Tennis Aust Aces the NFT/Metaverse Game. Interview with Ridley Plummer, Tennis Australia

Transcript

Nick Abrahams
Okay, terrific. We are going. Well, welcome back to Web 3.0 from Mystery to Mainstream, the podcast where we try to understand what is actually happening with Web 3.0, whether it’s crypto, NFTs, the metaverse? What’s actually happening for big organizations coming out of Web 2.0 and so forth. And today we’ve got a fantastic example of a wonderful Web 3.0 project from the Australian Open, Australian Tennis Open. So joining me from Tennis Australia is Ridley Plummer who is the Metaverse and NFT project Manager for Tennis Australia. Ridley, welcome to the show.

Ridley Plummer:
Thanks for having me, Nick. Great to be here.

Nick Abrahams
Fantastic. Well, look, can I just say congratulations. Obviously, it was an amazing outcome for the 2022 Open with the metaverse project, and we’ll hear more about that. But can I just say, firstly, what a sensational title. Can you tell us what does a Metaverse and NFT project Manager do?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, thank you. I don’t think four or five, six months ago anyone would’ve thought that you’d have Metaverse and NFT project Manager on anyone’s title. But, no, look, it’s been a fantastic few months. I think the success of the event overall was great in real life, and then that was matched in the metaverse. My remit and responsibility throughout the lead up to the event and through the tournament was to execute and strategize all of our metaverse and NFT execution in market. Which was a really short runway up until the event and we had some challenges there and had to navigate a few things in market.

Ridley Plummer:
Obviously, for a lot of people right now, the exploration of this space is very new. I think for the team that was building this internally, a lot of that was pure exploration, and so when we got to November and they tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, we know you double a little bit in your spare time in this space, would you like to take on this project?” My eyes lit up and said, “Yep, let’s go for it.” Yeah, here we are four months later and we’ve done quite a lot in that time.

Nick Abrahams
It’s an amazing way that you’ve described how it came to, and in fact, I noticed that Telefónica Spain just announced, over the last couple of days, they’ve appointed a chief metaverse officer and there’s quite a bit of cynicism surrounding that and so forth. But could you just give us a bit of a sense? Because Tennis Australia, and we know that particularly with the Australian Open, there’s always been a very innovative event, a lot of focus on the technology and so forth. But how did the whole idea that NFTs and metaverse is something that the Australian Open should get onto? Where did that come from within the organization? Then I guess a little bit more about how does someone like get that job? Because I think there’ll be people out there who’ve got an interest in this space who are thinking, “I want a job like that. How do I convince my organization?”

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, so the original discussion came from the activity that was happening in market from a sponsorship perspective. So we were seeing some pretty large crypto platforms do some pretty large deals in market. Obviously, that was of interest through Tennis Australia and the Australian Open from a sponsorship perspective. Probably almost 12 months ago now we started having discussions in market with a number of players and exploring what that could become. While that was happening in the background, I think we were also seeing the marketplace grow for NFTs and the likes of NBA Top Shot and some of the other large sporting organizations and [inaudible 00:04:12] rights holders in the market start to dip their toe in or even jump right in the deep end you might say.

Ridley Plummer:
As we were having those discussions internally, we eventually got to the point that we were so close to the event and hadn’t signed on any partners. That we chose to pivot a little bit in that sense and drive a little bit harder down our own path of what does this look like for the AO if we are to build our own metaverse experience or our own NFT product or platform? When we went back to the drawing board a little bit, we realized that we’d been running down this path for actually quite a while and that innovation word that you used earlier is a big part of what we do at tennis and the Australian Open, and that’s what we’re known for amongst a lot of the grand slams and major tournaments is the innovation that we focus on to. For most part, benefit the audience and the crowd and the fans that a lot of it’s done for them.

