When the world's largest beer company wanted to "enter the metaverse," it turned to a woman named Lindsey McInerney. But that may be understating her involvement. As global head of engineering and innovation at AB InBev (BUD), McInerney was the one who came up with the idea and convinced executives that the metaverse would be "seismic" and "much bigger than social media."
McInerney is an unlikely champion of big brand marketing. And she's an unusual player in fintech. Growing up in Toronto, McInerney was drawn to countercultures and identity issues. "My high school felt like a movie where there were the jocks, the nerds, the goths, the punks and the skateboarders," McInerney says. "I never fit into any of those groups, but moved between them all. And I was fascinated by observing and studying them."
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That fascination unfolded in college, where she focused on countercultures - women's studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and subcultures like skateboarding and the 1970s hippie movement. She was drawn to the intersections of identity, politics and activism. "I spent hours reading every book I could find about the Riot Girl movement," she says, studying the beginnings of hacktivism.
After college, her career in PR and social media analysis eventually led her to AB InBev, where she wrote a paper on the explosive potential of Web 3. After helping Stella Artois enter the metaverse, she left AB InBev to found a startup called The Sixth Wall, focused on Web 3 and entertainment, with actress Mila Kunis and Lisa Sterbakov.
McInerney is returning to her roots. She has always been passionate about trying to understand culture, and she sees Web 3 as a force - perhaps the force - that will change culture in ways we can barely understand. "Blockchain and Web 3 are going to invade entertainment," says McInerney, who is now working on experimental blockchain-driven shows where the audience helps shape and direct the content. She predicts this will change the landscape of movies and shows being produced. "I'm a culture junkie," she says. "What happens when you take what typically happens in Hollywood and expand it to cities around the world?"
And while that's all far in the future, her team has already rolled out what she calls the "DIC Punch."
The interview has been shortened and lightly edited for clarity.
Let's start with your time at AB InBev. In your role as global head of technology and innovation, why was blockchain on your radar?
Lindsey McInerney: When you think about how blockchain could be used in manufacturing, for example, for ingredient traceability, it was all there. No question about it. But then the [coronavirus] pandemic came, and everything was accelerated with cryptocurrencies and digital property.
And for the first time, I saw very clearly what the consumer use cases for cryptocurrencies would be, which was fascinating. So I wrote a thesis on Web 3, the Metaverse, [non-fungible tokens] and crypto for AB InBev. I started researching the different ways we could approach that. For me, that was without question the biggest thing we could focus on.
How long did it take you to write this report?
I wrote the first report within a couple of weeks because I was just so excited.
"A couple of weeks?!" I'm jealous.
I spent all that time reading and delving into forums, digging through Twitter and blogs, and communicating with anonymous people on the Internet.
I can relate to that.
You know, all the great things that you do in this area. I've been trying to really understand some of the things that have been happening.
And I've never been more excited about the future of the Internet, and it's been moving very, very fast. Then I just kept iterating. One of my theories was that the metaverse will replicate a parallel reality in many ways. That meant that what brands do well in reality should work well in Web 3 or in the metaverse. And if you abstract AB InBev from beer, one thing that AB InBev does really well is that they are one of the world's largest sponsors of sports and entertainment.
What happens when you take what normally happens in Hollywood and extend it to cities around the world?You bring people together to have a good time. And that's when we like to have a beer together. AB InBev has an amazing catalog and portfolio of brands, but Stella Artois is the top sports sponsor. They sponsor Wimbledon here in the UK and a very famous horse race. So when I started scouring the landscape for things that I thought had amazing communities and parallel experiences to reality behind them, Zed Run [the Metaverse horse racing game] stood out.
We started talking about how we could put something together that would be powerful and beneficial to both the Zed Run community and AB InBev, and that we felt would map the future of premium horse racing. So we launched 50 packages of Genesis Zed horses and Stella Artois skins. You can think of them as jerseys for the horses, but also as memorabilia in an NFT auction. And we sold them out. It was very, very well received by the crypto community, which was really the most important thing for me.
What are you focusing on now?
