Cricket’s World Cup Bowled Over by NFT Success. Interview with Finn Bradshaw, Head of Digital at the International Cricket Council, Dubai.

Transcript

Nick Abrahams:
Today, we are going to really drop into what has been one of the most successful sports-related NFT launches in recent times. And I’m delighted to have Finn Bradshaw, head of digital at the International Cricket Council, located in sunny Dubai, joining me here today. Finn, welcome to the show.

Finn Bradshaw:
Thanks, Nick. Great to be here.

Nick Abrahams:
I really appreciate your time. And I know you could be out there working on your sun tan in Dubai, but you’re here talking to us, so thank you for that. So head of digital at the ICC. Cricket, whilst I suspect there’s some areas of the world that probably don’t quite understand it, it is in fact, the second most popular game, behind soccer. So Cricket’s a big deal, globally. And Finn, former journalist, now leading the digital team at the ICC, and you seem like you’ve got a big background in sports and digital. So I suspect there’s a bit of sports stud in there. Can you give us a bit of a sense about your journey to where you are today?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve loved sport my whole life. And yeah, it was actually interesting though.I mean, I’ve now got to the stage where I feel like I’m the grandfather of the team. I do a lot of, “In my day.” Kind of good stories.

Nick Abrahams:
That’s one of the privileges of growing a bit older, mate.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. But we’re putting together a bit of a deck on web 1, 2, [inaudible 00:01:45] whatever. And looking for, sort of how to frame that for people who don’t necessarily get it. And I said, well, through my lens, a thing that blew my mind about web 1.0, was that you could get NBA scores on the day that it happened. Because you used to read the small print in the newspaper-

Nick Abrahams:
That’s right.

Finn Bradshaw:
[crosstalk 00:02:08] I used to buy USA Today newspapers that would be a week old, from a newsagent in Melbourne, because I wanted to read NBA scores. I was obsessed with basketball in the nineties.

Nick Abrahams:
Wow.

Finn Bradshaw:
Still obsessed with basketball.

Nick Abrahams:
That is a real tragic. That’s fantastic.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So I guess, as the world’s gone on, it’s always been sort of… My interactions with technology tend to have been sort of, how does it help me as a sports fan? So even, not a couple of years out of uni, I remember one of my jobs was working for the NBL, the basketball league in Australia.

Nick Abrahams:
Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
Where we audio streamed every game. Now we’re a little bit ahead of our time then, because dial up internet sort of made that a little bit hard to… Well, we delivered it actually pretty well, but people just kind of weren’t in that head space where they were going to sit down and listen to something for an hour and a half, two hours. But yeah. Then I was a journalist at various places, but News Corps sort of most. And yeah, I was really sort of fortunate to be there when, as an organization, they really sort of turned their attention to, how is changes in technology going to affect the media business?

Finn Bradshaw:
And I was particularly fortunate, initially, to be there at a time where you didn’t need to make money out of that. So you got to just experiment. It meant you had no resources, but you could kind of dream up some pretty crazy ideas. And I think one of the reasons News Corps’ sort have been successful over the years, is they kind of do give you a bit of freedom to try stuff, and then back you if that turns out. And so, I was really fortunate to have people there that really backed me around things like, we went really hard on Super Coach, the fantasy game.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, absolutely.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. Created a lot of content off the back of that, which to be fair, people in America had been doing for a long time, but maybe in Australia hadn’t been done as much. And so things like that, which were maybe a bit of an antithesis to what a media business used to do, but they would support that. And then sort of from there, again, was really fortunate that had… Went to cricket Australia and had a management team that really believed in the importance of technology, in the future sustainability of the sport. And again, sort of to get that support to… Because these things never happen overnight. You need to sort of believe in the long term vision of it, and sort of work towards that. And so, absolutely had that there. And some of the best times of my life was at cricket Australia. There, for the Ashes five mill whitewash, when Mitch Johnson had the mustache. There, for 2015 world cup time.

Finn Bradshaw:
But also, just again, sort of really riding a wave of… You could sort of… We really felt like what we were doing, was bringing this new generation that maybe had sort of drifted away from cricket, back in, because of what we were doing. Then went to tennis Australia for a short stop off, and that was amazing. Tremendous organization there, led by Craig. We were just starting our journey there, but when the ICC came calling, cricket was my first love. It was a boy who had Steve Warne posters and Dean Jones posters.

