Dave and Tim chat with Edward Bell GM Brand at Cathay Pacific

In this episode of the Web3 Marketing Association Podcast, hosts Dave Wallace and Tim Semelin are joined by Edward Bell, General Manager of Brand Insights and Marketing Communications at Cathay Pacific, to discuss how one of Asia’s most iconic airlines is exploring Web3 and the metaverse.

Edward shares how Cathay has built an internal cross-functional task force—spanning marketing, digital experience, IT, legal, and social teams—to explore the opportunities of Web3 in a thoughtful and structured way. Unlike luxury and fashion brands that rush to “be first,” Cathay is taking a more measured approach, focusing on delivering genuine value to customers rather than short-term stunts.

The conversation highlights Cathay’s vision of Web3 as an innovation engine—a lower-risk space where the airline can experiment with new ideas, build community engagement, and inspire curiosity about travel. Edward emphasises that the goal is not to replace real-world travel with virtual experiences, but to complement it—sparking the desire to explore destinations in real life.

They also explore broader themes, from how airlines balance Web2 and Web3 priorities, to the growing role of community in brand building, to the cultural shifts Web3 represents. Edward draws parallels with how David Bowie helped drive social change through music, suggesting that Web3 could be a similar catalyst for innovation and new forms of customer engagement.

For Cathay, success in this space will mean enriching the customer experience, building stronger communities, and using Web3 as a platform for creativity and learning—all while staying true to its premium travel lifestyle brand.

Transcript

Speaker 00: 0:00

At Cathay Pacific, the words move beyond are central to its taking flight in the airline industry. But what it moved beyond meant creating an innovation engine in the metaverse. The possibilities are limitless. Today on W3MA, we have Edward Bell, the general manager, brand insights and marketing communications of Cathay Pacific to tell us about the exciting adventures that lie ahead.

Speaker 01: 0:30

From the studios of NMD+, comes the Web3 Marketing Association podcast. The latest thinking at the very cutting edge of marketing. We aim to bring you insightful and interesting discussion about Web3 and the metaverse and other emerging digital trends. And here are your hosts, Dave and Tim.

Speaker 02: 0:58

My name is Tim. I am part of the Web3 Marketing Association and we have Dave also with us today that is also part of the association and we are very excited to welcome. Ed Bell from Café Pacific to host what we call the first web free marketer series. So we will launch actually more and more content to really help marketers to understand more about web free. And the best way to do that is really to get into the head of marketers. And so we're super happy to have Ed with us today. Ed, why don't you introduce your role and yourself a little bit and we can get started.

Edward: 1:36

Yeah. Well, thanks Tim and Dave and everyone who He's joined in and will join in. Pleasure to be here. It's such a fascinating topic. I appreciate the invitation. It's just great to talk about this subject because at Cathay, that's all we've been doing for like, I don't know, eight months, a year now. Every day, we're talking about this a lot. So I'm Ed Bell. As Tim said, I've been with Cathay for five years, coming up to five years and a couple of months. Me, I'm more of an agency background. I'm a strategy planner by training and I've worked most mostly in the region, lived in China for many, many, many years in Hong Kong, you know, mostly for multinational brands out of Asia doing work in China across the region and around the globe, a whole host of work, everything from Chanel to Citic Bank in China. So quite a spectrum. Yeah. So very happy to be turning my planner's brain into this topic. That's for sure.

Speaker 02: 2:38

And so I'm sure, you know, Everyone is very interested to just know what you guys are doing in Web3, right? So we see a lot of movements into the luxury sector, the fashion sector. We hear announcements from airlines and travel companies, but it sounds like it's a lot of announcements, but there is not like a lot happening, right? So where are you and Cathay at this point?