Ridley Plummer:
In hindsight, what we then realized was, “Hey, the fans can’t come to the event as easily as they could in the past.” Melbourne’s a really difficult place to get to it at the best of times, let alone when you’ve got border closures and restrictions on who can travel where. What we chose to do was build a strategy and an objective which was to become the world’s most accessible sports and entertainment event. And accessible have a number of different meetings now, whether that’s coming on site with your family or in a wheelchair or in a morning or an afternoon or an evening, and what that looks like for your in real life experience versus what your online experience is.

Ridley Plummer:
For us creating a seamless, accessible, online experience for fans all around the world was really important. Whether you were logging in from London or New York, and you were a tennis fan, or if you were logging in from Brazil or somewhere in the Middle East and you were a soccer fan, we wanted to get that audience to come to the AO in some way, shape or form. Naturally, creating our Decentraland build and really going to where the audience was, and not necessarily trying to bring that audience to us was an important factor in that.

Nick Abrahams
Can we talk a little bit then about… because I love the fact that there’s that strong thematic spine, the proposition, which is accessible to everyone. Can you give us a sense of granularly, what was the Decentraland experience like for the user and then also with the NFT drop of the designer balls and so forth?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, absolutely. The Decentraland build was a really important factor in this project for us. One of the reasons that we chose Decentraland and Vegas City where we built in Decentraland was because of the connection to the audience that we could create through that, and the likeness to in real life. As hard as that may seem, what we tried to do through that build was create those moments where people were thinking, “What can I do next? Where do I go next? Where haven’t I explored?” Which is exactly the mentality that we have in real life when people come to the site. We want them to have that almost Disneyland style experience where they walk in the gate and they go, “What can’t we miss? What’s the first ride we have to go on?” What do we have to see? What’s that bucket list item?”

Ridley Plummer:
That surrounds tennis. So when people come to the AO, we know that they spend eight or nine hours on site, and some of those people won’t see a tennis ball hit. They’ll go and explore the precinct, or they’ll explore the food and the restaurants and the bars and the entertainment that comes around the event. That was important that we created that element in Decentraland too. Whether that was through gamification or collectibles or use of archive footage that we have 50 years of in the can at Tennis Australia, we could ensure that when someone came back to the event, in Decentraland, there would be something new for them every day. Which is exactly the mentality that we take in real life. We want a family to come on Monday with the kids and go to the ballpark and spend two or three hours in the ballpark with the kids.

Ridley Plummer:
Then everyone’s exhausted, so they have to go home and then the parents go, “Well, we didn’t see any tennis and we came for tennis. Why don’t we buy a ticket to Rod Laver Arena and we’ll come back on Wednesday night and we’ll have a champagne and a meal at Rockpool, and we’ll have a bit of a date night?” Then they go, “Oh, but we had a great night but we didn’t see any of the music or any of the entertainment and we’re going to have some fun with friends.” They come back on the weekend with their friends and they have a couple of beers on Grand Slam Oval and maybe play up a bit and maybe don’t see any tennis. But we’ve brought them back on multiple occasions to have three completely different experiences. So that was what we wanted to do with Decentraland as well.

Ridley Plummer:
Then that flowed into the NFT collection, where we wanted people to have an investment and ownership over the game of tennis. Where they could be watching from anywhere in the world and they were completely engaged in every match because they wanted to see where that match point was landing and if it was landing on their plot of the court. Then we saw through our discord the language that the people were using around the engagement that they now had with tennis where they’d never had that previously.

Ridley Plummer:
That was people talking about, “You know what, I’m sitting up till 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 AM, wherever they are in the world, or I’m watching from early morning because I wanted to watch this match and see if my ball was a winning ball. And I wanted to see if there was any consistency in where the winning match points were landing and I’ve never done this before with tennis. Or I haven’t done this for 10, 15 years, but now I feel, not just invested, but engaged with the product.” I think that was a real, I think, success measure that we hadn’t anticipated in the beginning of the project. That people would engage with tennis in a way that they never have previously.

