Makers of The Metaverse: Jaime Schwarz Of Brand Therapy On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Experience the mediums. Play with snapchat, etc filters. If you can’t or don’t want to invest yet in VR goggles, they are available even at some movie theaters or for rent or find a friend or google cardboard, etc.
The Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality Industries are so exciting. What is coming around the corner? How will these improve our lives? What are the concerns we should keep an eye out for? Aside from entertainment, how can VR or AR help work or other parts of life? To address this, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jaime Schwarz.
Jaime Schwarz is an award-winning creative director of 15 years who left agency life behind to start his brand therapy practice helping his clients strategically innovate their way forward while building a brand voice to serve as their Chief Purpose Officer. He has a recently published patent for a system and method for virtual product identification which in effect is everything you can do with a trademark in the metaverse. Jaime, his wife Jessica, and two boys Miles and Charlie, are recent NYC expats enjoying their new life in Hastings on Hudson.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?
I’m a New York suburbanite who grew up with a younger brother who is a natural people person, a fundraising, activist mother, and a board certified psychologist who left Nazi Germany in 1934 when he was seven years old. I was lucky enough to study psychology, philosophy and then advertising across Upstate NY, Chicago, SF, London, Amsterdam, and NYC before starting my advertising career in NYC. After marrying a wonderful wife and having two amazing boys, and being a creative director for over a dozen agencies and over a hundred clients, thanks to the COVID push, I’m right back in NY suburbia where I’m now a practicing Brand Therapist.
Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
There are so many over the years. I’d say, relevant to my work now as a brand therapist, building brand personas for decision makers so the brand’s voice stays in their heads to making purpose-driven business decisions, Ty Montague’s book True Story and his podcast “Bullshit” are two things really informing my every day because they focus on his philosophy of “Story-Doing.” Story Doing requires brands to do what they are, not just say what they believe and make the doing their marketing. But to add a film, because I can’t help but praise my talented wife who was the casting director for it, 40 Year Old Version is an amazing one because it’s about making sure your story gets told. When we have something to say, we should all find our ways to make ourselves heard, no matter what’s in our way.
Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the X Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.
When I was still at my last agency, timing-wise, this was the ICO craze and Pokemon-go was everywhere, we were starting to experiment with what to pitch clients. I formed our agency’s innovation group and we just started ideating. I was trying to put Pokestops in far off places you had to walk to and have our health client sponsor them. I hosted a cyber security event for an insurance client and I focused on a lot of hypothetical applied tech like hacking a phone with micro EMPs. Then we went off the rails seeing if we could get a client to sponsor a live concert where you could only attend virtually. Nothing like that got bought, but it started the wheels turning. So when I started brandtherapy.coach, innovation became a very robust palette to paint with for my clients.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?
I am so lucky that it’s my job to find the interesting in everything I work on. So I’ll reword your question slightly and say the most disruptive story in my career is when I hosted my first hackathon. I was building the brand Coders vs Cancer and hosted a women-in-tech, breast cancer hackathon with amazing sponsors and an over 50% female attendance rate (in 2015). My network pivoted overnight (well, over 3 nights since the hackathon was a full weekend) from a marketing-focused one to an innovation-centered one. It started me on the path to accelerators, founders, startup processes and philosophies that became the basis of the other half of brand therapy’s strategic base: product and business development. The first thing I did after that was found the agency’s innovation lab that I mentioned above.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I don’t know if I’d call it funny, but when I first opened my own shop, it had a different name: Pro4Bono. Its model was “low cost marketing, high return joint ventures.” The idea was to build trust with my clients by bringing low-cost marketing to the table while learning the real drivers of their businesses to then build new lines of revenue for them which we would both profit in together. Low-cost marketing is a great incentivizer for clients but the assumptions that they’d jump at the, admittedly daring, ventures certainly made an ass out of me. I learned that trust can’t be built into a model, it has to fundamentally just be built over time and only when you have built that trust again and again and again, can you backward engineer any thematic causes to how to build it better the next time.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Well that breast cancer hackathon that I mentioned earlier had a sponsor named D’Vorah Graeser of Kisspatent.com who was just starting to build an automated platform for IP and she was an amazing person to meet then. Because we kept in touch, when I was no longer attached to an agency and owned my own thoughts again, she helped me understand the implications of my brand mark for virtual products idea and what I could do with a patent for it. If it weren’t for D’Vorah, I wouldn’t be talking to you about XR today.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Brand Therapy has been an amazing fit for me. I thrive being there for my clients in this capacity, and all my projects are humbling, exciting, and potentially world changing, because they’re all purpose driven from the core of their brands. Right now, the launch I’m excited about most is for my client Myrtle Jones who is launching JonesGuild.com, an art collector guild focused on revaluing black art and artists through art collector education and DEI innovation. I’ve helped Myrtle to create holistic provenance for her art so that the blockchains that hold them not only ensure the true value of each piece, but allow the art to speak for and defend itself. Some of my payment has also been in the form of a membership to the guild so I can’t wait for my own education in this space as it gets going. But on the virtual brand mark front, since the patent was just published this month, I’m just beginning partnership talks with dev shops, digital product makers, and others with great IP. But some of those talks I’m more excited about than anything else I’ve worked on to date. I really hope to share them with you sooner rather than later!
Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The VR, AR and MR industries seem so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? Can you explain or give an example?
XR is an amazing and exponentially growing industry with new opportunities daily. The immersive web has been born in these spaces and have taken the seeds of the metaverse in MMORPG’s and brought them to new heights. It is serving as a first step out of web2 and into web3. However it’s blockchain, the movement of ownership from platforms to users, that is the actual leap into the web3 space… IMHO. So what excites me right now are the integrations of these two technologies.
The first example I’d give is digital twinning. We’ve had simulations for a while now, like digital models of cars that help us design them, test them, and optimize them. But we’re getting complicated now with offshore rigs, multi-faceted systems, and the beginnings of cities (e.g. smart spines) thanks to 3D scanning and IoT seeding. Thanks to Cop26 and other ESG goals, office buildings are now going through digital twin audits and builds to make these buildings not only simulatable (for storms and upkeep) but to transform them into ecosystems, taking care of themselves and their tenants. GlassAftercare.com which is a brand therapy client of mine is teaching this to their clients right now. Through AR overlays and VR tours, a building’s future is as plain as its present. You can learn more about this kind of thing through the digitaltwinconsortium.org.
Another example I’m excited (and nervous) about is the potential of affiliate marketing in the metaverse. One of the use cases of my patent is to provide, not only brand assurance of the virtual products you’re wearing (both AR and VR), but smart licensing to simply cut-and-paste-purchase them through that person. Now, “I like your shoes” becomes, “I’m buying those shoes from you.” and voila, the smart contract built into the mark sends the money right back to the brand with an affiliate percentage for the wearer automatically split. I’m afraid of influencers acting like QVC in front of us, but I’m excited for how they figure out how to organically be teh awesome people they can be in front of us with their brand marks ready. This means we’re not just entering into the era of D2A (direct to avatar) marketing, we’re entering into A2A purchasing.
The third thing I’m excited for in a digitally immersive space is that not is everything code, products, events, discussions, but it’s also blockchained. The implications of this are that even live influence has a marketplace. Even people who quote others in their paid speeches will have those quoted automatically compensated. This isn’t just for remixes anymore. When you covered me the first time for SendThanksNow (http://www.yitziweiner.com/jaime-schwarz-of-sendthanksnow-how-to-live-with-joie-de-vivre-even-when-it-feels-like-the-whole/) that was about thanking people IRL anywhere, anytime, for anything but still had the barrier of needing registered users to be thanked and thankers to use the app. In an immersive space, it’s all included in reality. I’m excited, rather than scared by this fully digitized future because, as long as we own our data and smart contracts control IP from the source, the constitutional rights we enjoy are still intrinsic to this space. Of course, the surveillance economy is still in control of web3 today, so this has to be wrested before this kind of IP-for-all economy can thrive.
What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?
The first is definitely what I just alluded to about the attention economy still being the basis for web3. Surveillance capitalism is the end result of the attention economy. This perspective comes from being in marketing for 20 years. The intention for the attention economy is just hypertargeting for efficient costs per click, but the end result of the system is, well, we’ve seen it. Put in a fully immersive, digital space, the things we’re trying to correct through legislation now could look like child’s play. That’s why it’s imperative to move to a true own-your-data economy where educating yourself on how to earn IP, hold your identity and data, and sell it when wanted, properly is part of the system, not just part of good practice.
