When it comes to concerts and professional sports, two of the biggest brands experimenting with NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are the National Football League (NFL) and Ticketmaster. NFL Sr. Director Emerging Products Daniel DeVece and Ticketmaster Director of Product Management Joe Aiello were on hand at the NFT.NYC 2023 conference in New York City where they, along with Dapper Labs VP of Partnerships Brittany O'Hagan presented a session on how NFTs are powering fan engagement. Following the session, Blockchain Journal editor-in-chief David Berlind took the opportunity to interview O'Hagan to better understand how Dapper Labs is working with the NFL and Ticketmaster and how other enterprises and big brands should be thinking about NFTs and the opportunities they create.

One thing that O'Hagan made clear is that the three organizations — what she calls "the three-headed monster" — do not yet have all the answers. The applications of NFTs to fandom and big brands is such a new area for many organizations that the three-headed monster is still "in the depths just grinding" on new ideas. But what the three organizations do know is that they are moving forward with blockchain and NFTs. The first outcome of their collaboration is called NFL All Day; a brand involving NFT-based digital collectibles that will feature NFL game highlights on the Flow public distributed ledger.

But according to O'Hagan, there's more to come. During the interview, O'Hagan talked about using the individual brand powers of the league, team, and player to unlock new levels of fandom that are currently unavailable to sports fans in real life. But in terms of applications that are transferrable to other industries and enterprises, one major use case that the three organizations are looking into (especially given Ticketmaster's involvement) is the idea of NFT-based ticketing for events like concerts and big league games (Dapper Labs is also working with the National Basketball Association; the NBA).

According to O'Hagan, ticketing on a big-event scale is definitely the next phase of how NFTs can and will be used. But in order for blockchain-based ticketing to really work, it will not only take a lot of fan education, it will also depend on how easy it will be for big brands to bridge their existing fan and customer bases to Web3 experiences where there's still a fair amount of onboarding friction.

To watch the video version of this podcast or read its full-text transcript, go to:

https://blockchainjournal.com/interview/big-event-ticketing-is-next-phase-how-nfts-will-be-used-dapper-labs-ohagan/.

The video can also be watched on Blockchain Journal's YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVs_PqTbldA.