Well, to help answer some of those questions, we're actually going to dig in even deeper so that you can get some more context. And we're going to actually look at an actual case study now with the Buxom Plumpverse. And I am personally very invested in this. Bare Minerals was actually one of my clients back in my retail days before they were a retail product, when they were in direct response. And I'm a loyal Buxom user, so I'm very excited for this. We're going to learn about the Buxom Plumpverse, paving the way for brands to adopt the metaverse experience. We've got AJ Dalal, the Senior Managing Director, Data and Metaverse Strategy at Publicis Sapient. He's applied his expertise of Web 2.0 to embrace the untapped potential of everything related to Web 3, including demystifying Web 3 into practical, scalable applications, ranging from the blockchain, the metaverse, and NFT. So that's perfect for some of you concerned about, like, what even is this? And then Citi Dresi, brand president, Bare Minerals and Buxom. He spent more than 20 years in the beauty industry in brand building, business unit, general management, and direct-to-consumer growth. Welcome. Good morning, everyone. So let's dive right in. So we've got a pretty sweet and tight agenda for today. We're going to start off with some introductions, explain what the metaverse is, explain our strategy, and actually run you through the entire experience, and then have some key takeaways in terms of some of the biggest lessons that we've learned. What I did love about the previous sessions is it's going to build upon a lot of the key stuff that they were mentioning. So really excited to share that with you this morning. I'll do a quick introduction and then hand it to Citi for doing a quick introduction. So I've been in the digital space for about 22 years, which explains the gray hair. I started off running my own company in the digital space, and then I joined Sapient, where we do specialize in data strategy, AI, and Web 3. I manage a team of about 2,200 folks globally, so pretty proud of what we've accomplished over the years. Citi?
Hi, everyone. My name is Citi Drissi. I'm the brand president for Bare Minerals and Buxom. So 20 years of beauty experience in mass market but also in luxury. I've been through a lot of different companies, different cultures, different brands, different channels. So I'm very happy to present to you what we did on Buxom and how we wanted to penetrate Web 3 and gaming with this brand.
Awesome. So what's a presentation without an introductory video? So we're going to start off with a video that just explains the Metaverse to kind of just set the stage for everyone in the room. What actually is the Metaverse?
Metaverse. Metaverse. Metaverse. They're in the Metaverse. The Metaverse is all of them. It's an online virtual world that uses next-gen tech like augmented and virtual reality and technology we use every day that allows us to interact with other users virtually and deepen our human connections with endless spaces to work, play, and stay. And the Metaverse will evolve how we buy and sell. Cha-cha-ching! The things we own and trade. Cha-ching! Cha-ching! By creating the next generation of products and services, transforming how we experience the world. Wow! And connecting us all. Your next holiday party might be in the Metaverse. Or your next business meeting. Maybe it's where you'll unveil your next big idea. That was awesome! The Metaverse means different things to different people. But no matter what it means to you, the Metaverse is changing everything.
Perfect. So let's kind of set the groundwork here. So over the last 28 years, 30 years, we've gone through the evolution of Web 1, Web 2, Web 3. There's a lot of icons, a lot of logos up there, a lot of text. But what does it all mean? Back in 1995, the kind of the evolution or revolution of the Internet came to play. And some of the big companies that we still use today saw something that I think is very important for all of you in the room today. So Jeff Bezos saw something back in 1995 with the Internet. But everyone else saw something that was slow, static, didn't have the amount of users that everyone wanted. But what Jeff Bezos saw was an opportunity to get on board in a digital experience and using the limitations that that technology had, which was selling books online, which was using 46K bit images of those books, to enter that space to test and learn. And that is huge. Advance now about 10 years later, we've got technology advancing, data advancing, talent advancing, people's adoption advancing, and then Web 2.0 came in. And really that was the creation of the platform economy. And that simply just simply meant, that simply just simply meant, I'll say that twice, that people were able to solve one massive problem. Number one was single sign-on, which was how many username and passwords did you have to remember back in 2005? So single sign-on came on, and it changed that whole era, and it made it so easy to log in and remember passwords. The second thing was the creation of the platform economy, which simply meant a company like Facebook said, I will provide the platform, and I will merge buyers and sellers. And I will provide that platform for free. So we all know that if you're consuming content for free, we are the product. So they knew how to monetize that data. Let's advance into Web 3 and where we are today. Now Web 3 is not going to change the world overnight. It's going to take 10, 15 years to get there. But there's a few things that I think is important for you to all take away before we kind of continue on. Number one, and I hope they're not in the room today, when you think of products like Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, AWS, and all the stuff that they offer today as products and services, can we really tell what's different about them? These are the leaders in the cloud space technologies, and there's such a saturation in their innovation of products that they end up acquiring a bunch of companies offering a lot of the same products and services. That's number one, where you've hit that kind of peak in terms of market differentiation and innovation. Welcome, Web 3. Number two is Gen Z. Gen Z now is a full generation away from 1995, a full generation away from Apple, Microsoft, Google, all of these different companies. And like you saw on the stage earlier with the gentleman that was sitting on the left-hand side, I can't remember his name. Oh, G-Money. But the key takeaway there is they want to create a generation of technologies and capabilities that's their own. And I think that is a big key takeaway here. So what does Web 3 solve? It solves a few things. Number one, it drives innovation, it drives ownership, it drives disruption, which are really the three big underpins. But what's the value for everyone in this room? It allows for the application of AR and VR. So what's the biggest limitation of our generation today, believe it or not, is our cell phone. Right? Everyone is on their cell phone, cell phone, cell phone, but we're missing out on the rest of our senses, which Web 3 starts to play. Number two is interoperability, that next level of experience. Imagine playing a game, I've done a bunch of stuff in that game, I want to take my profile, and I want to load it into a different game. Or probably looking in the room, I see a lot of females in this room, which means if you're, well, that's actually men or women, I've got a social presence, and you've gone into, like, Instagram, you've done a bunch of stuff, why not be able to take my profile, go into another social platform, and load that profile in without having to start again from the beginning? Right? So it allows you to really develop that social presence online. So as we continue on, coming together before we start diving into Buxom, this is very similar to everything we experience today, but just from a Web 3 lens. All the metaverse is is the experience layer, and it's very connected to Web 2 as well as Web 3, and it's estimated to be about an $800 billion business area. Number two is everything in the middle is what we call our content or service layers. It's what powers the experience. The first is AI. Everyone talks about generative AI, et cetera. I will be very open. We've been in AI for 15 years. And as a nerd, I'm really excited that AI has become a popular thing again in the whole generative space. But all AI is going to allow you to do is process things a lot faster. Content, QA, code, algorithms, model, text, et cetera. Distribution of your content across multiple channels. AI will accelerate that. Number two, we talked about this in terms of the social profile, which is digital ID. It's the maturity from third-party data to second-party data to first-party data to digital identity or zero-party data, where it's a true value exchange between a brand and a consumer and the ability to be able to take that profile everywhere I go. Because I know everyone in the room, including myself, gets irritated when I go to a website and I've got to start from the beginning. We saw it also with loyalty. They talked about it earlier in the last presentation, which was the focus with Buxom on driving loyalty and underpinning it all. I know blockchain and cryptocurrency can be a confusing area to talk about, but it just means software.
So as I said, these are our box and babes, and you see we try to be very inclusive because this is part of our DNA since we were born in 2006. So let me introduce you David, Celeste, Jennifer, Sarina, Brandy, and Dolly, and these are the avatars who are accompanying you along this experience in Plantverse. And what we try to do with this experience, coming back also to what has been said previously, is really to amplify first and foremost our brand values. Our brand values of celebration, fun, unapologetically living your best life in the digital world. And this is also something we try to sell in the physical world. This is really part of who we are since the beginning. As I said, we are born in a nightclub, in a cabaret. Obviously building awareness and excitement, not only to a new consumer base, but also to our fans, to our loyal users. That's also an important part of bringing technology to our community today and also in the future. And obviously attract even more Gen Z because not only there is a high affinity of Gen Z with makeup in general, but even more with lip plopping. So overall, Plumverse, if I have to potentially conclude on one note, was a fantastic way of personalized, customized relationship with our fans, with our consumers, through different elements. The pink carpet treatment, obviously, DJ babe, the exclusivity behind the experience, and of course the celebration behind the experience. And what is also interesting is that, as I said previously, you can update the content in a very agile way. So when you see here from January to June, the different activations that we wanted to highlight through that experience. So in January, through our Plumshot sheer teens innovation. In February, for Galentine's Day and Valentine's Day. In March, with a MetaVerse fashion week. So we had a lot going on around this theme. In April, with Plumpshella, so it's our own plumping festival. In May, with Summer Babe, and in June, obviously, with our latest activation for the Pride Month, which is called Plump Up the Pride. So in conclusion, maybe, Eiji?
