Opinion by Sander Gortjes, co-founder and CEO of Hello Labs.
Many see television as a bygone cultural linchpin facing obsolescence as people shift their focus to the promise of smartphones and social media. In reality, 97% of United States households have a TV to watch programming, so it remains the go-to source for most Americans to consume media.
Short-form content platforms like TikTok have seen explosive growth, with Web3 broadly looking past TV to leverage Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) on social media to communicate with the public. TV’s potential to spur growth and adoption remains untapped, mainly and unexplored by the crypto. Web3 innovators are accustomed to communicating with a tech-savvy, crypto-native audience on these short-format social networks. Its inability, however, to provide content, context, high production value and education all in one sweep means television’s longer format and massive reach are better suited to teaching so-called normies about the wonders of blockchain, non-fungible tokens and digital assets.
The Shark Tank template
Without getting bogged down in a debate about how video-sharing platforms erode attention spans and dumb down culture, particularly youth culture, the merits of longer-format media are difficult to dispute. For crypto to succeed in the long run, it must find the quickest path to mainstream adoption. TV has a template to find the perfect swirl of high-value production and real-world coverage that can put entrepreneurs and Web3 adoption on a firmer footing.
Web3 startups that want to win hearts and minds and onboard mainstream users need only look to Shark Tank’s success to understand this. The American reality show, a franchise of the British series Dragons’ Den, sees a panel of venture capitalists rule over entrepreneurs’ startup ideas, pulling in huge ratings for ABC since it debuted in 2009.
Created by Mark Burnett, the mastermind producer behind The Apprentice, Shark Tank has won numerous Emmys in its 15-year run, racking 340 episodes and reaching…
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