Nick Abrahams:
Oh, wow. Okay.

Finn Bradshaw:
[crosstalk 00:05:47] on my wall. I wouldn’t have been doing justice to that eight year old boy, if I turned that opportunity down.

Nick Abrahams:
Fantastic. So the ICC, it was. And so the international cricket council, can you sort of give us a bit of a sense as to, what role does it play? How does it fit into… We’ve obviously got all the countries and their cricket associations. How does the ICC fit into all of that?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah, so we’re the global governing body. So yeah, people tend to be more familiar with what FIFA does for soccer. We’re the same, but our primary roles are, we supply umpires for every international match across the world. We sort of implement regulations and manage those. But sort of from a fan engagement point of view, and from a commercial point of view, we put on the world cups, right? So there’s ODI world cups, T20 world cups, world test championship. And then we do that… And in terms of the world cups, we do that for men and women, plus also under 19s. So, where we’re different to most other sort of equivalent bodies, where FIFA has one big men’s event once every four years, we have a big men’s event every year.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
So the next eight year, [inaudible 00:07:08] which we’re currently in market for, there’s a big event every year. And then on top of that, there’s a big women’s event every year as well, plus the under 19s. So we have a lot more touch points with our fans, than other equivalent national federations, international federations. Which you couple that with just the size of our audience, you’d see… While we’re equivalent to FIFA in our role, on social, we’re essentially double their size.

Nick Abrahams:
Wow.

Finn Bradshaw:
And I think that’s a signifier of the passion of our fans, but also, we have regular content to engage them with.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. God, that’s amazing, double fee for social engagement.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah.

Nick Abrahams:
Fantastic. Well, so you obviously have embraced, on a very significant web three strategy. And so you launched the cricket NFT project earlier in the year. Can you give us a bit of a sense of what sort of… What’s the background to that, and what’s the user experience, et cetera?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. So I mean, I think obviously about… I remember when I started here, just chatting to our chief commercial officer [inaudible 00:08:27] and we were still talking about crypto kitties, and sort of laughing about it, but then…

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, we all laughed. We probably shouldn’t have laughed. We should have bought.

Finn Bradshaw:
We probably should have bought them. Yeah. But sort of like, there’s probably something there. So it was on my list, but then obviously Top Shots launched.

Nick Abrahams:
Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
And we really had that sort of rush come. And I give credit to Top Shots. They executed that really well. And you’re like, ah, this feels a lot like a sporting property, because it’s like collectibles. There’s been collectibles forever in sport. And so that sort of brought it back to the top of the list for us a bit, where we thought, one, we’re really worried… We’re really conscious of mind share. If people are into something, we want a cricket option there for them.

Nick Abrahams:
Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
We don’t think cricket is just playing red ball behind a picket fence. We think cricket is all other touch points, whether you’re playing on the beach or whether you’re playing a game on your phone. That all sort of adds up. So I thought we should try in that space. And so where we’re probably different to some other organizations, is we didn’t run a sort of commercial process to find a sponsor. We put out a tender for an engagement tool, and we were kind of quite prescriptive around our vision for what we thought this would be. And as a fan engagement proposition, we think sports fans like collecting things, we think sports fans like… A lot of it, sort of described early on, it was sort of like digitizing nostalgia.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
When I think of… A lot of what was going through my head was, when I was a kid obsessed with cricket, we could go… We would go to the international game maybe twice a year. And that was, to me, like Christmas twice a year. And I’d always want to get the program to bring home, and then I’d read over it and keep… Probably still got all those programs in a box somewhere, at home with my mum.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, yeah. Your lucky parents.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. That’s right.

Nick Abrahams:
I’m sure they love having that, along with everything else from your childhood.

Finn Bradshaw:
Oh yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, combine that with just being a journalist and collecting magazines.

Nick Abrahams:
Oh, right.

