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In order to understand web3 emergent technology, I minted my first non-fungible token (NFT). This grassroots operational approach allowed me to get an in-depth understanding of how to think about NFT’s from a consumer point of view, as well as overcoming the technical constraints required to publish an NFT.

My process

1. In order to create an NFT auction of value, I decided to use a photograph I had taken eight years ago outside Farringdon Station in London. This poignant image has stayed with me for a long time. Victims of homelessness can be anyone, and they are part of our community – they could be our father, our child, or our brother. As this project was intended for proof of concept only, I decided to donate any revenue received to the homelessness charity, Beam. They do fantastic work, please check them out and donate if you can.
2. In order to mint an NFT, I needed to decide who would pay the “gas fees” (this is the cost of the transaction itself – on the Ethereum blockchain this is a unit of Ether measured in GWEI). Although gas fees were low at the time, minting an NFT can have hidden costs and not everything is transparently communicated up-front. For this reason, I chose free minting (or lazy minting), where the gas fees are paid by the buyer.
3. Although I had an OpenSea marketplace account, for this NFT I decided to list on Rarible so I could compare how the onboarding experience was different.
4. After choosing the blockchain and marketplace, I needed to decide on the wallet I wanted to link them together. I already owned a Coinbase crypto wallet, but have found it cumbersome due to a separate mobile-based app that needs to be linked to a Coinbase account. This time I used MetaMask and it seemed a lot easier.

Summary

I would recommend you try minting your own NFT – it’s fairly simple, once you have an understanding of the concepts involved. In retrospect next time I would probably pay my own gas fees, as I imagine this would increase traction. I would also set it to be a timed auction, and make sure I have a budget for promoting the NFT on a social media paid-for campaign (rather than relying on organic growth). Donating the proceeds to charity is something I haven’t seen in other NFTs, and this could be a useful donation-generating mechanism for the non-profit sector.

A megatrend is a pattern or a movement which has a major impact on business and society as a whole. They can be used as a tool to help guide investment – but which megatrends should we invest in?

Pictet Asset Management asked AML Group to look at ways of owning this new investment space, thereby encouraging consumers to invest with them — and after extensive stakeholder engagement developed mega.online. A fully responsive content hub, the site brings together curated articles written by academics, scientists and entrepreneurs from many disciplines and backgrounds like Vaclav Smil (Bill Gates’ ‘must-read’ author) and Leo Johnson to provide independent advice on the forces shaping the sustainable future. Supported with infographics, diagrams and video, the informative articles on topics such as eating insects and energy storage integrating a number of social media tools (such as Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube) to generate discussion and help guide users to specific theme investment funds only a click away.

A number of innovative features on the site helped to support this approach, including a ‘save for later’ tool (allowing content to be consumed on another device or shared with a group), and automatic generation of ‘reading time’ (as most of the content was long-form).

In this extensive campaign I was responsible for:

• Prototypes
• Digital Project Management (including Staged Delivery)
• Information Architecture (Sitemaps)
• Creative/Visual Design Collaboration
• User Interface Design
• User Experience & Wireframing
• User Personas & Journeys
• Quality Assurance & Testing

I also assisted with Content Planning, Social Media Integration, and Domain Name Strategy.

After two successful years promoting brand awareness of the Oxford/Cambridge annual boat race, the task to monetise the 2014/2015 sponsorship was now to explain more about why BNY Mellon have sponsored the race, how it links to what they do, and start a longer conversation with their audiences. Part of this solution was to create the BNY Mellon Brilliant website.

At the centre sits a content hub — where the target audience could discover how to take insights from the boat race and the wider sporting world, and apply it to their jobs, enabling them to perform better at work. The site contained a calendar of engaging content to populate the site, including interviews with sports and business personalities, client and prospect events, and origination of long and short copy articles and infographics.

In total, 106 pieces of content were created for the campaign, deployed throughout the year. The campaign also used social media and HTML emails to drive traffic back to the site and generate views and shares.

Since the initial launch, site visits have reached 40k and there have been 1,200 social shares and article views. Long-form relevant content has increased site stickiness, so we know visitors are reading the content and coming back for more.