Edward: 3:06

Well, I think when I look around, I do think I detect a little bit bit of a pattern as to which kinds of brands have gone first and how they've gone we can maybe talk a little bit about this i think it's quite interesting and i'll get to airlines what i see is those brands that are display brands brands that are very much their product their value with the customer is to provide some part of your image that you wear so you see a lot you know nike super fast in their luxury brands because those brands i think are very much dependent upon staying in the moment. They've got to stay very much on the edge of demand. They've got to be in that conversation in the pop culture, the street culture. For them, maybe some of them are not quite sure what they're doing, but number one strategy for them is to be in the current conversation. And I think that's why we've seen them move very quickly into this. And let's face it, over the last 20 years, everything that's new, you see those same brands kind of very much in that early adopting group. I think it's fascinating to look at what they've done. I love what Nike has done, of course, their usual commitment to quality and execution concept. They're in there designing special sneakers that you can buy for that generation, of course, very relevant to younger people who are in this space already. You can buy those things. And then, of course, it may be something we can talk about how that feeds back to other thoughts. Very interesting for them in terms of a creative and innovation standpoint. Now, I think what we've seen is a whole other bunch of brands that have bought land but done nothing with it. They've protected their brand, but for what purpose, we don't quite yet know. And I think I would characterize that kind of action as a classic defensive strategy. You could call it like a hedge. So it's too risky for us to not have some stake, but we're not yet ready to take the risk to expose our game plan just yet. What we haven't yet launched and where we are in terms of our journey is that we've been talking the years of this topic like everybody else for about the last year. It's been a big topic. We've created a working group and that group, it's a diverse group as it needs to be to work on this topic. And that team, we've narrowed down from all the things that we think we could do down to some starting points. And we're just about to push the button on production into that area. So we're actively looking for production professionals partners. We're looking for ways to develop our own community and we're getting into all the workmanlike issues that you need to have ready to push the button. Tax, legal issues, IP and proprietary and all that kind of stuff. So we're really working very practically on our things. We've got our ideas. We're serious about it and everyone will see in the coming months our first foray under our own brand in that space. I think it's really interesting that what you're doing is building foundational elements around it. So that gives you a lot more freedom to kind of think outside the box when it comes to actually delivering things. If you look at a lot of the forays out there, they sort of feel like, you know, people or brands just doing things occasionally for the sake of it, as brands will do. And I think that's a real potential lesson for other companies when they sort of start thinking about this, to actually think about the kind of legal and the operational side of things is super critical. Well, for sure. I mean, it's an interesting thing to talk about. I welcome you to gentlemen's viewpoints and everyone who's on the webinar as well. You know, going back to my earlier point, I think there's some brands for whom their identity is very much wedded to the idea of we are the source of new. And for them, you can't afford to not be involved in new things. When you come to an airline or, let's say, we define ourselves now as a premium travel lifestyle, but it's a and really airline is the backbone. I think what people want from an airline, we don't need to be and we shouldn't be just a slave to whatever is new. I think the source of our value, our brand quality as Cathay is to deliver value to our customers. We don't need to be first. We just need to be right. And I think that's where for us, taking that more considered view is really the right play. That's why I think also... You know, things are much more complicated for airlines because the airlines are very operationally heavy businesses. And we've got to be very conscious of doing something over here that maybe has some unintended implications for over there, which of course can slow things down. That's on the operational side. But I think mostly what we want to do is to maintain integrity. When Cathay speaks about something we're going to do, it's thought through. And what that means for us is, just like you say, we never want to do something for the sake of doing it. We never want to do something just to join in. I think when we go into it, it's going to be because it delivers some value to the customer experience. So that's our question. How can we enrich our customers' lives through these fantastic technology-enabled opportunities? And until we're clear... about that, then we're not ready to do anything. And I never want to go out to a customer and say, click on this, but I don't exactly know why. Or click on this because it looks like it's new. That's dumb. We don't want to be that kind of player. And I think that kind of strategy has worked well for a lot of brands that have really delivered sustainable value over time. Apple's become famous for it. They're never the first, but when they get in, they're very sure of what they're doing and it has built them a tremendous reputation.

Speaker 02: 8:59

We know you can't reveal anything, but one thing you can maybe share with us is you mentioned that you have this internal task force, right? What kind of people is on this task force? Only the marketing people? Did you get operational people as well? How did you put this together?

Edward: 9:15

When you think about it, Web3 existence is almost like a mini version of a company. So you need constituent representatives of those constituent parts to make it happen. So we've got the marketing people, the dreamers, talkers sketch artists you know these kinds of people to conceive of what we're going to do but then what we've also got is digital experience so that's our team who makes our apps and web and all that kind of stuff because they've got a very valuable kind of viewpoint what should the digital journey be and how does an interface then we've got stuff like it the kind of the blockchain part what's the technology side of this who are our partners who should be working with and then we've even got the social part because what we see is the difference between between this defensive play with people who have bought IP or they've bought land and then they haven't activated it. It's just kind of sitting there like this kind of dormant patch, a weed-strewn, kind of half-developed property project. You know, we don't want to be in that space. So then we need to have the legal part and the social to help develop the community so that when we have our ideas, we can then be bouncing back and forth with those super fans, I guess, is how it's developing in this world. whether they're kind of fans of Cathay or they're just fans of the space who are also fans of Cathay, we're creating a little community.