Finn Bradshaw:
Truly a fire trap. So, yeah. And so a lot of us really just think through that lens of, these moments happen in sport, that are so meaningful, imagine if you could feel ownership of that? I felt like that was a powerful kind of concept. And this is where the scarcity that you can create through blockchain, makes it interesting, because you had to… Once we started talking about that internally, the thing you have to overcome is, but people can go and watch it on YouTube. Why? And they’d say, “Well, yeah. You can go and buy a print of the Mona Lisa, but no one thinks that’s the same as owning the Mona Lisa.” And sports fans have always been comfortable with that. They’ve always been comfortable with, you buy a Tops trading card, Tops tells you it’s one of 10,000 and you believe it.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
There’s no proof, but now there’s proof. So anyway, so that was really our sort of thinking on it. And we ran, I think FanCraze would agree, an exhaustive process. And so for us, it was really sort of focused on that, sort of getting to know the partners. We were fortunate, we ended up with… I mean, I think when we put out an initial expression of interest, we had maybe 54 people respond to that.

Nick Abrahams:
Wow.

Finn Bradshaw:
Different organizations.

Nick Abrahams:
Okay. That’s a lot.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. And then we said it, “Okay. If you’re interested, here’s what we want from you.”

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
And that cut it to about 17.

Nick Abrahams:
Okay.

Finn Bradshaw:
We really wanted diligence on, how are you going to do it? What’s the size of your organization? Give us a cut from all that sort of stuff. Because we knew there were a lot of, sort of pretty small organizations. And if they weren’t well funded, you’d worry about the pump and dump, and all that sort of stuff. So did a lot of due diligence in the organization, but also on their vision. And we ended up with sort of, I’d say three, really compelling partners, that we thought any of them could do a great job. And then we sort of narrowed it down from there. And that’s where I’m really pleased now, where we’re at with FanCraze, in that we found organization that really shared our view of this. That this is going to be a really central pillar to sports fandom in the future.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
We both agree that it’s going to change, and we’re not sure what it’ll be, and we’re going to experiment. But we also don’t need to… We don’t want to pressure ourselves to try and be enormous, immediately. We’re really confident because of our channels and the passion for cricket, that when we go big, we’ll be big. But let’s get that product right first. Because there’s a lot of barriers for people to overcome, just in terms of, what is an NFT? And what is the whole… That whole space? But if they also then come, and the product isn’t very good and we haven’t kind of refined that, it’s going to be hard to get them back.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
So, we’re sort of six months in. We’ve got a really passionate core community. Our Discord channel, I reckon, is the most positive space I’ve ever seen in sport.

Nick Abrahams:
Really? And that would be slightly unusual for Discord as well.

Finn Bradshaw:
Well, yeah. That’s right.

Nick Abrahams:
It can be sort of a gloves off environment in that. But it’s really a positive environment. Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. And I think, credit to FanCraze here, because they run that Discord channel.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And they’ve been really responsive all the way through, and very transparent on things. Because you’re going to make mistakes, and things like that. Our first drop, we probably didn’t get the sort of queuing mechanism right.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
And they just owned it, and then changed it for the future. And so the community, I think sort of feels quite… They feel some… Then what they say there, is important. But then you’ll see people like, when we first did… For International women’s day, we did our first pack drop for women’s-

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
And most people there, were like, “I don’t know anything about women’s cricket.” I just got an Ellyse Perry, is that good?”

Nick Abrahams:
Right, right.

Finn Bradshaw:
And you see other people saying, “Oh my God. Yeah. She’s the best player over the last 10 years.”

Nick Abrahams:
Oh, actually on the Discord? So people being-

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah, yeah. Should also look out for X, Y, and Z.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And so it was amazing to see, one, people being really kind of nice to each other and helping each other out.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
But also, because we see this as a tool of growing passion for cricket.

Nick Abrahams:
Absolutely.

Finn Bradshaw:
And so to see people talking passionately about women’s cricket, was just amazing too.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. How many folks do you have on your Discord channel?

Finn Bradshaw:
I actually don’t know.

Nick Abrahams:
Right, right.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah.