Nick Abrahams
Yep, and it’s like I love the way you described the experience of going to the Australian Open. I’ve been lucky enough to go there a few times. The first time I saw it, I was blown away by how expansive actually the whole experience is and there’s so many different things that I assumed I was just going to go to Rod Laver Arena and watch some tennis. Whereas it is just like Disneyland, so I understand the parallels then into Decentraland. A couple of great things that you talked about there, which I’d love to drop into. The first of which is so the NFT ball drop was interesting in that, as I understand it and maybe you can explain it in a little more detail, because I think large corporates or big brands struggle to understand how to make NFTs relevant to people.

Nick Abrahams
So you put that element of gamification, which is, I’ll let you explain how if the winning match ball hit your area, then you won an actual ball. Maybe if you could talk a little bit about that, and then once you through with that, we’ll come back and I’d love to talk a little bit more about discord because I think that’s what a lot of brands don’t understand quite the relevance…

Nick Abrahams
… Don’t understand quite the relevance of Discord to the Web3 world. But firstly yeah, just the… I guess, how did you come up with this idea? So, you’ve got designers working on the balls and so forth. I mean, I imagine there must have been thousands of potential ideas and what was the process to come up with the win one?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, so it’s a good point. A great question. I think what led us to that idea and the eventual product was the lack of, I guess, connection and control we have over the player group in a way. Because when we originally looked at the project, we were like, well, we could just take the top shot model and take great plays from 50 years of archive footage or whatever happens at this year’s event. But there’s nobody that governs the entire playing group from an IP rights perspective. So even though Tennis Australia owned the footage that we capture during the event, we don’t have the right to commercially use that in market. We would have to go to every player individually for them to release their IP for us. So what we found very quickly was that, although we didn’t want to do a top shot 2.0 and a bit of a, hey, we’ll just follow that model. We never wanted to do that, that was never the intention.

Ridley Plummer:
We had to then get really creative about how we actually did something in market that was, I guess, meaningful to the consumer. And it was something that was first to world. We wanted to do something that was a bit of a game changer, that no one had ever done before. So when we were working with our agency, Run It Wild, who were ideating some of the concepts for us. The first pitch that they came back to us with included the AO Art Balls. And that was a standalone product at that stage. There was another idea that used data and created art through data that we also felt wasn’t quite strong enough to stand alone as its own product. And then we had this moment where we’re like, why don’t we take the data from project B and put it with project A and have the art ball that is then somehow using data to keep it live in real time and have real time updates made to it. There was this moment where we all looked at each other through the screen and we’re like, wow, no one’s ever done this before.

Ridley Plummer:
We should do this, but is it possible? And I think that at that moment, we were like, right, everyone run really quickly at finding out what’s possible here and why this makes sense. What are the watch outs? What are the dangers? Are there any red flags along the way? And then how do we bring this to life? It’s now the middle of November, our event is two months away. We’re trying to do eight months of worth of work in eight weeks. Okay. How do we build the team to actually make this happen? Because we knew the event had a start date. We knew we had to be ready three days before that start date, what could we do in between? Then we realized Christmas and New Year’s was also thrown in the middle there as well so that was a challenge in itself. Because we pretty much lost a week in the timeline, which at that point was around 20% of the timeline.

Ridley Plummer:
So yeah, that was, I guess, how the idea came about. And then it really finessed itself on a daily basis from there and that involved getting artists to create the artwork for the balls or it involved getting old Australian open IP and then wrapping those onto the balls. And I think we were moving so quickly that we had to make decisions on the fly and we didn’t have time to think about it or evaluate too much what those decisions meant. So as it came together, the building blocks just kept going up and it kept becoming this more and more beautiful product and concept because of the ideas we were able to flow into it. Which in this digital world is great because you can make those decisions and action them within 12 hours. If we were designing a physical product for this, you can’t do that. Once you’ve designed the molds or you’ve designed the artwork or whatever it is, you’re limited by the restrictions that imposes on you. In the digital world, we can evolve in minutes and hours, not days and week. So that was great.