Speaker 02: 10:36

A few months ago, you know, earlier this year, we did see some brands launching NFT collection. So of course we have, you know, the Nike, the Adidas, they do have their community, but a lot of brands launched without necessarily a community a few months ago, you know, maybe it was for charity or maybe it was some art partnership, but everyone I'm talking to now, everyone really wants to get to the community aspect. We saw Lacoste launching a week ago. They got like 100,000 people on Discord in like three days. And I feel all the brands now, they really get this community aspect that they didn't there to think about a few months ago. How did you come to that conclusion yourself to say, oh, let's not just launch an NFT, let's think about community?

Edward: 11:24

Travel businesses in general, I would say, are a bit confused about what to do with this space. I think travel companies are thinking through how do I manage, how do I maybe even balance my investment or my resource allocation into a virtual world? to inspire travel with the fear that maybe the more successful I am at sating people's curiosity about travel in the virtual world may cannibalize travel in the real world, right? Maybe at some level, this is a question, but then I think about for us, you know, in thinking this through and debating this, we don't see that there's really much of a conflict because We don't think there's any chance of anyone being satisfied in terms of that travel feeling in a virtual space. You know, Xanadu, my friend, and other people in China launched Xanadu, which had this kind of, you know, 3D virtual world travel experiences. And I created these amazing movies. As good as they were, it didn't really take away anyone's desire to travel at all. So what it ended up being is more like, if you like what you see, then you need to go there. So I think for us and I think for what airlines are going to probably want to do is you're going to want to invest in things that somehow pique your curiosity to want to go somewhere. So whether that's reconnecting with people in a kind of virtual space or whether that's having a first peek at a place maybe you're curious about, having a conversation with someone from the other side of the world and what's life like in Barcelona or whatever. So something that kind of gets you going and then to want to go there. And I think that That's really what it's probably got to be for a travel company. And anything that doesn't lead to there, I'm not sure it's that relevant.

Speaker 02: 13:15

I'm assuming you already had a lot of things to do regarding Web2, right? Like you probably had a huge roadmap already into existing projects and now, you know, we always adapt, but how did you juggle like still delivering on Web2 stuff, right? And do you have people that you completely put on Web3 or do you work with partners? You were saying maybe you were looking for partners right now. How is that going?

Edward: 13:41

Look, it's a really good question because what we're talking about at Cathay, I think the whole travel industry has been, I think it runs on the same survive and then thrive but you can't afford only to do them in serial you have to do them in parallel because you can't just start your thinking about thriving after you've survived you have to plan for thriving whilst you're surviving so for us you know we're working very hard on improving our app experience our web experience because that's the bread and butter stuff and that will for years and years and years be really how we survive and how most people get value from us so that still needs to be improved we can't take the foot off the asked there at all. At the same time, we need to be thinking about how we can be out there and meet the next generation of people, these younger kids. For them, being in these kind of virtual spaces is just so natural because they've grown up in multiplayer games. They've grown up in roadblocks and in Minecraft. They're out there with their friends anyway. So for them to migrate is just going to be stepping from one room into the next room. Whereas for other people, it feels like starting in a thing so we have to very much as we always do in marketing right as we all know we have to keep moving with the times to be in the places where our next generation of customers are going to be and be ready for them when they're there to do that i wish we had another whole team i could bring on to this you know we're just talking about this this morning for example i mean you just got to find time for it because it's important you know what's important gets on the agenda but to get it done you know we are looking for partners what you do right you just squeeze your yourself to get to your MVP, right? Your minimum concept. And then once we're kind of there, then we bring in the partners to get to those first few ideas. And I think once we're up and running, then we'll be able to branch out more partners, more concepts and stuff like that.

Speaker 02: 15:34

And so I always ask this to the brands I'm chatting with. Is the team working on that? Do they own NFTs? Are they on Discord? Did they go through that path themselves, right? Or like, how did you approach that? a company, how do you train your team to be ready?