I ended up starting a company with Mila Kunis and Lisa Sterbakov and a few others to explore the intersection of Web 3 and entertainment. Mila and Lisa have been running Orchard Farms, a traditional production company, for years and were very excited about Web 3.
Previously, they had created Stoner Cats, an NFT project where token holders could participate in the production of an animated film, which is really cool. Mila and Lisa both see the future ahead and are totally aware that Web 3 is going to change every industry. And I've teamed up with them to build a company we call the Sixth Wall.
Given your expertise and experience with the metaverse, you could have gone in a million different directions. Why did you choose to go this way?
When people hear of crypto, they think of cryptocurrencies and they think of fintech and finance. That can be very daunting for a large group of people. And a lot of people will say things like, "It's just too difficult. It's just too complex for me. It comes from the gaming and finance world. How am I going to get a handle on this?"
And I have a vested interest in making it simple. I want to make these things as simple as possible for as many people as possible. Because it's those people that we need at the table to make things better and right.
What is the Sixth Wall creating now?
I have to preface this by saying that we are now exactly where we were years ago with the early App Store. Back then, people could only develop egg timer apps. Very basic things. And now we're realizing that you can build billion dollar companies as applications on the iPhone. So all of this will eventually be much bigger than we can imagine.
Good point! But what can you tell us about the current iteration?
I've been intrigued by the entertainment sector because I'm interested in bringing more people into it. NBA Top Shot was a great example. People can buy basketball tickets and have no idea they're even on the blockchain. Entertainment is a really common denominator. We love stories. As humans, we're storytellers. It's ingrained in us.
And I see entertainment as a way to bring a lot of new faces to cryptocurrency. In the entertainment industry, there has never been as much collaboration between the community and the creators as there is with "Stoner Cats" and the project I'm working on right now, "The Gimmicks." It's being defined in real time by the community.
It's so much more than "Choose Your Adventure." We can create things that we see in Discord and react to them. And the creators say, "Oh, my gosh. I've never gotten that kind of real-time feedback before."
Can you describe what that is exactly?
The Gimmicks is the second show we've released. It's based on the Solana blockchain. It's a cartoon that kind of combines "South Park" with "WWE." It's a wrestling show. We release new episodes every week. It's animated.
And we work with a studio called Toonstar. It's a Web 3 animation studio. Every week the community gets three or five different choices of what to do next, and they can vote on it with their tokens. So if you have a gimmick, you can log in and sort of pick the ending. And everybody else can join in.
We built what we think is one of the earliest on-chain engagements. Five years from now, we'll probably look back and laugh about it, but if you vote, you get a "DIC Punch," a token we developed that you can send to your friends.
Incredible. Go ahead.
You can use it to punch other people in the community. It's a finishing move for one of the characters. It's supposed to be funny and kind of fit the tone of the series. You can think of it like the early Facebook poke.
It immediately reminded me of the Facebook poke.
We were like, "Hey, this is like the Facebook prank, only harder." [Laughs.] It's very simple. That's where we are now with these technologies. They're simple, but the idea is that community members are now able to engage on the chain, and we're exploring it. We're having fun with it and trying to figure out what it all means.
And blockchain and Web 3 are going to enter the conversation. We can't imagine all the possibilities right now, but we're charting the entire process of making a movie and TV movie to understand how Web 3 will permeate the entertainment industry - from ideation to red carpet.
What are your predictions for what might happen in three or five years when audiences begin to embrace these stories in the metaverse?
I'm excited to see what a greater diversity of people - a more distributed group of people - will create. I'm a culture junkie. What happens when you take what usually happens in Hollywood and expand it to cities around the world? What does that look like? And can that happen? And what kind of stories are being told? Whose stories are being told? I think that's really interesting and important.
So if there's theoretically decentralized ownership of stories - and even intellectual property and characters - and it's not just three white guys in a Hollywood conference room thinking about what should happen, then you have a whole community that's more diverse? Is that warming my heart now?
Right. You could have people create content that reflects the world we live in. That's a very real possibility. Or if you look at certain projects, there's an opportunity for people to use intellectual property and tell stories in a way that they haven't done before. And that might look a little different than it has in the past.
I love it. Good luck to you and Sixth Wall.