Nick Abrahams
Fantastic. And I think, and so the… I guess in summary for those that weren’t familiar with it. So, I guess, if the so six and a half thousand or there about art balls were created, and then they were some bought by various people very quickly, I noted. And then, the proposition was that your ball equated to a particular part of the court. And if there was a particular match winning shot that landed on your little section of the court, then you actually received that ball. Is that’s how…

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah. So, the balls were received or available for the finals. So, the championships only. So, we were following 11 championships through the tournaments. So that was everything from the men’s and women’s singles, right through all the doubles and into all the wheelchairs events as well. So, we had 6,776 plots on the court that tied to the NFTs. They were all non-numerical. It was all completely random. So, what I mean by that is if you were the first person to mint a ball, that didn’t mean that you got number one and that you got court position number one. Everything was completely random. So, first mint might be 576 in the ball number that might be 4,200 in the court number. And each court position was around 19 by 19 centimeters. And the reason that we eventually got to the 6,776 balls is because we had to divide the quarter perfectly equally. And that divided nicely as six, seven, seven, six, which also is a term that you would hear quite regularly in tennis when you’re reading scores. So, there was all these nice synergies there, everything just lined up beautifully.

Nick Abrahams
I wondered how that number came about. Okay.

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah. So, there is a bit of storytelling that goes along with that one. So yeah, and as I mentioned, 11 championship balls that could be claimed by the owner of that court position once the tournament was all said and done.

Nick Abrahams
Oh, fantastic. Now, let’s talk about Discord because I think it seems to be critical. And I think one of the reasons why I particularly wanted to drill down into your NFT drop is we’ve seen 80 or 100 even more big brands around the world do NFT drops. Many of them not particularly successful because they’re just a piece of branding and they haven’t really taken off… And you did a wonderful job of creating that sense of gamification and that sort of physical digital combination. So, I think that was fantastic. The other thing is, I don’t think necessarily brands understand the power of Discord in this community. So could you maybe just explain what Discord is and I think you’ve got a… You have actually an extraordinarily engaged, I think it’s 20,000 or something. I was amazed at the number of the people who are on the Tennis Australia Discord channel. So yeah, could you give us a bit of a sense of what is Discord and how do you embrace it?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah. Discord is effectively a chat room for really, for lack of a better term. It’s a chat room or it’s a community network. So, what we actually did and what we have found in a lot of NFT drops, as you mentioned, is that the two critical communication channels are Discord and Twitter. I don’t know how and why that has eventually formed that way, but it’s actually a fantastic solution. And Discord has the ability to create channels and rooms that I guess like-minded people can go into and talk about different items that they want to talk about or different subjects that are relevant to them. So, what we chose to do is create our Discord for our, I guess, entire metaverse strategy. And within that multiple channels of which people of like mind can go in and communicate with one another.

Ridley Plummer:
I think for a lot of people in this community, it’s a source of information. It’s a source of truth where we can communicate as the AO directly with our consumers. One of the really unique things about Discord and similarly to Twitter is that it’s kind of a marketer’s dream in a way, because it’s a window into your community. And it’s a community that is talking in real time about all sorts of topics that are relevant to them and your business. So, there’s nothing stopping me from going and sitting in one of our Discord chat rooms for half an hour here and there, and actually viewing what people are saying. Plus, it’s a chat log. So, I can go back and look through all the discussions that people are having. I can see whether there’s a positive sentiment or a negative sentiment, what people in the community are wanting from us, what they’re satisfied with, what they’re maybe not satisfied with.

Ridley Plummer:
So from a strategic community management standpoint, I think it’s a fantastic tool for brands to use. It doesn’t have to just be NFT or metaverse related, I think as well. I think a lot of people are probably a little narrow-minded in that sense that they think it’s purely related to the metaverse and NFT project. But I think, we’ll see in the near future, that brands will start utilizing the likes of a Discord much more than they’re utilizing their social media channels in the future.