Nick Abrahams:
Got a lot, by the sounds.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. It’s not huge, not compared to… I mean, we’re used to talking in hundreds. We had a hundred million people come to our website last year. We reached about 300 million people on our social, so we’re talking big numbers. So whatever our Discord is, is small to us.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
But as I said, that’s not really our measurement at the moment. Our measurement is… So we’ve started doing sort of the flash challenges, which we can get into a bit. Basically, little games that sort of provide a bit of utility to your product, and incentivize movement of the asset, of the NFTs.

Nick Abrahams:
Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
Between peers. And we sort of look a bit more at sort of, how is that going? Are we increasing engagement, as those go along? We tweak them, we try different things, and sort of… That’s sort of more what we’re interested in, and sort of is… What’s the community saying about the new features we release? Rather than getting enormous scale. Again, once we sort of hit that, then your more sort of traditional business metrics around ARPU and MAU and stuff like that, will start coming into play.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. So you touched on that a little bit, around the utility proposition. So I guess, from the user’s point of view, so they get a drop. I gather it’s similar, I guess, to what they do with Top Shots. So you’ll get a few, I think it’s five, and it’s sort of random, but different levels of player and so forth. What are the utility… I’m particularly interested in, you sort of touched on, vaguely, the play to earn aspects of utility.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. So yeah, at the moment… Yeah. So yeah, when you get a pack, it varies. The packs have different values, therefore it varies in terms of how many moments are in there, and how scarce… Your opportunity of getting a scarce moment increases with a more expensive pack.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
But there’s always an element of randomness in there. We’ve brought in a few things recently, like starter packs that are sort of a bit cheaper, but you don’t have a pick of the rare ones, to sort of get people going on it. Yeah. The first real utility we brought in, are these flash challenges, where you have to create a collection that has a certain set of requirements. You might need players from certain countries, or captains or whatever, to sort of create it. Then over a period of time, there are points allocated, depending on a variety of factors. And then there’s a winner, and the winner of that gets access to, maybe an NFT that they can’t get otherwise.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
We’re not actually sort of rewarding people directly, with money, at the moment.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
And I think we’d probably stay away from that. It’s meant to be a game, more of a game, fan engagement kind of thing. Not to say that there won’t… But we’re not… We want people to be engaging with these things because they love cricket and they do it, and then maybe there’s a financial return at the end of it. But I think if that’s your primary thought, that’s going to make you… That’s going to cause some decisions that I don’t think is going to be good in the long run.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And so, yeah. But where we do think it can get really interesting, when you combine what FanCraze has built here, and then think about us, as people who put on some of the biggest events in the world.

Nick Abrahams:
Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
What could we provide in the real world, that would give people who might have certain things, utility? We don’t know what that is yet. We’re sort of working through that. We need to work out what’s valuable to the community, but we definitely think that there’s… We want to get to a point where you’re getting real world utility out of, not every crypto. [inaudible 00:20:22] But if you either get to a certain level or you get a certain one, that, that gets you maybe something of perpetuity, or gets you access to certain things. So we need to work that out, but we absolutely think that’s where we’ll end up. But yeah, obviously it’s not a trivial matter to sort all that stuff out.

Nick Abrahams:
Absolutely. Well, I think everyone’s learning, aren’t they? And building on the value property.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. But I think, otherwise, you have to think about sort of, what separates the ICC from any other sports entertainment property? And one of the reasons I think that we can base something around moments, is anything that happens in a world cup, has great meaning. Obviously, if you’re Dhoni, hitting a six that wins a world cup for India on home soil, that’s a pretty meaningful moment to a billion people.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
But even if you’re a Bangladeshi fan, there’s things that happen… Or an Irish fan. Teams that have not necessarily had the greatest… Had the ultimate success in world cups. There’s moments in there. But if that happens in a normal run of the mill match, doesn’t have… Hitting a winning run in a world cup match, will always be meaningful to that person.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
So, we’ve got that benefit, and then we organize… And so flowing through that, then we put on these events that are absolutely iconic. But if someone goes to that, that’s a back at this moment. That’s a thing they remember for the rest of their lives. So what can we do in terms of rewarding our community, essentially, through some kind of utility, based around that? And that’s sort of where our heads at, at the moment.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they’re part of a very exclusive club, and there are opportunities to be had. Is there an opportunity there for your… You’ve obviously got a lot of sponsorship partners and so forth. Will they be adding to the utility proposition for the NFT holder, do you think?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. We haven’t quite started that conversation, but it’s one we do plan to have with our sponsors. Again, I really think there’s a great opportunity there. Because basically, when I think of things like, in the past, when you run competitions, a lot of the difficulty often is, someone wins this prize, but maybe it’s in six months time and you got to track them down. And this is where the benefit of sort of blockchain and ownership, and who owns those things, makes that easier. And then again, sort of adding to that, the reason why people want to be partners of the ICC, is that they want to be associated with these events, and they want to talk to passionate cricket fans. And I think this gives them a really unique way of doing that. This isn’t going to be right for all of them, but yeah, we really do want to sort of flesh out, is there an opportunity where this could sort of add to the strategy that they’re trying to execute? In the same way that, 15 years ago, you’d sort of have to educate sponsors on what social media was.