On this project I was responsible for:

• Digital Project Management
• Information Architecture (Sitemaps)
• Creative/Visual Design Collaboration
• Aggregation across multiple Social Media platforms
• Animation
• User Experience & Wireframing
• User Journeys
• Quality Assurance & Testing

The Financial Services Forum is a membership-community of professionals – they endeavour to have an understanding of the consumer, marketplace and business marketing performance. The Forum continues to provide that very focus, and the critical insight, which allows their Members to concentrate on improving performance by putting marketing effectiveness first. What makes The Forum’s agenda both relevant and beneficial is the fact that it is totally independent and sector-specific. It involves the right people, addressing the right topics — both current wisdom and future trends — through a mix of events, publications, communities and online resources.

We partnered with the FSF to create an upgraded online digital offering, using a phased delivery mechanism: Phase 1 concentrated on getting a comprehensive CMS and improved site architecture (IA) to allow for expansion into international communities — along with the capacity for visitors to engage in online discussion. Phase 2 looked at ways to increase membership, including promoting the first three months for free (to sell-in the advantages of increased article availability and event tickets). Phase 3 focused on revenue generation and reducing administration, with a Stripe payment gateway for events and subscription-based membership.

Successive phases will look at additional features and closer integration of the CRM facility for improved lead generation.

This was a year-long partnership, and on this project I was responsible for:

• Existing Functional Review/Evaluation
• Functional Specification
• Content Migration Plan
• Prototyping
• User Experience
• User Interface
• User Journeys, Email Newsletters and Autoresponders
• Information Architecture
• Artworking Markup and Development Support Material
• Feature Development
• CMS Training Manual
• Quality Assurance
• Service Level Agreement and Disaster Recovery Plan
• Assisting with extensive Client Collaboration

AML’s idea was to base the campaign around valuable, engaging content for consumers, which provided a back-story for the Neptune investment funds. The content was delivered through both printed and downloadable online brochures, and a bespoke microsite — using parallax functionality and providing supporting content through video.

Alongside written content, articles featured elegant illustrations and infographics to highlight key facts about the funds and markets in a striking and clean way. Using this visual language, we created online advertising to drive investors to the site and the online brochure.

New Reformers provided cut-through in a busy ISA market by offering high quality, useful content in a visually interesting and innovative way.

AML were able to achieve the desired layout design – an easily animated, asymmetric parallax layout (similar to the New York Times’ legendary Snowfall article, but fully responsive) – with both elegance and simplicity. Through prototyping, we evaluated a number of tools (including the Aesop Story Engine), and eventually settled on Visual Composer. An additional constraint was for the client to easily and quickly update table data (without any developer knowledge) – for this, we selected the intuitive and flexible Tablepress plugin.

Completed within the allocated six weeks production timeframe, on this project I was responsible for:

• Creative/Visual Design Collaboration
• Extensive Artworking Markup (of colours, elements and sections)
• Responsive SVG infographics
• Animation
• User Experience & Wireframing
• Quality Assurance & Testing

CBI is the ‘voice of business’. In today’s economic reality, in terms of public opinion, there is a loss of business confidence and growing support for anti-business legislation. To redress this issue and attempt to balance the conversation by allowing pro-business issues to be heard, The Great Business Debate campaign was launched at the CBI Annual Conference in 2014.

The campaign consisted of a website, a Twitter campaign, HTML emails, online and press advertising as well as a series of live debates. The website contained articles, news and opinion from business entrepreneurs, tax campaigners, business leaders and even the Archbishop of York. It was also a platform for polling, quizzes, case studies and a debate toolkit (so companies can continue the discussion offline).

As of September 2015, there have been over 160k pageviews, from over 86,000 users. With over 8,500 followers on Twitter, it’s definitely got people talking and has ‘moved the dial’ for trust in business. The CBI have long-term plans for this campaign (and has now created new social media distribution channels for the website content on YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+) and will extend it to include live webcasts, as well as developing more local events to stimulate the debate even further.

In this extensive campaign I was responsible for:

• Standardised Development and Deployment Platform (WordPress)
• User Experience
• Quality Assurance