Edward: 15:50

What we find is that our digital experience team, our IT team, they're super excited about this space. They're the kinds of guys, I find the technology guys are the ones who just say, just do something. So we're saying, we hear you, we want to be in there too, but then we want to be in there in the right way. We don't just want to do something and then later have buyer's remorse and feel like, oh, we could have done that better. So we're tempering the excitement from the technology side, because I think for tech motivated people, this is a union between where technology meets marketing in a whole new way. And I think people are really excited about that union. I think it's almost like that hubris of youth. It needs to be tempered if you want to be a quality first brand. So we're just trying to balance, I think, the exuberance with let's do it in a way that we're really excited about. So everyone who's in the project team, they're all NFT owners. Everyone's bought that space. And so you learn through doing, right? It's not me generating those ideas and I'm just one member in the team, but there's a lot of people in the team who are more hands dirty in the space on a daily basis.

Speaker 02: 17:00

That's what's fascinating because yeah, now it might be more like technology or an IT person that maybe before was more supporting, you know, building platforms. And now they really have a very strong input on the strategy as well.

Edward: 17:14

That's a great topic as well about how these things should be led. We've got all these different kind of parties involved. But we believe that, certainly for us as a brand anyway, I think there's some brands out there, they see it more in transactional terms. But I think for us, we're defining this as a brand engagement first and foremost. So that reason what we're doing is the team is being more orchestrated by the marketing side. But as I said, there's people in the marketing team who are super into it. They're the ones who are in the project team. It's a coalition of the willing, you know. The people are in there because they're excited about it.

Speaker 02: 17:47

We've got to quit Question from David, and I knew this question was going to come up. I'm pretty sure David is based in Hong Kong also. He's curious about if you socialized this with the Cathay senior leadership or if that kind of came up and it was like, of course, we have to do something. Or was it maybe some moves from the competition that kind of forced you to do this? Like, how did that happen? Or was it a tough conversation? In

Edward: 18:10

the airline world, in terms of how airline brands manage airlines, you keep a very close eye on competition. I mean, this is how the whole pricing model works. The price level is very much looking at competition. And then in terms of our competitive set, in terms of interior design and all kinds of things, we have a much broader set. When we think about customer experience, we look at Netflix and Uber and a whole other bunch of brands that we think are interesting in terms of service brands. But for this one, no one has pushed us into this space. In 2019, we launched this platform, Move Beyond. For us, it's a mindset about never standing still never being satisfied and always challenging the status quo or what's conventional so that is our just do it if you like and it's a mindset where we always want to be on the forefront of change one of our new brand values for example since 2019 is progressive so this is the most progressive thing you can do these days is to be in this space and thinking about it so that's where we're from and at Cathay what's cool about it, you know, maybe people have this perception that senior management is kind of like conservative guys. It really isn't the case in Cathay these days. We have our senior guys are super into this space. Many of them own NFTs already, and they're the ones who are saying, hey, hey, yeah, you know, what are we

Speaker 02: 19:34

doing? And I feel Hong Kong is also becoming a very dynamic city into this space. I mean, I hear a lot of projects happening in Hong Kong, like everybody is in Web3 all of a sudden.

Edward: 19:47

You know, one thing I absolutely love about Hong Kong it is a huge financial center as well but I think they've got really a feel for retail this is the new retail interface this is the new retail concept and you know I was in a shopping center in Causeway Bay the other day there's an NFT store right next to the Apple store a big beautiful store and they got all this artwork on the wall I mean it's a new version of an art museum but it's not called an art museum It's an NFT gallery. So Hong Kong is super agile on these things. We know there's a lot of buyers in this space. And in our staff, Hong Kong people, majority, they're already buyers of all of these kinds of things.

Speaker 02: 20:31

That's great. I do have a couple of more questions for you, Ed, Dave, if you have any more questions. But to kind of conclude this discussion, so you did hint that you're working on something. Hopefully we can see something very soon. I'm sure it also ties to maybe the situation in Hong Kong and how Cathay will recover and will thrive because I think we all know that we're very close to be again fully open, I'm sure. What excites you the most personally into Web3 and NFT, either as a Cathay person or also maybe as a customer? What really makes you excited about this?

