The Founder’s Series with Chris Hawk: A New Era of Advertising
StarStake Log #8: A New Engaging Approach for Advertising and Sponsorships for Creators and Brands
Welcome to the Founder’s series, a backstage all-access look inside the mind and methods of what StarStake is, why StarStake is and how StarStake is poised to revolutionize the creator-fan economy. Each article is from Co-founder and visionary behind the StarStake platform, Chris Hawk, and delves into different aspects of the mission StarStake is here to accomplish.
In this article, Chris Hawk shares an overview of the strategies behind StarStake, a powerful Web3 platform.
“StarStake provides a new engaging approach for advertising and sponsorships… Here’s where the kicker comes in… Let’s say you have a million people that have your StarConnect NFT and you have this million person community on StarStake in addition to your social media — that’s where you create your audience. But you create your community here on StarStake. At StarStake, you own that connection with your audience. It officially shows on the blockchain that you’ve got 1 million star connect fans.
Now advertisers can automatically go to StarStake, go to your homepage, and click ‘Advertise with me’. They can click on that button and they can go ahead and do a sponsorship right to your fans so they could sponsor your promotion for you. This is how cool this is — Let’s say you’re a health influencer and a brand that is a food delivery company can sponsor you by going to your website and clicking a button.
Say they want to sponsor free meals for 10 different people. 10 different Super Fans for your community for three months each, so they get free meals three months each as your fans. As they create the sponsorship, they can create the access NFT with all the information for that and let’s say they want to sponsor $10,000 to your fan base. They can automatically create the sponsor promotion right in your Brand Club for you. You can add in some comments and all of a sudden, your fans have this amazing free offer from this company.
They got advertising because all of your fans are going to see it and become familiar with this food delivery company, and they’re going to want to eat for free for three months, right? So now your fans are competing, they’re buying more of your products, they’re participating, they’re sharing your content more. They’re trying to get those free meals and it was sponsored so it costs you nothing.
As a creator, it costs you zero and you’re getting this growth vector, of all this action and loyalty in your brand for you. So it’s super cool and they can even sponsor financially, they could say ‘Here’s $10,000 split between the Top 5, Top 10, Top 100 people because they love getting access to your million people that are seeing these promotions.
If your community has a million people in it, there’s no algorithm that says who can and can’t see this if they’re part of your Brand Club and they’re on there. They’ll get a notification that Nike or whoever is doing a financial promotion sponsorship for this Brand Club for the month of July. So that gets super awesome advertising to them and they actually use our NFT Buck technology for the Ad Bucks that directly send it to their wallets so even the people that win are going to get these advertisements that work like cash on StarStake. You can either spend it or cash it in for USDC. This is Super cool!
All that is built into this and what a lot of people don’t yet realize is — say you have a million people on StarStake — you have a huge connected community. You also have a community that is partly made up of Super Fans, meaning they’ve bought a lot and done a lot to support your brand. Okay, you’ve got active fans, you’ve got true fans, you’ve got connected fans, different types of statuses. You also have all this data of how much people have spent and all this information. Now advertisers can come to you as well. Maybe not for a sponsor promotion, but maybe just to advertise to your community.
The same thing that happens on Facebook, the same thing that happens on YouTube, where those advertisers pay YouTube lots and lots of money to get in front of your community which technically isn’t your community but they’re going to advertise to them. And your competition is going to be taking your audience away from you because you’re charging a fee for that. Even though YouTube is getting a majority of it. Now these brands are going to go directly to you. There is no YouTube middleman that takes a “tiny” piece. When these platforms take a piece now, that advertising cut amounts to billions and billions of dollars.
With StarStake, they’re going to want to get in front of your fans and maybe they only want to advertise to your Super Fans or your Connected Fans. They can say, “Hey, I’ll pay you $50,000 to advertise and drop Ad Bucks to your fans” as they’ll have direct access to your community. They can reach your audience and you can charge for that AND you get a majority of that money rather than some middle man advertising platform. How cool is that? Because the only way this is possible is by you owning that community.
You establish that connection through your Star Connects and through your Brand Clubs and Access NFTs. Now you have all these parameters that they can bid on to say, “Hey, I want to get in front of those customers. I want to get in front of those loyal people because I know if I do that, they’re so loyal to you, they’re likely to take a look at what we have.” And you can choose whether or not to do that. That’s direct money in your pocket.
If you’re smart, you could take some of that money, put it in your pocket, and take some more and create a promotion in your Brand Club and give some of that to your fans to see even more growth. That’s the value for value model versus the value for a fee model which is dead. It is death by content. You’re always going to have to find that next fee, that next gig, that next thing, whereas with value for value, you’re building loyalty while simultaneously building revenue and growth, interaction, engagement and happiness — all these things.”
Written by a human, for humans.
