MAM
Fantico names Nic Watt as their new CEO
Mumbai: Nic Watt has been onboarded as the new CEO of Vistas Media Capital’s Fantico. Fantico is India’s first curated celebrity and fan engagement platform that was the first to feature collectibles of movie stars, artists, performers, cinema, and sports stars among other unique memorabilia. Since then, Fantico has also ventured into custom metaverse experiences and games.
Nic Watt has spent more than 20 years working in the video game and blockchain industries. He joined Fantico to focus on his top-level vision for the company’s product direction, people, and technology.
Prior to this, Watt held positions at Immutable as head of product & innovation, at Riot Games as lead user experience designer, and formed Nnooo, a video games startup.
Co-founder Abhayanand Singh states, “Fantico is the outcome of a collaboration between media and entertainment and the blockchain sector. With Fantico we aspire to build close relationships between fans, brands, and celebrities to create a flourishing culture in India along with a robust creator economy. With Nic as the new CEO, we hope to elevate the company to newer heights.”
Co-founder Dhruv Saxena added, “Fantico is focussed on creating a new medium of entertainment and engagement. Nic has great experience with traditional and web3 games, which makes it fun to build towards our common vision.”
“Since the time I have been working with Fantico, I believe the platform to be focused on building a unique place for audiences globally. We want it to be a place where people can easily transact with each other and gain gamified benefits while playing games. In addition to this, Fantico looks forward to launching virtual reality spaces that are customizable and provide utility right back to the rest of the users. We wish it to be a fun, social place where people can socialise and hang out with each other and interact with brands and IP via games and experiences. This is a very exciting time to be in the NFT space and with a great time around me, we are sure to make it even more exciting for users,” commented Watt.
Nic continues, “The core of Fantico is the ‘Play to Earn’ phenomenon where unique elements that blockchain provides tie back into people’s daily lives. We plan to build upon the Play to Earn experiments I was running at Immutable. We are very excited to blur the lines between real-world engagement via payment platforms and brands with digital engagement via games, experiences, and social spaces.”
Nic is known to be instrumental in creating and prototyping Play to Earn systems at Immutable where their first experiment saw people in Brazil and Russia earning more than the countries’ monthly national average. With Fantico, Nic hopes to better comprehend the wants and needs of people in India, the Middle East, and Africa.
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
