Many marketing campaigns involving non-fungible tokens seem fleeting. They’re announced, they generate headlines, and then they fade, often involving digital art that’s been minted as an NFT to prove its authenticity and then auctioned off on platforms like Rarible or OpenSea.

Agencies are figuring out how to advise clients on the use cases of NFTs, barriers to entry, and how to properly engage with its extremely online community.

You may remember such hits as:

• Pixelated Pizza from Pizza Hut Canada
• Taco-themes GIFs and images from Taco Bell
• “NFTPs” (non-fungible toilet paper) from Charmin
• A new logo from DKNY

Navigating new waters can be treacherous. And the agencies want to help.

Sosti Ropaitis, executive vice president at MediaLink said such executions are largely a way for brands to experiment in a nascent space.

“The reason that I should be paying attention as a marketer is not because it’s something that creates headlines, but because it might just be a future capability,” Ropaitis said.

On top of that, agency execs tell us, a brand that doesn’t ~try~ to address something in the zeitgeist, can appear out-of-touch.

“Cultural capital is our currency. So if we don’t do something right away, you fear that you might be seen as a laggard in the space,” Craig Elimeliah, executive creative director at the agency VMLY&R, told us.

He added that the brand stampede toward NFTs stems from the low cost to make and list the digital assets: “It’s not like having to build a website for a $100,000 or do a video for $50,000,” Elimeliah said.

However much money marketers are spending, the NFT ecosystem is growing.

• The volume of NFT transactions was more than $754 million in Q2 of this year, a 48% jump from Q1, per a report from NonFungible.com.
• Of those sales, 66% were tied to collectibles. The rest was split among art, gaming, metaverse, sports, and other transactions.

Explaining it to the normies: NFTs are still at the stage where the non-tech-savvy population face barriers to entry. For example, most of the tokens are traded on the Ethereum blockchain, which means you might need to open an Ethereum wallet through a service like MetaMask. To someone who doesn’t know what any of that means, NFTs are still just pixelated pizza.

• “It’s incumbent upon the brand that’s activating to either smooth out that barrier or educate the customers so that at least there’s some degree of understanding of what you’re engaging in,” Ropaitis said.

Read on to see what agencies think are the most promising NFT opportunities for marketers, plus how to avoid being the target of a “fellow kids” meme.—ZS

Facebook experienced what was likely its largest outage in the company’s history on Monday, which meant that Instagram, Whatsapp, and even Facebook’s literal front doors experienced outages, too.

For the social media managers whose primary marketing channels are Instagram, Facebook, or those doors (free out-of-home idea to anyone who wants it?), the blip—which lasted about six hours—garnered mixed reactions.

The good:

• “Social media managers have all come to Twitter to have a bit of a snow day while the other networks are down,” Nick Martin, social listening and engagement strategist at Hootsuite, told Marketing Brew on Monday.
• Chi Thukral, head of content and sustainability at Yanko Design, the design magazine, told us that her peers were all celebrating—“except for one of my friends who has to redo a whole ad set.”

The bad: But other social professionals (like that ad set’s victim, probably) were exasperated.

• “It’s creating a massive amount of stress,” one social media manager who deals only in organic content told us. “Fall is the busiest time for my industry, and many others, having to shift a full day and editorial calendar is a nightmare.”
• In reference to her champagne-popping contemporaries, she said that she wished she could feel relieved. “I have so much to do, but I can’t do it,” she told us.

The snow day: Jerica Deck, social media associate at Girls Who Code, may have put it best, saying that she honestly felt both more stressed than usual and like she got a break. “It definitely changed my plans but it was kind of like getting a snow day,” she told us, in a reminder to us all that sometimes snow days can be indeed, kind of stressful.

Read the full story here.—PB

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has turned over documents that reportedly show the company knows about (and downplays) its role in human trafficking, perpetuating misinformation, and spurring serious mental-health concerns among teenagers. But she has also called out Facebook’s advertising platform.

In a disclosure to the SEC (read here), Haugen accused Facebook of misleading advertisers for years about its “shrinking user base,” “declining content production,” and figures about reach and frequency.

More starkly, “Facebook overcharged advertisers on a vast scale.”

How? Though Facebook knows some users have multiple, or “duplicate,” accounts, the SEC complaint says it wasn’t up-front with advertisers about who’s actually seeing advertisements bought through the platform’s “reach and frequency” campaigns—meaning the same person could have seen an advertisement on different accounts, but an advertiser was charged for both.

“These claims are simply false,” said Facebook spokesperson Kamran Mumtaz in a statement. “Ultimately, advertisers use Facebook because they see results.”

Listen to the children

According to internal Facebook documents cited in the SEC complaint, young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 are spending less time and sending fewer messages on the platform than previously known.

• Plus, data from the company showed that “15% of new teen accounts are existing users” with another account.
• The data also shows that while users over 25 are using Facebook more, teen usage has plateaued, and young adults are using it less, at least in terms of daily active users.

How bad? Teen “daily active usage” is projected to decline 45% between 2021 and 2023. As a reminder, Facebook put its kid’s version of Instagram on ice in late September .—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Search: So vintage. Avoid these 12 “completely outdated” SEO practices.

Podcasts: 27 of the best marketing podcasts, according to HubSpot .

Athletes: You’ve got a budget you want to light on fire spend wisely on big-name influencers? Here are the 10 most expensive influencer athletes looking for brand partnerships. Both of Shaq’s kids are on there. Like father, like son?

Know your consumers: With Attest, you can send your target audience a tailored survey and gain immediate and valuable insights to make your marketing more relevant. Oh, and you can send your first survey for free. Start here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content}

Quote: “The positive way to look at this is we just got a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of free advertising,” an investor in Ozy told the company’s CEO Carlos Watson.

Stat: 36,000 readers pay to subscribe to Defector, an independent sports and media site. Read the company’s first annual report here.

Read: Business Insider’s list of the 50 rising stars of Madison Avenue. They didn’t include your favorite newsletter writers, but there’s always next year .

Is your Zoom fatigue hitting yet? Ours, too.

HR people have a lot on their minds these days. Remote work and burnout. Diversity and inclusion. Tech and tools. Culture. Recruiting and retention. The list goes on and on.

HR is challenging, but HR news doesn’t have to be. HR Brew brings the Brew’s humor and great personality (if we do say so ourselves) to the world of HR.

Sign up today for the perpetual bragging rights of being a week-one subscriber.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Social media marketing grows up
• How ghost kitchens market themselves without a home
• Brands are using this tool to try and go viral