Nick Abrahams:
Right. Yeah, yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And why that’s going to compliment, because it’s not ever about replacing. The best way to reach a large number of people, is still TV. You look at, in terms of watch time or whatever, it’s the big daddy. It’s the thing that cuts through. It reaches an enormous audience. But then once you start getting down and wanting to sort of talk to smaller subsets, or you want to talk to people in different ways or in different environments in that person’s life, then those other channels become really powerful.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And so, we see this as a really interesting extension of that. But again, you want a partner who also understands that we’re all on a bit of a journey.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I think it’s a bold adventure for everyone, at this stage. Just as, I guess a segue with that. So you’re talking about your partners, who are, I think for the most part, very large business to consumer brands. And we’ve seen the NFT world sort of… Obviously there’s the Bored Ape, sort of side of things, which sort of… It’s a little difficult to understand the valuation. But where we’ve seen a good amount of traction in NFTs, has been corporate NFTs, particularly as sort of an expansion of the loyalty program and so forth. So do you have a sense of… With what you’re doing, we know that to have a successful NFT drop, you need to have, effectively, a community.

Nick Abrahams:
And sports has a community, sports has fans, so you’ve got a natural built community. Whereas big B2C brands, don’t really have a community as such. They have customers, and a lot of them, but I don’t think they necessarily think of that world as community. Have you got any thoughts as to how… And whether it’s using… Maybe they sort of piggyback off your NFTs, your cricket NFTs, there’re obviously a lot of them momenting their own. Do you have any thoughts as to how you see the NFT world rolling out for the big B2C brands?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. So, sort of to your earlier point, you look at what some of those… Let’s say PFP, NFT projects.

Nick Abrahams:
Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
And they’re trying to create this sort of sense of belonging, and this idea that, if I’ve got a certain one in my Twitter bio, people can tell something about me. That’s what sport does.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And sport already has all that.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And I would say, I guess it’s grounded in something that’s going to exist beyond sort of what a lot of those ones will. So all the others are trying to create what sports already got, which is why I think sport makes a lot of sense in this space.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And also, that whole idea of collecting and stuff like that. So to your point, why does a brand become a partner of a sporting event? And they all have different strategies, but it tends to come back to that. There’s something about that fan base, that community, that they want to talk to them. And they think that being associated with whatever’s the right property for them, will enable that conversation to go better. And so that’s when we look at all of our sponsors, before every tournament. How are you going to measure outcomes?

Nick Abrahams:
Right, right.

Finn Bradshaw:
And how can we help you hit those? And they all have different sort of strategies. And particularly on digital, on broadcast, it tends to be your own asset. You’ve got your logo there on digital, we can really shape that. And so you look at some… The way we work with different partners, someone like Dream 11, our fantasy partner, we recently did this whole content series on dream big, on these sort of really emotional, uplifting stories.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
We rolled out as a video series. And it’s a very different outcome you’re looking for that, than putting a logo on the best shot of the day.

Nick Abrahams:
Right, right.