Nick Abrahams
Yeah. And do you think Discord, is it sort of a sort of generation Z audience and under sort of thing? Who do you think…? What’s the sort of demographics on Discord?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, look, what we’re probably seeing is right now, it’s more of a sort of crypto, Web3 native audience. I think there’s a lot of people out there that would not necessarily be exploring this space that have found their way to Discord for one reason or another. I know it’s also widely used in the gaming community. And I think that is much more used as a chat room style of communication for that community. Not necessarily for the gaming fraternity to explore and I guess exploit in a way. So, yeah, it’s been important for us to create a, I think a network and a community in there that has a voice. There is trade transparency from us as a brand. And yeah, look, I love getting in there and seeing what people are talking about. And, look, there’s positives and negatives. Like there is in any sort of project and on social media and where anyone has a forum that they can converse in, but it’s how we then action those from a brand standpoint or a project stand that is really important.

Nick Abrahams
Great. Thanks for that and sorry to put you on the spot with a 101 on what is Discord. But I think it’s just really helpful to people to understand the importance of it. Maybe just dropping back to your project specifically. So, you’re talking to Decentraland, you’re talking NFTs and we’ll be on Discord channels and so forth. How do you convince-

Nick Abrahams
… Discord channels and so forth, how do you convince senior management and I don’t know, maybe even the board that this is something that you should be involved in? There is an amount of cynicism around this world. And how do you go about getting people comfortable that this isn’t all going to collapse and be a big disaster and reputationally, could impact the Australian Open, etc?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, that’s a great question. From a personal standpoint, I’m incredibly fortunate that the execs and the board and the more senior leaders at Tennis Australia are very open-minded when it comes to use of technology and innovation. The driver of the majority of this came from the top and that was from senior management and execs that we always want to be pushing the boundaries on what’s new in market.

Ridley Plummer:
I think there’s an element that you need to take with any new innovation or new technology that if you want to jump into that space and be one of the first industry leaders, I guess, or a little bit bleeding edge in a way, you need to be prepared to take a little bit of risk there. And I think we had the ability in the lead up to the event throughout the year to do a bit of our due diligence on what this looked like and possibly what platforms and agencies and direction we wanted to take in this space, that when we did get to the point of making decisions in November, we had a lot of runs on the board, and we had the support of the senior leaders within the organization to run really quickly at it.

Ridley Plummer:
And there was a huge element of trust that was put in myself and the team that were leading the project in the sense that, yes, you are representing an incredibly valuable piece of IP in the AO and Tennis Australia, and we always need to be wary of that, particularly in these new marketplaces.

Nick Abrahams
Well, congratulations to you for obviously selling the vision, but also, for the senior leadership to really get on board because I think that’s always a problem within most organizations when you’re at the very forefront of these advances, it can be a very lonely position, so well done.

Nick Abrahams
Now, you mentioned Run It Wild, the agency and so forth. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of a partner and how you go about executing with a partner? Not necessarily specifically about Run It Wild, but I think for many organizations that I’m talking to, they’ve got an inkling, there’s usually one or two believers within the organization, but the tech team don’t know this world and can’t execute, and so, what should people look for in a partner?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah. Again, this is a great topic of conversation because in this new world of Web3 and digital evolution that we’re going through right now, there are no true experts that cover everything in this space. I think that’s really important to note because there are a lot of people out there that will you they’re experts. And I think, that should be the first red flag when any partner or collaboration is happening, that if someone is spruiking that they’re the best at what they do and experts, run in the other direction as quickly as you can.

Ridley Plummer:
And Run It Wild, we came across through Adam, who is the partnerships manager at Decentraland, he actually owns Run It Wild as well. And once we got into discussion, and they started pitching some ideas at us, I just had this comforting feeling that they knew what they were doing. They knew what they were talking about. They also knew our brand, which was really important because they’re Melbourne-based. So, they’d been to the event before. They knew the Australian Open. They knew Tennis Australia. We could go and have face-to-face meetings over a coffee or a lunch or dinner, whatever that happened to be, to talk about the project in real time.

