Blockchain and creativity—inside Barbarian founder’s plans to ease brands and agencies into Web3

Benjamin Palmer emerged on the advertising scene two decades ago as leader of the band of daring digital creators at The Barbarian Group. In its early years out of Boston, the company revolutionized marketing creativity with interactive experiences such as Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken,” as well as innovative creations for brands such as Method, Nike, Comcast, Milwaukee’s Best Light and more. The Barbarian Group went on to open offices in New York and San Francisco; by the decade’s end, Cheil acquired it, and in 2016, Palmer announced his departure. “I’m not leaving you for anything specific, just gonna explore and make some rad shit,” he posted to Instagram at the time. Now Palmer, along with the agency's former technology officer Aubrey Anderson, are opening a new agency with a lot of rad shit designed to help marketers and agencies transition into Web3. The pair's The New Computer Corporation is offering a suite of tools designed to help any company or entity quickly move into the world of Web3. Metaverse glossary Key words and terms brands should know Click here NCC’s tools are centered on a noble goal: to use blockchain technology to solve some very old problems for creative professionals, such as those tied to attribution and compensation. At the same time, they promise to be incredibly useful for brands and agencies because they offer transparent means of tracking content views, and they present an easy way to deliver targeted messages and deepen connections with consumers who actually want to receive them. New office space Now that some of those key products are ready to go out into the world, so is the New Computer Corporation. The company has leased a cozy office space—the previous digs of French electronic music duo Daft Punk— at The Jim Henson Co. lot in Hollywood, where a giant Kermit the Frog statue tips its hat to cars driving by and “Dark Crystal” puppets greet visitors in reception. NCC also appointed as chief growth officer Greg Bresnitz, former global head of business development at Ace Hotel and a Vice Media vet, and brought in as chief creative officer Noreen Morioka, the co-founder of celebrated firm AdamsMorioka and former design lead at Netflix and Wieden+Kennedy, who for now is focusing on “creating a visual language and thread that holds all [NCC’s] products together,” she said. NCC’s investors include Algorand Foundation (creator of the blockchain upon which NCC’s tools are built), Borderless Capital, Eterna Capital, PEER, Hivemind Ventures and Noise DAO. Its collaborators include Ryan Schreiber, the founder of Pitchfork, who is currently developing an undisclosed project with NCC tools. Back to the basics Palmer and Anderson initially set out to create a fun new consumer experience that Palmer likened to “GeoCities 2022.” But as they got further into development, “quickly we realized there weren’t really low-level tools to accomplish things like collaboration, payments, tracking, messaging and identity wallets,” he said. So NCC shifted to building “everything that we want and could imagine us or other people wanting in the future as APIs that plug into a Web2 architecture.” All of NCC’s tools are built on Algorand, which was founded by MIT professor Silvio Micali and is widely recognized as one of the world’s greenest blockchains. Last month, in the runup to the World Cup, FIFA announced it would debut its NFT platform on Algorand. NCC’s products include an embeddable wallet, Inkey, which simplifies the onboarding process to the company’s decentralized apps (dApps); Stoi, another offering that creates a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) around a specific piece of content, allowing all those involved in creating it to reap compensation or rewards from its success; Project Rodeo, a project management tool that tracks the contributions of all those involved in creating a piece of work or content on the blockchain; TTM—token-targeted messaging—a way for creators, entertainers and brands to connect quickly and directly with its customers and fans; and Bricks, a decentralized streaming media ecosystem. Song that owns itself “What we’re doing is taking the tools that have only been used for currency and financial transactions and building all of these individual features for additional functionality,” said Palmer. For example, the tool Stoi, an acronym for “Song that owns itself,” creates a smart contract attached to a fixed number of tokens for any piece of streamed music, enabling artists, collaborators and fans to share in the ownership of the song and its future earnings. A token represents an individual’s percentage of ownership in each song’s DAO, and transactions will be paid according to that smart contract. “If five or 5,000 people create something and payment comes in, it splits out accordingly,” Palmer said. “Music is meeting decentralization and disintermediation,” said John Woods, chief technology officer of Algorand Foundation. “Algorand is the first chain fit for this purpose—secure, robust, scalable, fast and cheap. We’re excited to see where NCC takes this.” Some of NCC tools were originally conceived around music creation and distribution, but they can be used on any work, such as an ad, allowing creators to be compensated according to their contribution to that work. The inverse can also be applied. For example, any time an ad is viewed, that writes to the chain and an advertiser can be charged, instead of having to pre-pay a set amount upfront. “What [typically] ends up happening is that gets farmed out, and it’s robots clicking on ads and nobody actually sees anything,” Palmer said. “This would be a tool that