Finn Bradshaw:
And so, in the same way that some brands just reach, and they want to reach as many people as possible, but others want to talk to certain communities in certain ways. And this is where I think, sort of this web three, will enable that conversation to happen, to a certain section of the community. But also, enable that to sort of, I guess, be an ongoing relationship, and to sort of you make it a more permanent relationship, I guess. Because you look at, social media’s the main way at the moment, where you sort of move from really mass, to a little bit more. But it’s still not one to one, and it’s not… And there’s a lot of stuff about social media, that there isn’t the nicest environment at times. Whereas, I think to your point, whether this becomes a sort of membership loyalty program for us or not, I’m not sure, but it’s definitely… The idea, is creating a really sort of positive, passionate cricket community. And then for some brands, that’s going to work really, really well for them.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, yeah. Now you mentioned at the outset, about your choosing the partner, the right, I guess, technology and delivery partner. And so you went with FanCraze. It seems that this is almost the most critical decision for any organization. Because I think very few organizations have, in-house, the capabilities to not only deliver the technology, which isn’t super difficult in some respects, but the whole approach, including the development of the community. And you mentioned that FanCraze is managing Discord, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about FanCraze, and who does what, in the relationship? Do you just sort of hand the assets over? Or how collaborative is that?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. So in terms of the technology, it’s all run by FanCraze. But in terms of shaping the product, I guess we sort of talk… We work quite collaboratively sort of the strategic games, and then they execute on that. But I mean, I have twice weekly meetings with them, myself.

Nick Abrahams:
Oh, wow. Okay. That is very intense.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. And part of that’s just my interest in the area, but it’s also, we’re conscious… Compared to other, more mature areas… So with Dream, we have regular meetings with them. But you don’t really need to work through what a fantasy product looks like.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
And what are we going to try, and that. But with this one, after each drop or each new feature release, we want to review it and see how it’s going, and then sort of work out how can we best support it. So broadly, our responsibility is, we’re there to promote the cricket community. And then once they’ve sort of landed on the platform, it’s up to FanCraze to look after them.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
But it’s also new. We’re constantly sort of adjusting what we do and how we talk about it, and what are we putting to our community? And then sort of how that’s impacting. So anyway, they’re coming over next week, doing a two day workshop with us to sort of really look ahead to the cup, and planning that. And again, we do that with a lot of partners, but with this one, we’re leaning in a bit more, because we think it’s going to be important for us going forward. But also, we realize we need to sort of lean in a little bit harder than maybe some of the others, to make sure that the execution is as good as it can be.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, yeah. No. And your enthusiasm is sort of well understood. And I think you just look at the raw metrics, if you can believe what you can read, which possibly you can’t, but Top Shots, last year, I think they said that 700 million US dollars worth of Top Shots changed hands in a year. So obviously there’s an extraordinary new revenue stream on offer here. Can you talk, not in any great detail, but just, are you happy with how the metrics have gone? Is it as you expected it would do? And I guess also, is there anything that happened in the whole project that surprised you?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. We’re really happy with where it’s at. And the biggest risk, FanCraze is a startup. We knew some of the people involved from other projects, but it was a risk. But they’ve been fantastic on all levels. The thing that surprised me, was how quickly they launched.

Nick Abrahams:
Really? Okay.

Finn Bradshaw:
We signed the agreement in November, and we launched our first backdrop in January.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And I’ve been in technology or digital for a long time, and I’ve had websites that have taken a year long, and let alone getting all the payments and the registration and all that. So speed of execution, of pretty good quality, I think our products now, it’s comparable to most of them out there, that’s probably been a surprise to me. So, credit to them. I know they don’t really sleep much.

Nick Abrahams:
They’ve got the startup culture going.

Finn Bradshaw:
Oh, totally. Yeah. Which I mean, is awesome, because you can, on a Saturday go, “Hey guys, there’s an issue here.” And they’ll be back on Slack within minutes. And so, yeah. And so yeah, that’s probably been the biggest surprise. But as I said, sort of the… In terms of, kind of community growth, cautious about actually sharing numbers, but we think it’s pretty strong.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
We think sort of, from what we know of other people. And again, because we don’t feel like we’ve… We haven’t really gone hard on marketing yet.