Ridley Plummer:
And I think that for me, gave me a sense of comfort that the project was in safe hands. And I think particularly in this space right now, there are so many elements that make up a project. There’s the artwork, there’s the concept. There are the smart contracts, there’s the websites, there’s the minting process, there’s contracts, there’s Discord, there’s social media channels. There are a whole lot of elements that have to come together so seamlessly to make this successful.

Ridley Plummer:
And what Run It Wild as a partner did really well was build a team that gave us an individual that was in a running lane of their own. There wasn’t a lot of crossovers. So, because our lead time was so short, everyone knew exactly the lane that they had to stay in. No one ever crossed over into anyone else’s. And we never had any of those moments where we felt, “Well, there’s too many cooks in the kitchen right now, how are we going to make a decision?” Because the decisions that we were making needed to be in minutes and hours. We didn’t have days and weeks to make those. So, who the right person was to make those decisions, how we got to the decision and what impact that had on the next day’s decision was important that we’re all in the same time zone as well, just to progress that forward really quickly?

Ridley Plummer:
So, I think, in my opinion, the team that was built around this project was absolutely the most important part of the project from start to finish.

Nick Abrahams
So, the project, my assessment of it looked incredibly successful and my sense is internally, it’s been regarded as a success. Can you talk a little bit about within the organization, how do you measure success? I mean, obviously financial is one metric, but there’s a whole range of other parameters I imagine that you look at, can talk to us, how do we assess ROI on this sort of a project?

Ridley Plummer:
Again, a great question. And this was something that we dabbled with in November, December that, what does success look like in this project? And I don’t think any of us that were leading the project even from above really knew what success looked like. So, I think when we were exploring a little bit further into NFTs and Metaverse, it was a little bit of a, “All right, let’s throw some numbers on a piece of paper and see if that’s where we eventually get to.”

Ridley Plummer:
I think one of the great decisions that we made early days was not to measure success based on financials. It was never a money-making exercise eyes for us. As I said earlier, it was an exploration in innovation and technology. And we were fortunate that, I guess, from a high-level perspective, there often is a lot of, “Hey, we need to put a budget to this and we need to make this many dollars. And if this doesn’t, we don’t go forward with it in the future.” We never had that discussion at all. It was never a factor.

Ridley Plummer:
The factor was around accessibility and taking our event to as many people globally as we could, but also taking tennis as a sport, to as many people globally as we could and promoting tennis as a sport to those people who otherwise may not engage with tennis that regularly.

Ridley Plummer:
So, key success measures for us in our NFT project was it was selling out. Ultimately, that was all that we wanted to do, but not from a financial perspective. Success was selling out. We thought that might have been over a two or three-day period, not in 33 minutes. So, that was a success. We ticked the number one box there.

Ridley Plummer:
What we knew with Decentraland was that there was an audience there that were already exploring Decentraland. That was one of the reasons we chose to build in Decentraland because we knew that there was an audience that we could take our brand to. We didn’t have to bring an external audience to us. There were around 80,000 monthly active users in Decentraland at that point in time, so we thought if we can get around 50% of that, so 50% rounded up a little bit, 50,000, was a nice round figure to work with. And if we could have 50,000 visitors through AO Decentraland in a two-week period, that would be a success for us. And as long as they were engaged through that period. So we ended up with 170,000 unique visitors over two weeks.

Ridley Plummer:
So, again, I think we ticked the box there, but we also kept them engaged. And as I mentioned earlier, that was through gamification or collectability or new things to watch and see and explore whenever they came back to the space.

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, I think for the most part, we have to look at the project as being successful. And now, we go to the next 12 months. And what do we do to extend that beyond just two weeks in January? And that’s a really important factor for us now, is that, what does the NFT project look like in March, April, May, June? How do we integrate with other sports, other grand slams, other tennis tournaments? And how do we keep an otherwise really engaged community engaged throughout the year? And I think that’s another big success measure for us is how do we extend the AO beyond two weeks in January?

Ridley Plummer:
And so, now, as we explore what that becomes, that’s another important factor that we don’t just put this project to bed until next January. Yeah. It’s got a heartbeat year-round.

