Chat with someone about web3 or the metaverse, and there’s an astronomically high chance they’ll drop the word “community” to help color whatever they’re talking about. For Fox and its web3 arm, Blockchain Creative Labs (BCL), community is at their epicenter.

There’s so much emphasis on community at BCL that they’ve developed an entire engagement ecosystem around Dan Harmon’s new animated television series Krapopolis and the show isn’t even set to premiere until the fall. That’s a pretty interesting approach given that most web3 communities are built around art or a product that already exists.

Tommaso Sandretto, chief revenue and chief investment officer at BCL, believes the community-centric focus is what will propel Fox’s shows into the metaverse and beyond. But it all starts with engagement and inspiring superfans to interact with their favorite shows, not an easy task when some of them haven’t hit the network yet.

“BCL was born as an idea between our chief info security officer and our animation department,” Sandretto said to me recently. “The idea is how can we leverage blockchain technology to further engage with our fans – Fox fans and fans of the Fox entities – and how can we deepen the relationship to create a dual direction, rather than a single direction.” Rather than pump out more shows, the studio should solicit continuous feedback from its viewers, Sandretto said. “Blockchain is the perfect place for that, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and gamification are perfect applications of it.”

BCL takes a two-pronged approach to its operation, focusing on consumers on one side and creators on the other.

Tommaso Sandretto

“On the consumer side, we focus on Fox [intellectual property] — Krapopolis, The Masked Singer, United States Football League (USFL) — anything that is Fox IP for which we have total rights and can start playing around with developing, generating, and building communities,” Sandretto said. “For example, with The Masked Singer, we created a whole new voting experience and a new ‘confessional room’ as premium content — really targeting the super fans.”

It’s these super fans who then become the target market for whichever Fox entity BCL is trying to build a community around. 

“Krapopolis is another great example,” Sandretto said. “We launched our project last August – a year and a half before the launch of the show – and since then, we’ve had lots of traction, press and gamification around the launch. The people in the community who purchased a nonfungible token are fans of Rick & Morty [another tv show created by Harmon] and fans of the animation world, so the NFT was really a ‘fan pass’ providing anything from experiencing small snippets of the show to being written into the show.”

Sounds unique? Sandretto knows it is and hopes it’s a process that will catch on.

“We asked trivia questions about the show and awarded two different keys to Krapopolis that allowed you to get written in,” he said. “You come over, the animation department creates a drawing of you, and then they push it in the season finale.” BCL is also offering exclusive access to events as a perk.

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“Six months ago, we had a great screening in New York at SoHo House and Dan Harmon actually showed up and held a small Q&A,” Sandretto said. “If you’re a diehard Rick & Morty fan, you live for those moments. Being in a room with Dan, asking questions—it’s unheard of. So that’s a perfect example of how the gamification could work moving forward.”

With the USFL, the spring football league that Fox owns and is in the process of relaunching,  season tickets come with a team token that provides access to the field and experiences you can’t have in the National Football League. “It’s all part of the premium experience you can attach to the NFT itself,” Sandretto said.

For writers and artists and producers, BCL is creating new and different revenue streams through blockchain and providing increased transparency around the financial performance and reviews of certain programming.

“Around the creator, we’re experimenting with on-chain revenue streams and on providing transparency around sales and feedback on things – that until now – have always been a little muddy waters,” Sandretto said.

The hope is that as the community building and technology evolves, so too will the transparency and plans to expand into the metaverse, he said. 

“We’ve been looking everywhere for metaverse inspirations and metaverse experiences, but have yet to find our footing in terms of the right product fit for our audiences,” Sandretto said. “We’re also so early in the development of our product. Again, we launched a year and a half before we had an audience for Krapopolis or real fans of the show, so once we can get the real engagement and see what gets appreciated or not, we’ll be able to potentially develop something in the metaverse. Everybody is racing for more and more content, but I think more engagement around content is more important.”

If successful, BCL’s commitment to community building as a tool for current and future growth of its IP could potentially change how major market studios relate to their fans and their fan communities. For Sandretto, he thinks it’s slowly  becoming part of the studio playbook.

“We’re testing all of our ideas, and if we’re successful at creating this new level of engagement, I’m sure this is going to be the new norm and will be the new way Fox and other studios will interact and generate relationships with the consumer,” Sandretto said. “What’s very hot and useful right now is totally irrelevant in six months, so we also have to quickly adapt and meet the viewers and customers where they are. It’s really important for us to test our hypotheses, see what works, and then see how we evolve to make sure we keep up with everybody else.”