C̶o̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶ Access Is King
Over four years ago I published an article talking about the importance of context over content and titled it the equally clickbaity “Context Is King.”
The short TLDR summary of that article is that story is how we learn, story is what adds context, and story is more impactful than data or facts alone. I’ve since then honed a personal philosophy that there is a difference between information and intelligence. Information is data, we can all google, but without true insight, the ability to understand, and the wisdom to distill the real story, you have nothing. Research is not enough. You need those skills to turn information into intelligence. Big difference.
As I wrote back then; information and content is a commodity that we trade daily. But now, particularly with the rise of web3, we are all part of a major paradigm shift. While we are still oversaturated with information and content, and while context is still needed to meaningfully connect to an audience and tell a story, we are now witnessing the rise of “access” as a commodity.
What we are seeing now is that people want to be part of the story and experience information first hand. This is what underpins the excitement around the metaverse; rather than being given a piece of content you are able to live that content out, even if virtually — in fact the difference between physical and digital is shrinking so rapidly that I paused at even making a distinction between the two.
While the initial NFT boom was led by, and let’s be honest here, web3 representations of traditional assets (“it’s just a JPEG”), what we are seeing now is a focus on utility driven access to content, to information, and most importantly to experience. These are the products that will succeeded in 2023 and beyond and this is the King that is about to be crowned and brands around the world are scrambling to work out.
Rather than just selling a product; how do we use ownership as a key to access an exclusive experience representative and befitting of the brand’s values (and value)? How do we provide a utility that can benefit or enhance the customer’s life? And how can we provide benefit that goes beyond just the use of the product the customer is buying? This is the thinking that will drive the most exciting NFT projects moving forward as they become the key to this type of unparalleled access to experience.
If we look at two of the darlings of the previous tech boom, Uber and Netflix, it’s easy to say one is a transport company and one provides video content. But really they succeeded not because of their product or content, but because of the way they gave access; instantly and effortlessly in a way that improved people’s lives. The genius of those two companies was access and utility — and in fact, particularly in Netflix’s case, now that that model has been replicated and is old hat and their acquisition strategy has regressed back to being content driven they are majorly suffering. That’s because content is easy, anyone can do it, but access, utility, experience, and the intelligence that drives it, is the real commodity.
Think about it. Back in the day to get people excited about Netflix all you had to say was “there’s this app and you can watch movies without going to the DVD shop!” Now everyone does that. Now their strategy is “we’ve gotten the Russo Brothers to direct a film with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and it has a budget of $200million!” That is a vast departure from utility back to content and a massive customer acquisition cost.
And this access driven strategy can be applied to any type of product.
At Brane our utility is allowing people to instantly chat with others who share like-minded interests, without roadblocks, without cost, without restrictions. We give people real access to one another, and what experience that access leads to is up to them. We may have built the best technology or app in the world to do so, but we understand that fundamentally our product is access.
And that brings us back to context and understanding your audience and the problem you are solving. How you do it doesn’t matter as much as why, and now more so than ever, the why needs to be giving your customer access to a new or improved experience.
It’s a new world and the promises of web3 and the metaverse, or rather the principals that they represent (because let’s be honest web3 is fundamentally a set of core values and not a technology itself) is filtering through to every (good) new product and every single growth industry is now interconnected between the physical and digital. And at the core of every offering, every strategy, product and solution, needs to be the understanding of “access.” What it is, and for whom.
Content has lost its value, it’s all but worthless, a market now saturated by marketplaces. Access is the new King.