Nick Abrahams
That’s a massive change. Can I just say congratulations on that metric, that is an insane metric, 170,000 uniques of an 80,000 per month unique figure? That’s wonderful. So, congratulations. I guess, just on that, you mentioned what’s happening with the future and obviously, just between you and I, of course, any sort of scoops you want to drop on what the AO might be doing?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah. Look, there’s a ton of conversations that were happening in market right now. I think we’re incredibly fortunate as a brand like Tennis Australia and the AO that we have a huge network in market that extends across global brands, global rights holders, other sporting properties, other sporting organizations that we know incredibly well through our network.

Ridley Plummer:
We have around 100 partners and media rights partners alone in the global space. So we’re having conversations with a lot of these partners right now about what comes next and how do we link up with you in what you’re doing in market? How do we give you value? How can you give us value? What’s the collaboration here? And I think that’s a really nice element of this world that we’re living in this digital space right now is the giving nature of this world and that people want to give to you, and we want to give to them as well. And there’s this really nice collaborative community going on that doesn’t expect to just take, take, take from every everyone else.

Ridley Plummer:
So, the conversations that we’re having in market are incredibly positive right now. Absolutely there’ll be some big news coming through the coming months. Right now, I guess time is our friend and our foe as it was back in November and December. In that sense, back in November and December, it was our foe because we had this such a short timeline, but it was also our friend because we had…

Ridley Plummer:
Because we had such a short timeline, but it was also our friend because we had to make really quick decisions. Now it’s the opposite, we have a long lead time to make decisions, so you start thinking about the gray area in those decisions, and it’s not just black or white. But at the same time, we do have time to make those decisions and ensure that those decisions are a right for our project, they’re right for our community, our investors and our Art Ball holders, but also Tennis Australia and the AO, but also the partners that we’re working with as well.

Nick Abrahams
Can I just ask one more project-related question? You’ve been very generous with your time, but I’m interested, if we look at ticketing, particularly, and it was interesting that you didn’t decide to go with ticketing as the way to drop the NFTs. And if you look at the Super Bowl, this year it was all NFTs. And I think the US football, the NFL, I think they’ve said they did a quarter of a million tickets as NFTs this year. And Coachella has some VIP ticketing for their music festival. What do you think are sort of the pros and cons of ticketing via NFTs for big events?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, I think it has to be meaningful. I think more than anything, yes, there’s a collectability element, and people have collected ticket stubs or lanyards or wristbands or whatever that happens to be, as a bit of a memory box collection in a way of, “Hey, I went to Coachella in 2010.” Or “I went to Glastonbury in the first year.” Or “I went to this concert.” Or “I went to this sporting event.” Or “I went to this Ted Talk.” People have collected those aspects of their life for a long time, and they do deteriorate over time. The beauty of the NFT collectability in ticketing form and event format is that they will exist forever in a way. What can then happen in the future is, where this becomes powerful, that if you have an NFT from that event or that collection or POAP, which is, for listeners, excuse me, is a proof of attendance protocol, so basically, a smart contract in a way that says you were at this event and you can prove you were there because the contract says so.

Ridley Plummer:
How we use those in the future becomes really important, in the sense that, as a Tennis Australia employee, if I go to the Coachella brand and say, “Hey, would you like to collaborate on next year’s AO? We’d like to give everyone that went to Coachella this year a 10% discount on tickets, how do we do that?” “Okay. We can look into their digital wallets and see who has that NFT ticket or proof of attendance protocol, and then give them the discount and bring them across to our brand as well.” And likewise, we can then say to Coachella, “Okay, everyone who has an AO or an Art Ball NFT, what can you give them? And can you give them early access to tickets? Can you give them a discount on tickets? Can you give them merchandise access to whatever that is?” So, you get this really nice cross-pollination across brands and communities as well, that gives the owners of those NFTs or tickets utility beyond it just being an NFT.