could solve at least some of that problem and make it more automated and transparent.” Not Spam 2.0 Another of the tools, TTM, or token-targeted messaging, allows any entity, such as a band or a brand, to forge deeper relationships with and direct specific messages to individuals who have already demonstrated loyalty or affinity for them. For example, an individual who purchases a pair of Nikes would receive a token for that purchase. That token could then give them access to new drops or a ticket to a promotional event or experience. There are applications for competitors as well. Since that token is on the chain, “You could be a Reebok or a new company that nobody’s heard of and give Nike customers a 20% discount,” Palmer suggested. But NCC founders assert that this isn’t Spam 2.0. “What it means is that you can use that token to open a door,” Palmer said. “It’s not like a Gmail inbox that fills up whether you like it or not. It’s more like a message board that’s password protected, but your token is the password, and if you want to jump into the Nike chat, you could go in there and join, but if you don’t want to, you don’t." Jumping in While tools similar to those created by NCC are out there, such as Gnosis Safe, a digital wallet that manages assets on Ethereum, and DAO voting through Snapshot, “they’re all individual companies that you kind of have to Scotch tape together and they don't really talk to each other,” Bresitz said. “What we're building is a group of decentralized APIs (dAPIs) built on Algorand that are all interoperable and all talk to each other. So this is going to be the first suite of tools that are not only done by one company; they’re also done on a chain that is built for scale and utility. We're taking care of a lot of the really foundational infrastructure stuff that most people either can't build, because they don't have enough devs, or frankly, they don't want to build and they just want to get to it.” “It is not just about making it easier for people to build on Web3, but enabling composability and the development of products and services that until now were confined to the Web1 or Web2 stack,” said David Garcia, CEO and managing partner of Borderless Capital, one of NCC’s investors. "We are excited to back NCC and their vision of democratizing access for builders and creators that want to be part of the new internet.” 'Differentiate with generosity' The NCC founders are also excited about how blockchain technology is allowing them to revisit their aspirations from the early days of the internet. “What we liked about that era is that we had the opportunity to be generous and create value through generosity,” Anderson said. “[Today] we’ve been through 20 years of people trying to generate value through secrecy, which doesn’t feel good on the consumer end, and now, we found a technology platform that lets you differentiate with generosity again.” NCC’s tools are open source, and the team at this point doesn’t seem so concerned about generating major revenue streams, as its investors will keep them afloat for at least a year. “We're trying to keep as much free as possible for as long as possible,” Anderson said. As for how NCC will sustain itself going forward, “we have a philosophy that we should make money when other people are making money,” added Palmer. The company will take a modest, single-digit percentage transaction fee when money goes in and out, similar to a credit card processing fee. NCC will also be helping to incubate other businesses, during which it may take a small equity split. Further down the road, the team plans to revisit its original aspiration of creating consumer experiences, which will provide another revenue stream. For now, the NCC team is hoping to draw companies and creators across different categories “both to vet our assumptions about what we have built, but also to help project in the future the ways that all the tools need to evolve,” Anderson said. “We’ve been building with our own needs in mind, which we think are probably 70% representational of the world at large. When we do our first project with an ad agency or brand, we’re going to learn through that collaboration, and the tools will get better.” Not one hop Anderson and Palmer created the toolset so that companies can experiment with them easily, without disrupting their current workflows. “If we want large institutions, big brands and agencies to be able to start experimenting, they need to be able to do it quickly, easily and in parallel with whatever they’re doing currently,” Anderson said. Ad Age Next: Streaming Get your tickets for the Nov. 10 event in New York and use the code AA50 for $50 off Register here For example, NCC has been in talks with a major streaming service about new ways of tracking content plays. “They can’t just unplug their current technology, plug in ours and hope for the best,” Anderson noted. That company, for example, can implement an NCC tool for a specific segment, and then, after a period of time compare numbers one to one. “We don’t need to move people’s corporate culture in one hop. We have them implement things with a low barrier and watch the results be better, and then they can come back and collaborate some more.” While NCC originally developed its tools with music creators in mind, they’ve been released “in a very raw, general-purpose format,” Palmer said, and ultimately, the hope is that everyone will take the tools and play. “We don't want to be too prescriptive about how they should be used. This should be a time where everybody can be very creative with this stuff. Go nuts, guys!”

Blockchain and creativity—inside Barbarian founder’s plans to ease brands and agencies into Web3

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