Unbox: How Steve Aoki Built the Next Generation of Fan Clubs
Have you ever wondered how The Sandbox fits into the strategy of the world’s most iconic brands and celebrities? In this edition of our Unbox series, we sat down with Jaime Olaez, Digital Marketing Manager at YMU talent agency, to learn about Steve Aoki’s experiences in The Sandbox and how the platform helps their team achieve its web3 goals. Steve Aoki-designed experiences have been the source of incredible new memories for players who immersed themselves in the virtual manifestation of the Aoki brand, garnering over 150k unique users and over 416k visits to experiences.
Building the New Level of Entertainment for Fans
Steve Aoki, a self-proclaimed futurist who avidly explores new technologies and how to leverage them to achieve his visions, has been involved in web3 and NFTs since the industry’s early days.
For Steve Aoki, it’s all about music and fans! Being in the NFT and web3 community enables him to create as an artist while also having the ability to be more involved with his core community of fans in ways that previously weren’t possible. Web3 is a paradigm shift in that sense. Instead of just delivering products to his fans, Aoki can work hand-in-hand with members of his community to create experiences that are highly interactive and based on their feedback.
“Fan clubs have been around for decades. Artists do drops, they do meet & greets, sign merchandise, etc. — the fans are a part of all that, but it’s not a collaborative building process like we see in web3. In web3 you’re consistently listening to what people want because it’s much more community-focused. You have a family of people and you care about their interests. You want them to have a voice in what you’re doing. The Sandbox has enabled us to leverage the relationship we’ve built with our community to create incredible new experiences.”
Aoki saw The Sandbox as an opportunity to create novel music experiences and have the creative freedom to build his own custom world within the expansive world. As he learned about what other artists and brands had already done with The Sandbox, his excitement only grew.
Since joining the platform, Steve Aoki has made a huge splash in The Sandbox ecosystem! According to Olaez, the secret sauce to Aoki’s success in The Sandbox has been the freedom to build out experiences that are authentically Aoki — ones that are built around his own ideas of what is cool and fun.
“This is something cool that Steve would actually want to participate in and promote. It’s something that he would play himself. We wanted something where he could tell his fans to play and it would be something that he actually thought of, not just something that was created for him.”
Instead of being told his concepts were too ambitious to be done, The Sandbox team was accommodating to even the craziest concepts that came up in brainstorming sessions. Olaez says this was a stark contrast to typical partnerships that artists are offered, adding that generally partners can’t handle big ideas and that most partner projects are built with little artist creative direction and freedom of expression.
“It’s really easy for a brand to get involved with a musician or artist and make things happen, even if it’s not the right fit. This partnership felt very organic. The Sandbox reached out to Steve directly to show him demos of the project, provide ideas, and involve him in early brainstorming. That made us feel very comfortable.”
By providing Aoki the freedom to build, his experiences were inherently optimized to resonate with his core community of fans who care deeply about authentic experiences that maintain Aoki’s creative spark.
His spark ignited a flurry of activity across three launched experiences. Players have played nearly 70k hours across 4.78 million quests completed in Steve Aoki’s Playhouse alone, making it one of the highest performing across The Sandbox metaverse to date! In that experience, Aoki invited fans to immerse themselves into his world — a place to go to a rooftop party, search for the secret cake recipe, or discover his “subconscious” room.
But Aoki didn’t stop there. He wanted to create a stronger bond with fans by giving them the opportunity to have something with his identity. He launched 3,333 unique avatars: zombies, rainbows, and so much more as the primary entry point for his true fans to experience The Sandbox. Aoki went on to join exclusive concerts and even express himself through an AR Avatar, which enabled fans to dance alongside him!
Finding Passionate New Fans Through The Sandbox Community
Because The Sandbox already has an incredible group of people involved that enjoy the platform and care about contributing to its success, there wasn’t a sole reliance on Steve Aoki to bring in his audience to achieve success with his activations. Olaez tells us that this factor has been largely unique to The Sandbox — Aoki’s past partner experiences generally haven’t brought their own engaged audience to the table as a contribution. As a bonus, players of The Sandbox, to Aoki and Olaez’s surprise, joined the Aoki Discord Server in droves and have become some of its most engaged participants.
“To The Sandbox’s credit, they have a very strong fanbase. It’s very engaged and is constantly joining Steve’s Discord. We were able to cross-pollinate and get a bunch of new fans that way. We didn’t initially expect that so many people would discover Steve’s web3 community through us joining the platform. It has been a very mutually beneficial experience so far.”
Thinking back on its successes in The Sandbox, team Aoki has identified 3 helpful tips that can help brands effectively integrate into web3 and resonate with the core community:
- Subculture: Take your time and do your own research on the industry to understand web3 codes so that your story can effectively be built.
- Community: Web3 is very collaborative and the audience wants to be involved in the building process. It’s essential to ask people what they think about the things you’re creating. Take the time to read comments, head into Discords, and search for feedback that people are providing the project in question. Doing so makes the end product much better because the community feels involved in the process.
- Utilities: new web3-powered fan clubs are all about bringing value to fans and Avatars/NFTs are a great way to bring utilities and bridge digital & IRL.
Utilizing these tips helped propel Aoki’s experiences and marketing reach past the KPI goals that had been established, like total hours played and general social media conversation.
Overall, Aoki and his team are looking forward to stirring up more conversations within the web3 culture through the launch of future activations that are co-developed with the Aoki web3 community.
