Brenda Cohen: A Go-To Expert Driving NFTs and Marketing Campaigns to a Next Level of Advancement

Award Pool is an integrated platform that empowers brands, creators, and collectors with amazing engagement tools and features to create, collect, and trade unique experiences, collectibles, and amazements securely.

With Award Pool, brands and content creators can gamify campaigns containing various social and in-game challenges catered around their communities. Brands can discover a straightforward way for activation while content creators can engage and grow their community.

To create a genuinely gamified experience, the company has the capabilities to award those who complete challenges and win tournaments. Collectors can earn, buy, and trade NFT-based rewards for their participation in challenges.

A Trailblazer with Strong Leadership Skills

Brenda Cohen is the Co-Founder and CMO of Award Pool. She started her journey as a Creative Director and Start-up Executive. Brenda helps clients in finding their footing in the early stages of business development, aiding to create solid business plans, branding, messaging, marketing campaigns, and a roadmap for business goals.

Brenda Cohen, along with her husband, Reuven, started several companies over the years including their first company, Enomaly, which was among the first to develop a self-service infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform, and in 2012 merged with Virtustream (sold to EMC for $1.2 Billion in 2015).

What makes Award Pool unique is that the company was founded in March 2020 when the pandemic hit hard in Toronto, Canada. She confesses how she and Reuven were unsure what kind of business to start in a situation where it is not possible to leave the house and also when there are three kids at home.

Brenda expresses how they spent each morning teaching grades 1, 4, and 5 at the dining room table, and in the afternoon and late into the night, they built the architecture of an automated end-to-end esports competition and marketing engagement platform: Award Pool.

Brenda remarks that when things started to function, she developed a business plan, investor deck, and marketing plan for the company. She and Reuven mapped out where Award Pool was going and how to market it outside of esports. She acknowledges how her son Finnegan (10) created the chat system for Award Pool. Also, how her son, Sam (11) helped her with the business plan. And her daughter, Isla (7) helped to create the logo and mascot. It was at the point where they brought in Alex as the CFO and Amhad as the COO to help take Award Pool to the next level and suddenly, this little family project became a viable and growing business.

She conveys that their dinner conversations changed from what they did at school to what they needed to make Award Pool better, what games they needed to feature, what challenges and actions people would want to try out, how they could reward users, etc.

Almost two years later, Award Pool is growing rapidly. Brenda explains, there are several campaigns on the go, a robust pipeline, and a technical roadmap to compete with the most funded companies in the space. She articulates that the marketing team has grown to include adults with experience and not just her kids. Award Pool is well on its way to being a giant in the NFT rewards/marketing engagement space but according to her, it will always be a pivot that her family took when the world shut down, and everyone was left to depend on their creativity and drive.

Combating Adversaries with Creative Skills

Like any successful business, Award Pool needed to make changes from the initial plan to where it is today. As a benefit, Brenda says that they listened to user-driven interests to drive the feature roadmap.

She highlights that Award Pool was built as an esports management platform but shortly after the launch, they realized that the users were most intrigued by how they could earn points and redeem rewards. The creators of the campaigns were more interested in reaching users to showcase different projects their teams and brands were passionate about. That is when Award Pool began to move away from simply esports and focus more on engaging audiences through gamified marketing campaigns. Challenges were built to help educate customers, learn about fans, and grow an online presence, but also gamify the experience with in-game integration, surveys, Q&A, and trivia.

Brenda conveys that as a Co-Founder and CMO, that works with companies often at the cutting edge of technology, it is often difficult to engage new users and clients in a space they don't understand. This is particularly problematic with the reward portion of the platform that is NFT driven. Marketing NFTs comes with its own set of challenges because several advertising platforms don't allow for NFT advertising. She tells that she felt this as an obstacle, but at the same time, it isn't impossible.

Brenda believes that the best way to start a marketing campaign for new technology is to educate with content-driven marketing. She started with blog posts that were simple such as: What is an NFT? What is CryptoCurrency? What is Influencer Marketing? Why build a campaign on Award Pool? What does gamification mean? Why does community matter in Web3? These simple blog posts were shared on social media platforms and helped build the story around what the company was creating.

