways. One is everybody's putting creators out as entrepreneurs, but they're not entrepreneurs. They are marketers.
They are creatives. But if you tell people like, hey, congratulations. You have a prank channel. Now go set up an LLC and find yourself a lawyer and launch a consumer package good product. They're going to go a lot Right?
Everybody wants them to be out of their new words, but they're not they need a team around them in order to get that done. So, we're helping to fill that gap in teach them how to raise investment. We're going to be launching product lines of that sort and hopefully launch the next Etsy or whatever in the process. The truth is there's a lot of creators that need to build out teams around them.
However, that involves taking out an incredible amount of management risk. 
So, they need to surround themselves with teams, but a lot of creators don't want to manage teams. And they don't want to take down the risk and they want expertise from day one.
So we're doing a lot of building teams in house that can help them fill in-depth. Like podcast productions, Snap Discover shows, managing their super fan platforms, so we're taking a percentage. We're helping to bring in the expertise in the team, so they don't have to hire out for it. It's just very risk mitigation. And then three, the part that I'm really excited about is how are we evolving sales and brand partnership for the next generation.
And a big part of that is combinations of technology. Like, I just don't think that building a platform right now is where we want to be. But I do think that taking all of the great stuff that's out there and building it to one company has a package So everything from influencer discovery to projecting success to creative to measuring success post campaign is all managed and optimized. We're going to be launching a lot of that in 2023 and hopefully shake up the industry a little bit in the process.

Curt: Sounds very smart. And you're watching out for your people and being very future focused and keeping your eye on where tech is going and analyzing the failures and recognizing the opportunities. So, you know, I think you are an innovative company in that way. And so, kudos to you and your team.

Phil: Let's hope. I mean, there was influencer management is pretty broken and also has a band reputation. I feel like I jump into all these markets with a bad reputation because I'm like, I can fix it. Maybe it's that that just that mentality. But, yeah, there's a lot of kind of, like, no I'm not throwing shade at younger people, but there's a lot of people who graduate from college and they say, alright, I'm a manager now.
And they go out and find a bunch of talent and say, hey, come with me on the truth. But they don't know how to do it. Right. And what the market needs now is just maturity. Or else it'll keep having a bad reputation.
There's a lot of brands that are leaving it through marketing because they're just not getting the communication response. They're not they're not fighting people that are trying to do equitable partnerships. Everybody's trying to screw everyone because they think that's what business is because of the sharp tankification of the world. Do I take as much as I can? And then, you know and then, like, what it's just a bad way to look at the market.
You want to build relationships by making it a win win. And that's what we're really going to focus on is how do we be the good guys in the market so we can help win back some of these brands. Awesome. 

Curt: So, listen, Phil, it's been great having you today. This session is going to be in the replay. So, it will live on as a permanent record. I don't know. Permanent clubhouse will be, but you know, the idea is that, you know, other people who weren't able to attend today can listen to it. And thank you so much as great catching up. I you know our history goes back you were an adviser for me and my company I had a couple years ago, the NOW NOW play and me and my partner consulted with you, and you're very generous with your advice on the market, and thank you so much. And I'm glad I met you at that time. I've been big fan and follower ever since. And I'm so happy that you could join us today and contribute to MediaSlam, which is a new venture for me. It's really just, you know, a platform that can live anywhere. It's a newsletter. It's LinkedIn audio. It's Clubhouse. I just found that, you know, I knew a lot of people, and I had a lot to say, and I had a point of view. And it's like, why not just start getting it out there? So, thanks for joining me in that effort. You've been a great co-host. And you'll you will be back in the future, I hope. And everyone is listening, you know, please join the MediaSlam club, follow me, Curt Doty, or follow Phil Ranta.
And thanks again to our sponsor, Legacy Concierge. And everybody have a great day, and thanks again for joining Phil. And we'll talk to you later. 
Thank you so much. Okay. Bye bye.

Phil: Bye.

MediaSlam is a podcast and publication of CurtDoty.co that discusses the intersection of design, content and technology. Follow Curt Doty on LinkedIn and Follow MediaSlam on Clubhouse. To learn more, go to www.curtdoty.co/mediaslam If you would like to hear this Clubhouse Replay, click here.

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