Thank you. So there's four big takeaways to all of this. Number one is don't mistake your target audience. I think for the older folks in the room, it's probably hard to connect to it. I think one of the things that we did with Buxom is provided a non-Web3 experience to mimic this. So you could put your toe in, you could step fully in, pour everything in between. So we definitely have a brand presence on the website as well through email campaigns, etc. Number two is, they talked about it previously, they called it utility, tried to humanize it, is really simply what is the value you're giving to your consumer that's going to create stickiness or an amplification. And one of the things that we tried to do was have this run through six months, where every month that they did something, they received a reward, a follow-up communication, got them to re-engage the following months. Because at the end of the day, we're just trying to create our brand ambassadors, obviously sales, loyalty, etc. Number three, be authentic and specific. This I cannot emphasize enough. The Web3 community are brilliant. They are technically savvy. They can figure everything out and anything out in terms of what you're doing within the blockchain, because they could just look at EtherScan or any other type of scans out there and understand how you're doing anything and actually replicate some of the things that you're trying to create in terms of contests to sniff out whether it's authentic or not. So they are incredibly smart. They chat, like you said, on stage before on Twitter, but they're even bigger on Discord in terms of that community. And finally is embrace an evolving roadmap. The six months that Citi shared was kind of a, we had the first three months down pat, and then we were unsure of what we wanted to do. We told the community that we're still deciding on which area we're going to go. Be very open and very transparent. They love it. And you'll see other brands, I don't want to put any knock on any other brands in terms of kind of changing their story consistently or launching something different, which has caused kind of a pushback from that community. So with that, we're all finished on our end. So I do want to say thank you. Citi, do you want to say thanks?
Of course. Thank you, guys. We have a couple minutes. Are there any questions about clubbers? Yes, go ahead with questions. All right. Oh, we got one over there. Don't talk yet. We want to have it on camera.
Thank you. Thank you for a great presentation. Very interesting. I have one question about adoption. You guys said that you ran it for six months. That's a long time of period. So as a well-known brand, just curious to know over six months, what is a good expectation in terms of numbers of interactions or engagement, et cetera? Thank you.
Yeah, I can start or do you want to? No, I can. I think we did not really think about number of interaction. We were really thinking about, okay, how do we want to surprise our community? How do we want to entertain them? And for us, what was very specific is that we wanted to link that always to a social or cultural moment that would be accepted by our fans, our community, but also in a more general way by Gen Z. So maybe I will shock you a little bit. We did not think too much about KPIs. It was much more about quality, intimacy, interaction, and we want to play it really for the long term because this population really needs it. And they are born with entertainment, right? And I think the brand, especially in makeup, the brand that will succeed are the ones that understand that it's all about entertainment marketing today and surprise them, develop interesting content, interact with them, and this is a beautiful platform to do so.
We have time for one more. Yes.
Hello. Congrats for the Plumverse. My question is what is the best moment to connect to audience in terms of to motivate them to get into the platform and have fun as you mentioned?
Well, it comes back to the activation. I mean, for every initiative that we have on the brand, there is obviously a lot of PR around, a lot of buzz around. We are also using all our available platform to advertise what we do. So obviously there is a lot of teasing going on in our own channels, in our website, in our Instagram, in our TikTok, and then the rest is just magic, right? Again, we did not have like huge expectation to be honest, but the biggest expectation we had is really how we want to use that platform to create just another experience for the brand. So very qualitative in the way we approach it. And they were linked also, as I presented to you previously, very linked to even the DNA of the brand. So for us, it was a kind of natural move.
Awesome. All of our speakers are completely open to connecting with you. So go find them after, give them a round of applause. That was awesome info.