Another thing I’m concerned about is leaving the real world behind. AR has the power to enhance the real world, it also has the power to blind us from the realities of the troubles we should deal with. And in VR, well, that’s just Brave New World. How we ensure we don’t end up there, I’m not really sure. But I think it means we must stay tethered to the real world.
A third is the speculative bubbles these technologies create. NFTs are a good example of a bubble we’re living with right now. But when people can build whole worlds where we live by their rules, wool is very easy to put over people’s eyes.
There are many more but a theme to a lot of them is the drag coefficient of blockchain. That’s gas pricing, its CO2 footprint, and the tilted scales it creates even as you move to proof of stake which requires those with means to be the ones doing the proofing, which only increases disparity. A great way to open your eyes to today’s limits and watchout signs is the video Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?
Aside from mimicking real life which some people have been able to take advantage of during covid to enjoy being at the office without being at the office (real post its is still better than a Miro whiteboard IMHO), innovation in general is going to be immensely helped. When John Favreau was creating the remake of the lion king, he was building sets in VR, painting African plains with digital paint brushes. This holds true when you need to explain anything your’e inventing, any concept you’re trying to get across. A napkin has been the archetype of the seed of many a company. In a 3D space, imagine what kind of companies can be dreamt up on an immersive one.
Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?
As an empathy engine I think it’s an amazing technology. And I don’t just mean being transported to places we’ve never been to meet people we’ve never met. I mean getting 3D tools into creators hands who have different kinds of perspectives. Not just seeing through artists eyes like when Guernica was made into 3D so long ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc1Nfx4c5LQ. We could soon see through the eyes of people who can show us new universes we’ve never considered because we just haven’t had the tools to cross-communicate before. Like people whose cultures we’ve overlooked such as the first nations people all over the world. A lot of them speak with contextual grammar. That alone is amazing to ponder. Did you know quantum physicists are studying the language of the Blackfeet Nation because contextual language is better at describing the quantum realm? And people on neurodiverse spectrums and people with unique perceptions like synesthesia. In the metaverse, we determine the rules, we determine how physics works. With these creators at the helm, we get to step inside their worlds and see through their perspectives. I can’t wait for that!
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”
First of all, experience the mediums. Play with snapchat, etc filters. If you can’t or don’t want to invest yet in VR goggles, they are available even at some movie theaters or for rent or find a friend or google cardboard, etc.
Next, do the historic research; it’s amazing how much you can see ahead when you see where it’s come from. The Sundance Film Festival has been doing New Frontiers showcase for over a decade, there is so much to go through. And the library of Chris Milk alone is a great place to start. I think a great company like COSM.com which not only does VR but makes immersive screen spaces (think planetariums on steroids) is a part of this new world too.
Then look ahead by finding the great XR thought leaders of today who are everywhere. David Sime is a great resource I’ve followed and now work with on many XR topics.
Then join the groups, which are worth it once you’ve had the grounding, to start discussing, understanding, and building your own tastes in the space. Discord is a never ending list of servers all thriving in the web3 space. In marketing, I’ve enjoyed the Jump discord group.
Last is to experiment. This is a still nascent industry with tinkerers about, and you’ll find them in these groups, and building with people is so much better than building by yourself. Building doesn’t have to mean building a metaverse, just go back to snapchat and try making your own filter.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I’m typing this after just finding out that Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the gif, just passed. I was at the Webby’s in 2013 when he accepted his lifetime achievement award. And although 99% of that room hadn’t heard of him before, his impact on all of us was palpable when we applauded for him. You never know what your creations can do, so instill it with good purpose and make it as user friendly as possible so you can empower others with it. That’s the kind of activist I like to be, not an inspirer but an empowerer. The world is a crazy complex place. Giving people the tools to deal with it for the betterment of us all is the strongest way I know how to live out one of my beliefs: I owe those who came before me for everything I have and am, but the only way to pay them back is to give everything I have and am to those who come after me.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I’m honored by anyone taking the time to read this, really. But to pick a person in the Web3 space I’d have to say Juan Benet, who is the CEO of protocol labs. He is a great visionary in this space. I discovered his web3 conference talk from 2018 and have been following him ever since. He sees very concretely into the future and I always want to know what’s just around the corner.
Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!
Makers of The Metaverse: Jaime Schwarz Of Brand Therapy On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
