Creating marketing efforts around short-lived moments usually aren’t worth it. However, there is a sweet spot for low-effort + creative ways to engage your target audience, and here are a few that caught my eye over the past week.
On Sunday, Zora announced that they would have a 4-minute mint to commemorate the total solar eclipse that happened yesterday.
Unsurprisingly, word of this limited mint quickly spread with speculators and collectors rushing to the page once the mint opened, including yours truly. As a result, 70,000+ people went to the Zora site in 3 minutes, crashing the page in the process.
Thanks to some quick thinking from the Zora team, they made the following adjustments:
Reopened the mint
Increased the mint window from 4 minutes to 44 minutes
Opened another mint to commemorate the surge in traffic and make fun of the situation
The extended eclipse mint ended up having 110k+ mints while the Zora eclipse mint had 47k+ mints with all the pent-up demand.
Obviously, this is a lower-stakes type of situation that is also a great example of how a team thought quickly on its feet, adjusted a few parameters to accommodate an influx of demand, and poked fun at the situation. No better way to commemorate it than with a NFT 😉
Over the past few months, airdrops have been the name of the game when it comes to attention. One memecoin called Unicorn is no exception to that, and they’re building the first Proof of Stake L1 Memechain.
Don’t let the retro HTML-themed fool you, this team has put more thought into the airdrop claim process than we think. What did the Unicorn team do?
Unicorn split out the airdrop into multiple waves (Epochs), allowing holders of specific NFT collections and tokens to claim the airdrop
After the claim window closes, Unicorn will claw back the unclaimed airdrop allocation and redistribute the token to users who claimed
Starting from Epoch 5, there was a community competition: The communities with the highest claim rate would receive a multiplier for the portion of the airdrop that was clawed back
By adding this twist to the airdrop claim, Unicorn kills (that sounds violent for a magical horse…) multiple birds with one stone:
Get holders to rally their respective communities to claim the airdrop
Increase general awareness of Unicorn
Maximize distribution of the Unicorn airdrop. More holders = stronger community
What is Ethena? It’s an Ethereum-based synthetic dollar protocol that is yield-bearing, or as the team puts it, an ‘Internet Bond’ that currently offers a 37.1% APY on their synthetic dollar USDe. I won’t get into detail about how it works because I’m not qualified.
Last week, they posted an update that seemed out of character for the typically serious DeFi protocol.
Talk about dispelling stereotypes! There is a time and a place for serious products and protocols to apply some creativity and fun in their certain types of posts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if future APY updates will be that playground for Ethena.
I’m happy to report that I’m still alive as voting for Day 2 goes underway. Some interesting observations and insights during the early stages.
This is dependent on the product/platform and where there are opportunities to be creative. Immunity prevents a Player from being voted out and can be granted to an individual or a tribe. Everyone was eligible for immunity for the first two nights if they completed specific requirements.
Night 1 Immunity: Connect X account and post that you’re playing.
Night 2 Immunity: Reply to a CTG post that explicitly stated that those who follow and reply will receive immunity
Simple concept, but worth thinking through what can be ‘rewarded’ beyond something directly tied to monetary value.
Since wallets could hold multiple Player NFTs before the game started and during the game, tribes naturally saw this as a threat. The broader CTG community shared tools to help identify these wallets and vote many of them out to clamp down on info leaks.
Some examples of this are a live indexer identifying which wallets hold which Player NFTs and a collection snapshot that identified wallets holding multiple Player NFTs.
Players also deployed memecoins, open edition art to memorialize the challenges, and created memes. This one is my personal favorite for the day:
For anyone who has been a part of group projects, we know how they go. There are the leaders, the slackers, the clueless ones, the lurkers, you name it. Now imagine this x10 and with half of the group members as anons.
That’s CTG on a tribe level. Fortunately, in the early stages logic generally prevails. One particular tribe took the cake on the first night though.
During the first night, each tribe had to vote off 5 members. With 10 tribes, that would assume 50 members out of 800 Players would be voted off. However, 75 members were voted off thanks to some strategic planning from the Purple tribe. What did they do?
There was likely a Season 1 player who knew if the top vote receivers were tied, all of those Players would be voted off
The tribe audited and cross-referenced various criteria that helped to determine whether that Player was active or not a bot
During the voting process, the group tracked vote distribution to ensure the right Players would get eliminated
All in all, the Purple tribe voted off 22 Players on the first night with this strategy, almost all of them with 1 vote. This was certainly a twist I didn’t see coming, and it didn’t need a script from the producers.
That’s all I’ll share for now, don’t want to have a target on my back 😉
See you Thursday!
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Check out the latest blogpost by @tpan! Dive into captivating marketing strategies around transient moments, with examples like Zora's eclipse minting event and Unicorn's gamified airdrop claims. Also, learn about Ethena's creative twist on updates, and insights from 'Crypto: The Game'.