Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Mike Charalambous, as they will be discussing The Metaverse, NFTs, marketing in this upcoming realm, as well as opportunities for early adopter brands. Mike is the CEO of Threedium, one of London's leading 3D technology solutions for e-Comm, display and AR. 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐌𝐢𝐤𝐞:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://threedium.co.uk/

𝑀𝑖𝑘𝑒: 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikechara/ 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro 

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube 

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show 

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean 

▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify 

▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer 

▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher 

▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox 

Episode transcript: 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi, there! This is Andrei, and you're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Mike Charalambous, who is an old friend of mine, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Threedium, one of London's leading 3D technology solutions for e-Comm, display and AR. And today we'll discuss the metaverse, NFTs, marketing in this upcoming realm, as well as opportunities for early adopter brands. Mike, really nice catching up! It's been a while. How are you?

Mike  

It's a pleasure, man. It's a pleasure. I think last time we were organising to catch up over beers in a physical bar, next time is going to be in a digital bar, in the metaverse. So times are changing fast.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah. See you at the central end? Actually, it's been a couple of years, maybe at least two since we last spoke. So that is sinking up, well not nice. But you thinking up with the start of the pandemic, and everything that came with that. And you have developed some really cool things meanwhile. I was following you mostly on LinkedIn and looking into what you guys were doing with Threedium. And I think this is going to be a really fun episode because it aligns very much with the specific of our episodes here on the podcast, which is getting our listeners closer to the innovation that is happening within the tech space and marketing specifically. And I think it's gonna be a lot of insight and learnings to take away for you guys out there that are looking to see any opportunities or are maybe interested in this web 3.0, the metaverse, NFTs and how the brands that you are marketing or your own companies can leverage the changing customer behaviour or, you know, this space in general. So, Mike, let's talk a bit about you. Let's introduce you to the audience. What's your story was story behind Threedium?

Mike  

We started 3d zoom over beers and nachos in a nice diner in London. But rewinding back, I was very much involved in the consumer electronics, and agency world back in the day. So I used to work with Nokia, on the tech scout team, finding different software and hardware,  solutions that could work for the Lumia phones. Then I changed shapes, I joined Wonder Man in WPP, we were still working with Nokia and some other consumer electronic companies, trying to support them on the brand strategy side about rolling different consumer products across different markets. And that's where we started seeing that e-Commerce, and in general, digital engagement was becoming very critical, very important for the brands. As a side hassle, we were meeting with a few friends, all of them were, experienced in different fields in their own ways. And we were thinking about ways to how we can further elevate the digital experience as to how brands can engage with users from a product display perspective, but also from creating commerce experiences that can elevate the purchase intention and trust for users to put their credit cards and buy products. So this is how Threedium was formed. With our mission to make 3D and AR solutions very much accessible to everybody to all sorts of different brands agencies, small to medium companies, to be able to to use them and elevate their, their commerce channels. Whether that is in e-Commerce or physical or omnichannel. Very recently, we also allow them to utilise them and distribute them within the metaverse. Threedium is a team of five founders. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of the company. Ever since the launch of the company in late 2017, we grew from a team of five to a team of 50 people. We are headquartered in London, but we also have offices in Serbia, Germany, and most recently in the US.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice, that's a very nice growth there! What fueled it? Was it tapping into the sort of metaversy spectre? Or was it the adoption that fueled your fast growth?

Mike  

I think ever since 2016 when e-commerce and mobile-commerce started to become important revenue and business drivers for the brands and retailers in general, we started seeing a much faster dependency on digital channels to be able to exist as brands and to increase market share. And this increased reliance on e-Commerce and mobile commerce allowed the brands to have much more available budgets to spend, invest and enhance their digital channels. But we are also seeing some tremendous talent being involved in this fault. So whole new eCommerce strategy. And we've seen some great teams being put in place from different brands, which helped to drive the adoption of new technologies, and more fascinating innovation in the space. So this is great foundation to see rapid evolution in eCommerce. And fast-forwarding from 2016 to 2020. We've been seeing brands slowly adopting 3D and immersive solutions to pilot a few of their product launches. But also the pandemic has massively, you know, escalated the need for digital transformation. So we've seen many, many brands putting digital transformation at the forefront of the strategy of their priorities. So eCommerce, mobile commerce, digital channels have been important elements that they had to further revolutionise in order to stay relevant in that ever-changing consumer, environment and ecosystem. We've seen massive adoption, acceleration of the need and use of immersive solutions, mainly 3D, because 3D is becoming an important component for creating digital assets, utilising in so many different ways for replacing physical products and the need to use physical products to create content, to sell products and to engage with users. As one can say, we were probably at the right time, in the right space, to get enough attention for all these big brands that they were looking to embrace 3D and immersive commerce solutions. So we had a product that was already quite advanced for its time, and it was able to cater to all these advanced and massive and scalable requirements that the brands, enterprises and agencies wanted at the time. And this is how we started rapidly gaining traction and market share. So right now in 2022, we have more than 3000 individual users, using our platform to create immersive continent solutions to top load and push up to their eCommerce channels. But also to use their physical channels as QR codes. We also have more than 40 enterprises across different verticals. Using our technology at scale, to innovate with their eCommerce, omnichannel and metaverse channels. All these users and enterprises are using our technology to be able to create 3D and AR product explorers 3D and AR configurators, 3D and AR display ads. And very recently, they're also using our platform to optimise their existing 3d models to create 3D metaverse ready, if you like, wearables and products, which they can then sell in the metaverse worlds directly to avatars. And as we typically say to our brands and partners, you create 3D once you use Threedium to sell it thrice. So it's the multiple ways in which they can benefit and utilise their assets and started seeing a great ROI across different channels using our engine. Some of the brands we work with include Diageo, Farfetch, a lot of brands from the LVMH group, some brands from the Richmond group. We also work closely with a lot of creative agencies and media agencies such as McCann and Wavemaker. And we have very strong partnerships with all different metaverse wo