Nick Abrahams:
Right.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. We’re pretty optimistic on that. You can’t use crypto on the platform, and we made a little bit of choice on that. And so that means we haven’t really been hit by the crypto implosion.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
Because people are just trading in fear. Now, everyone’s going to… There’s going to be some realities in the world, around less disposable income. But we’re not being hit by that thing, where people’s crypto… To spend on our platform, they had to convert our crypto anyway. And again, we sort of feel like that’s really important to… I was reading some new NFT project recently, and they’re like… They’ve tried to do it really simply for users, and say, “Now the first thing you need to do, is go and find a platform and convert it into crypto.” I’m like, you’ve lost 95% of people right there.

Nick Abrahams:
Oh yeah. Yeah. If you think about one click ordering, that is not one click.

Finn Bradshaw:
Oh yeah. And you got to set up a wallet, then you got to… Oh my. I’m into that platform, and that’s a headache for me.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And it’s still like… I would say it’s inhibited, to me, because my investments in that space, were not maybe going as well as they were six months ago. And so, am I going to put more money in there? Nah, I’m not going to do that. So, yeah. So anyway, all of that needs work. And as I said, the thing that excites us, is the engagement [inaudible 00:36:26].

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
And people aren’t… People are staying on the platform. We’re not seeing huge churn and stuff like that.

Nick Abrahams:
Brilliant. Yeah. No, it’s fantastic. And yeah, look, I hear you on what crypto has done in our investments over the last couple of months. I think you are perhaps like me, when the market’s like this, you just don’t look at it. I can’t look at it. We’ll leave it alone.

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah.

Nick Abrahams:
Maybe just to finish on a note, which is really… I mean, this is one of the world leading projects of its kind, but where do you… Where does the ICC go to from here? Obviously there’s the metaverse and so forth, are we going to see a cricket world cup in the metaverse? How do you expand?

Finn Bradshaw:
Yeah. So I mean, we always sort of try to come back to, what do fans want? What do they need? What’s not being served for them at the moment? And I think a lot of that metaverse stuff, you saw quite on acceleration of that during COVID. Particularly sponsor entertainment point of view, you couldn’t do what you’re normally doing, so you’re looking for new sort of solutions for that. I think it is interesting, I saw there’s another big concert in Roblox recently. There’s definitely communities in there, that you can probably… The best way to reach them, is through those platforms or environments, where they are. And so, maybe metaverse platforms will become that. We definitely have seen some of the stuff we’re researching with fans at the moment, is they’re looking for environments where they can hang out with other really passionate cricket fans.

Nick Abrahams:
Okay.

Finn Bradshaw:
And they’re looking for that sort of way to sort of navigate through that, and find them. And Discord and Reddit and places like that, are serving that to some degree, but we do think there’s sort of something else that can be delivered there. What we need to work through, is are we the best people to deliver that for them? Does it make more sense [inaudible 00:38:49] And then you would probably still come back to interacting around the world ICC event, because that’s sort of what we do and we own. And we need to then sort of work through how that might come about. There’s a lot of might in that answer. The short answer is, sort of.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
We’ll kind of continue to monitor and assess, but be driven by, what are fans telling us that’s missing in their fandom?

Nick Abrahams:
Yep.

Finn Bradshaw:
Or by, is there communities that we think are interested in cricket, but aren’t being reached by current platforms? And yeah, maybe that’s a new way to do it. So we’re not the biggest team here, so we need to be quite selective.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
In sort of where we put our energies. But at the end of the day, we think that we’ve just got these really… Cricket’s got these amazing sort of intrinsic assets, in terms of passion, large fandom.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah.

Finn Bradshaw:
Even the nature of the game is quite good for digital, in terms of it’s all quite… It’s distinct moments, and you can kind of hit in and out, things like that. So we’ve got all these, so we just need to work out how we best serve fans for this emerging technology. But I think, so we’ll just… Yeah. We’ll wait and see a little bit on some of those, but we’ll move quick once we feel like there’s something there that we can do, that fans will really resonate with.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Finn, thank you very much for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen, Finn Bradshaw, head of digital at the International Cricket Council. Thanks so much for your time today. Congratulations again, on just a brilliant NFT project. And we wish you all the best with both that project, and all of your other web three exploits. Thanks very much, Finn.

Finn Bradshaw:
Thanks, Nick. Speak to you soon.