Nick Abrahams
No, that’s brilliant. I guess I will ask one final question, which is just about sort of any advice that you would have for organizations wanting to go down this path. Maybe just before we do that, so Tennis Australia, are you a tennis player? Is that why you’re there or no, you just…

Ridley Plummer:
Oh, look, I pick up the racket occasionally. But no, look, I played occasionally before I joined, but yeah, we do fortunately have amazing access to some great courts with our office at Melbourne Park, that we do get to jump onto the Australian Open courts occasionally, when we’re working in the office.

Nick Abrahams
Oh, fantastic. And what a great event this year with Ash Barty winning, obviously there were a number of great events, but it was just terrific. And we’ve all been working on our slice backhand since that. But-

Ridley Plummer:
Oh, absolutely. Incredibly important stroke, as I think we’ve all seen.

Nick Abrahams
Who knew? So look, just to finish off, thank you very much, Ridley. It’s been so insightful to hear such a positive story about this. And can I say too, because Australia doesn’t have necessarily a lot of stories about NFT drops and so forth, so you really took an extraordinary risk and obviously a very calculated risk, and it’s wonderful to see a payoff so well? And thank you for sharing so much information. I guess the final thing would be if you could give a piece of advice to an organization that’s thinking about Web3, is there something that you would say to them?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s two questions that brands can be asking right now, and I think that is, could it be an NFT? And I think that exists for projects that are happening in real life right now. And then, why could it be an NFT, or why should it be an NFT? And I think that’s more for the NFT ideas that are coming through, that they must be meaningful. I think consumers will very quickly start to see through brands that are purely doing drops or releasing and NFTs as a cash grab, and that will fail for the brands. And that’s where those questions are key, don’t just make the decision on a whim, ask the questions of, “Should it be an NFT? Why should it be an NFT?” Or on the flip side, “Could it be an NFT?” And there might be a market opportunity that exists for ideas that are happening in real life right now with a new community and new audience that a brand hasn’t even tapped into yet.

Nick Abrahams
Fantastic. Well, Ridley, thank you very much for your time. Congratulations, once again, on an incredible success. And we look forward to what happens over the next 12 months, as we see the AO, and the NFT and metaverse project continue to develop. Thank you very much.

Ridley Plummer:
Thanks, Nick, great to chat.

Nick Abrahams
Well, that was terrific. Thanks, Ridley.

Ridley Plummer:
My pleasure.

Nick Abrahams
Really appreciated that. That was very, very interesting, it’s such a great story. So, we’ll get that out. Just wondering, would you be able to introduce me to, I think you mentioned Adam at Run It Wild?

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah, of course.

Nick Abrahams
I’m just trying to figure out how I can give people a steer towards folks who know what’s happening, so yeah.

Ridley Plummer:
Yeah. Absolutely. No, more than happy to. He’s actually just got back from an overseas trip, so he’ll have a bit more availability now, so more than happy to. And he’s building out the team now, and he’s got some great connections in market as well. So yeah, I think, as I mentioned, what’s sort of been really refreshing about this community is the collaboration that comes with it. And I don’t think anyone’s sort of afraid right now to introduce people or ask for introductions, which is great. And everyone seems to be incredibly receptive to it. And what I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks is the network is pretty small and pretty tight, and there is an element of everyone knows everyone. And yeah, it’s really refreshing to see that collaborative nature coming through.

Nick Abrahams
Yeah, no, it’s exciting. Well, I’m old enough that I lived through the original dot-com one, I had a dot-com that went well for a while, and didn’t then with the crash. But it does feel quite similar in a sense of there’s just a tremendous collegiality, as we sort of embrace something that’s truly revolutionary. So, look, I’ve taken up a lot of your time today, thank you very much, really appreciate it. And if there’s anything I can do to help you at any stage, do let me know. And otherwise, I’ll let you know, sort of when it’s all coming out and so forth, so yeah.

Ridley Plummer:
Brilliant. Thanks, Nick. No, really appreciate it. It was great to chat.

Nick Abrahams
Okay. Nice to talk. Best wishes. Cheers.

Ridley Plummer:
Thanks very much. Catch you. Bye.