After laying down that foundation of editorial content, campaigns were run on Award Pool with the company's product- a marketing engagement tool. As an initiative made by Brenda, rewards were offered to those who invited their friends to join and in this way, the community was built from zero to 150,000 in three months simply by educating and rewarding the users.

She states, "While we weren't able to do any traditional advertising to grow our audience and showcase our product, we built a community using the very product we created."

Inclusion and Continuous Learning: A Must for Transformation Leaders

Brenda mentions that at Award Pool, creativity and drive are taken seriously. She believes that a good leader takes the time to hear the thoughts and opinions of their team. She helps to drive a company of 25 and growing – every person at Award Pool has a seat at the table. Brenda says that great ideas come from a quiet walk alone but the better ones come from jam sessions and an employee that has a passion for what they do. A true thought leader in tech knows that they don't know everything. They know that they are only as good as their best coder, most friendly salesperson, and skilled marketer.

She expresses, "A transformational leader is not afraid to fail. We have started companies that have failed before. It's part of the learning process. You have to be willing to take risks. A good leader is always learning. I knew nothing about NFT before Award Pool and very little about esports but the journey of learning is just as important as the knowledge gained".

'Targeted Campaign Creation' as the Key to Growth

Brenda explains Award Pool's audience is Gen Z, the newest generation (born '97 – '15), and the brands and content creators that want to connect with them. Gen Z is a digital native raised on the internet and social media. She says that brands are having a difficult time connecting with members of Gen Z in a meaningful way. Brands need alternative methods to help deliver their story to convert their target audience, Gen Z, into loyal customers.

Gen Z isn't interested in TV and online ads. Their idea of social media interaction takes place within the games they play online. Their communities, groups, and social circles are online and inside the games, they play. They don't distinguish between rewards that are tangible or digital. They are looking for a simple way to earn cash, NFT, in-game currency, and prizes by completing social and game-related challenges.

According to Brenda, if Gen Z is today's digital natives, then Millennials and Gen X are the beginning of the digital generation. She believes that those born between 1965 and 1997 will remember life before the internet but that doesn't mean they aren't completely engrossed in the digital age and use online tools, websites, and cell phones every day.

She opines that to connect these two audiences, Award Pool needs to first make it simple for a brand or content creator to create a campaign using the Award Pool widget. The average person building a challenge is not technically savvy and perhaps unaware of how blockchain works. So, the widget needs to be simple to use but complex enough to answer the many needs of content creators.

Sailing through Generations with Disruptive Technologies

According to Brenda, the first generation of the internet was defined by taking traditional applications and making internet versions of them. The second generation was defined by creating whole new industries that more than often were controlled by large platforms, think Facebook, Uber, Airbnb. The next generation, Web3, is putting the power back in the hands of the individual and the creators. It is defined by new methods of value creation (crypto/NFT), new methods of collaboration (DAOs), and new methods of information (blockchain). Award Pool is at the center of all three, says Brenda.

A Sneak Peek into the Bright Future

Brenda claims that anyone with tweens or teens in their home can see how Web3 is already evolving. The lives of today's youth are 100% intertwined with their online worlds. A skin in their favorite video game is equally as important as a new pair of cool shoes. Their online friends are just as important as the one's next door. She adds that almost all of their media is consumed online. They trust brands that integrate within their online games and communities. When they are old enough to buy cars, book vacations, collect fine art, and purchase their first home – the web better is ready.

Brenda remarks that Award Pool gives brands the chance to speak to that audience within those spaces and reward them for their actions with digital assets and NFT that they want to collect. Brenda believes the Web3 generation will expect ways to create, collaborate and educate themselves in their own way.

A Piece of Advice for Emerging Women Leaders

Technology leaders are changing. In Brenda's words, there are many women entering blockchain, especially in the NFT space, as it offers unique opportunities and positions not typically seen in tech. "If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that working from home and having a work/life balance is challenging but not impossible," she adds. Her advice for emerging leaders is directed towards not pigeonholing oneself to think only a certain kind of person can be a leader in a technology start-up. In support of the statement, she highlights how she has met architects, bakers, bloggers, stay-at-home moms, and sketch artists who have founded their start-ups – and that's just this week.