The State of Web3 Marketing in 2022
Web3 marketing went from Super Bowl NFT ads to a much quieter conversation by late 2022, as Terra, Celsius and Three Arrows Capital collapsed one after another.
Twelve months ago, web3 marketing was riding one of the most aggressive hype cycles digital marketing had seen in years. By the time this is being written in October 2022, the mood has changed considerably, and any honest look at the year has to account for both halves of it.
The peak
The run-up looked unstoppable. Nike acquired the virtual sneaker and NFT studio RTFKT in December 2021. Adidas launched its “Into the Metaverse” NFT collection the same month, selling out quickly and generating tens of millions in revenue within hours. Coca-Cola, Gucci and dozens of other established brands ran their own NFT drops through late 2021 and early 2022, treating them as a new kind of limited-edition merchandise with a marketing story attached. Meta’s rebrand from Facebook in October 2021 put “the metaverse” into boardroom conversations everywhere, whether or not anyone agreed on what it meant.
For a stretch of months, having a web3 strategy, an NFT drop, a Discord server for token holders, some kind of metaverse presence, felt to a lot of marketing leaders like table stakes for looking forward-thinking.
The unwind
Then the market underneath all of it fell apart. Terra’s UST stablecoin and its sister token Luna collapsed in May 2022, wiping out tens of billions of dollars in value in days. Crypto lender Celsius Network froze customer withdrawals in June and filed for bankruptcy soon after. Trading firm Three Arrows Capital, a major player across the crypto ecosystem, was ordered into liquidation the same summer. NFT trading volumes on major marketplaces fell sharply from their late-2021 and early-2022 peaks, and floor prices on collections that had been status symbols months earlier dropped in some cases by more than half.
Marketing budgets followed the sentiment. Several brands that had announced web3 initiatives quietly slowed or shelved them, wary of associating with a category now generating as many headlines about fraud and collapse as innovation.
Not everyone pulled back
It wasn’t a total retreat. Starbucks announced its Odyssey program in September 2022, a loyalty initiative built on NFT-based digital collectibles designed to feel more like an evolution of its existing rewards program than a speculative crypto play. That distinction mattered: the projects still moving forward by late 2022 tended to be the ones framed around a concrete, familiar use case like loyalty or access, rather than pure collectibility or speculation.
What this means for most businesses
For the large majority of businesses without a dedicated crypto-native audience, the honest read heading into the end of 2022 is that web3 marketing was never about blockchain technology. It was a proxy for wanting to look innovative, and that instinct doesn’t require jumping into a category currently working through a serious credibility crisis. The brands that experimented and got real value tended to have audiences already fluent in crypto; the ones that jumped in for the headline mostly got the headline and little else.
If you’re deciding whether this belongs in your 2023 plan, the market has just given a fairly clear answer: wait for the dust to settle, and if you do eventually explore it, anchor it to something your customers already understand, not the underlying technology itself.
More from this period: browse other Marketing Strategy guides or everything published in 2022.
