Late last week, Impact Theory provided their Founders Key update announcing that John Rood (Former head of WW Marketing for Disney Channel) would join Impact Theory and the Founders Key team as Chief Marketing Officer. According to deadline, John Rood has spent over 14 years in combined tenure in a myriad of roles supporting Disney Enterprises.
John has spent decades building amazing things at Warner Bros and Disney including the launch of the New 52 and many Disney channels. You can learn more about him soon via an interview on The Pulse. – Founders Key Medium
Chief Creative Officer of Disney Channels stated, ““I also know he has not come close to exhausting his appetite for leading great marketing programs and teams — so while he leaves us to pursue admirable ventures around the world, I’m certain his next chapter will include new marketing ventures back here in Los Angeles.”
Tom Bilyeu has been vocal for years about his long term goals to create the next generation media brand that could become “the next Disney.” NFTCulture has sat down with Tom a few times to discuss his background, experience, and journey into NFTs that ultimately resulted in the creation of the Founders Key. His candor about the current ecosystem and web3 have been a breath of fresh air.
As we enter a generational shift where digital ownership transitions from corporations to consumers and concepts including holders rights and licensing become more blurred, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) become the perfect conduit to completely disrupt the industry. A number of recent events highlight the massive shift that create an environment for teams to come together and create web3 brands that can compete with and possibly outpace legacy web2 brands, Disney included.
A Perfect Storm For NFT Disruption
We have seen a number of instances of web2 companies protecting their IP as the NFT landscape becomes more murky. Numerous organizations including DC comics become litigious protecting their IP as comic creators (contractors) tried to leverage their art as NFTs. We asked Mark Cuban about this almost a year ago:
How do you see this being resolved? We see entities like Nintendo (who have been notoriously litigious with their IP) coming hard into this space. How does this affect the market, the collector, and the artist?
The same things happened in the early days of the net, and as mobile phones and social media became ubiquitous. Rights holders are going to want to protect the IP they own. I don’t see a problem with that at all. There will be some challenges early as people learn the rules and hopefully the rights holders will be forgiving rather than litigious, but over time, there will be “burn notices” where people not respecting copyright will be forced to burn items that they should have not been allowed to buy. It will upset buyers to no end, but it will end up happening. –Mark Cuban
The opposite is also happening with brands like Bored Ape Yacht Club allowing their holders to use their Ape NFTs as an independent source of income creating an ecosystem that has created an environment for completely fresh IP including Jenkins The Valet, Ape Bands, and Adidas Originals buying an Ape and partnering with Pixel Vault to go all in on the metaverse.
John represents a talent that is well positioned to help Impact Theory to accelerate their mission. His background doesnt just include Disney. He also has experience as Director of Promotions at Warner Brothers Consumer Products, Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development for DC Entertainment, and his previously stated role with Disney.
The marrying of web2 entertainment expertise from John combined with the web3 passion and expertise provided by Tom Bilyeu and team will not only help Impact Theory as they set out to achieve their goals but will likely also benefit NFTs and web3 as a whole. John Rood may be the market maker that the ecosystem needs to help NFTs finally cross the chasm into the mainstream.
We are rooting for Tom.
If I really sat and thought about what it's going to take to build a studio that will rival Disney it would shut me down. It's just too fucking big.
It's going to take 70 years. It's an insane undertaking.
So I don't think like that.
— Tom Bilyeu (@TomBilyeu) January 1, 2020