Edward: 21:08

Yeah, that's a great question too. I think from a marketing standpoint, the thing I'm most excited about, the greatest value of this space that I can understand right now I was thinking about this this morning as it happened I was listening to this really interesting review on how David Bowie changed attitudes to homosexuality and what basically the story said is that you know the pre-Bowie era was people were homosexual but in secret Bowie let them all kind of come out and it was the beginning of I'm not ashamed to be gay kind of movement right he made it cool with all this stuff and he openly said I was bisexual. But the way he did it is very interesting. There's a viewpoint that that happened not through public policy or intellectuals. It happened through rock music. Rock music allowed it all to be cool and it just became almost like a little highly visible but experimental place in which the mass society could adopt the ideas first created in pop culture through rock music particularly. What's interesting for companies who will not earn the majority of their revenues from any of these spaces, I think for decades, my point of view. But what it's going to be, it's going to have a strategic importance that's very, very great. The new invention center for our mainline business. And I think that is fascinating. There was this thing I heard about some companies in Singapore, they were granting same-sex marriage licenses in their metaverse space. Because you can't do that maybe in the laws of the land. But in the metaverse space, you can. Now, that to me is fascinating, right? Because what it tells you is this is a lower risk environment in which I'm going to try something. And then I can get people's reactions. I can hear back from my super fans. And then I can maybe import some of those ideas into mainline business. That to me is really, really cool. As you know, right, in Cathay, we're expanding our business from being just defined as an airline from A to B into being a premium travel lifestyle business. We've got a whole bunch of stretches in that space, just like Lacoste does, just like Nike does. All these brands, you know, you've always got something that you're stretching for. So this is our big stretch now, right? And we are stretching into GBA and we're stretching into how to be an airline that you kind of want to pick as your dining partner or you want to pick as your payment partner or you want to come to our shop and buy things. So how can we create environments? What are our experiments? in these kind of virtual spaces through which we can get learnings, through which we can see what works and what doesn't work. In a way, it's almost like live research. It's such a clear and brilliant perspective. Yes. It's absolutely the right way to think about it. I love your example and how you kind of use David Bowie and that whole thing around same-sex marriage in the metaverse. I think it's just crystal clear. And I think you made a point about that generational change as well where you've got three billion people on games platforms around the world who are very used to doing things in the virtual environment and I guess what this does is it gives you a chance to kind of really connect with behaviors which are not the same as the behaviors of my generation or whatever who didn't grow up on these games platforms it just gives you that opportunity to really see what's going on as well from a behavioral point of view you know going back to the point you made right at the start, you can really add value to your customers' lives. Because if you're not adding value, then there's no point in doing it, is there? Absolutely. We don't know what we don't know, right? So I think this is a great way to create a hedge for that and to just, in a low-risk way, create some opportunities to learn some new things about who you could be, how you could operate, or maybe a new product idea. I think companies have always had this kind of way of thinking. You know, there's that fantastic innovation concept. They say in a company based on your head count, you have a ratio for how much innovation you should have. It's like the innovation quotient. And I think what this does is it helps to get our company to be using this space as part of our innovation engine and just go out with experiments and try this and try that. In the real world as an airline, it's very tough. You don't want as an airline a reputation for being experimental. That's not what you want. You want your airline to be rock solid, right? Zero error for margin. But in this space, all of a sudden, if you're Cathay, we can have some fun. We can try this. You know, we can be a fail-fast company too now, whereas no one wants your airline to be fail-fast. Amazing.

Speaker 02: 26:07

Amazing. Well, thanks so much, Ed. You know, I think it was amazing. It was a great discussion. I'm sure we're going to have a lot more of these episodes and we're already working on some few future guests a couple of like fast questions I wanted to ask you what's your favorite NFT that you own today

Edward: 26:25

I haven't bought any there's the Spanish artist called Edgar Plans some beautiful pieces and I love the way that he's thinking about it so I'm looking at a few things I haven't yet decided where to go I very much like his work as part of what I would want to get into

Speaker 02: 26:42

amazing because you work for Cathay I do have to ask a question what your next travel destination

Edward: 26:48

I'm traveling to Australia pretty soon to see my long-suffering mother for whom I promised I'd be returning multiple times a year and it will be coming up for three years

Speaker 02: 27:01

well it's great so this is all for today this concludes a great discussion I definitely got a lot out of some of your thinking and then I will see all of our listeners into the next episode thanks Ed

Edward: 27:15

thank you so much it was so so insightful. There's an awful lot to unpack. And then when Katha actually does bring out, you launch some of your ideas, we'd love to have you back on. Yeah, we'd appreciate that. You know, I think we're a humble, humble journeyer on this process. So we welcome all the feedback from you two and the listeners and everybody. And it's just great to be on the journey of adventure, isn't it? Fantastic. Thanks so much. Bye everyone. Bye.

Speaker 01: 27:46

You have been listening Thanks for listening to W3MA, an NMD Plus production.