Ceslie Armstrong radiates charisma and dynamism – whether she’s interviewing a top celebrity, producing a Grammy award-winning music artist, doing a podcast, hosting a television or radio show, or advising her clients on web3. An award-winning media and entertainment executive, she’s multi-talented and a globally recognized producer, writer, advisor, curator and collaborator.
A Texan at heart, but based out of New York and Los Angeles for the majority of her life and career, Ceslie’s long list of highly impressive credentials attests to her illustrious career that spans more than three decades. She has packaged and produced programming for major networks, digital platforms, venues, and universities featuring celebrities, experts, authors, artists, and influential icons globally. She is an expert at highly produced live video and audio streaming experiences including culinary, music, fashion, and entertainment based performances. Added to this, she’s a pioneer in early internet-based compression technologies, streaming, and blockchain distribution.
“My career has always been one foot in media and entertainment (M&E) and the other in tech,” she remarks. “I’ve been fortunate to witness and help drive the merge of those industries into one.” From working with major networks, studios, publishing companies, and streamers on the content, strategy, growth and recurring revenue modeling aspects of M&E, she’s also straddled the content / creative and business / tech sides as parallel lanes in the industry. It was during the Covid-19 pandemic when she suffered devastating loss of business, that Ceslie took time to ‘double down and laser focus’ on blockchain technologies. Journeying from web2 into web3, Ceslie realized in 2019 that the new blockchain-centric technologies were the very innovations needed to merge those lanes and all aspects of her business and personal thinking, about how to shift the balance of power toward parity for creators of valuable original intellectual property (IP) and the audiences who consume and value that content.
Ceslie first began studying blockchain technologies from the perspective of distribution channels for media and entertainment IP and the potential disruption that smart contracts and tokens could play in the authentication and provenance of original premium IP. Her companies’ business models were structured in the traditional sense of media and entertainment, and she shifted those to exploit the new technologies to benefit the IP creators, holders, and audience while generating long-tail revenue streams and downstream derivatives.
Ceslie’s company is OnChain Media+Entertainment LLC and is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas with operations and partners in Austin, Los Angeles, New York City, and London. She is the founder, CEO and Executive Producer. It’s a network, world-class talent studio, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecosystem, built for creators and audiences to use eco-friendly blockchain technologies to transact using fiat or cryptocurrencies. It is also a multimedia journalism-based magazine, podcast network, luxury books, and, in 2023 is launching its BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) product “Life. OnChain.” focusing on the utility that smart contracts provide for mainstream daily life.
She believes that blockchain technologies and BaaS tools and models can benefit humanity globally in many verticals. OCM+E builds and provides BaaS platforms and models as business-to-business services and with their DTC platforms and services, they empower creators, IP holders and audiences simultaneously, with a very low barrier to entry.
You need only immerse yourself in OCM+E’s website to discover the incredible work Ceslie and her team are doing. Take for instance the minting of renowned photographs as NFTs such as those taken by David Binder of Mother Teresa which will enable these iconic photographs to live on for eternity, whilst concurrently providing recognition and remuneration for the photographer. Ceslie’s organization is using NFTs to leverage and deploy the power of smart contracts with decentralized IP distribution, all powered by premium original engaging content.
When asked about how web3 and the Metaverse have changed and evolved in the past year, Ceslie’s response is candid: “Web3 is a bullet train and is commandeered by developers, scientists, creators, dreamers and doers. The remarkable changes in 2022 have been related to interoperability and tools to minimize the barriers to entry for mainstream audiences.”
Ceslie offers some valuable advice, “Don’t compromise your usual tried and true workflows and processes just because web3 is new. Do what you already know but expand and tailor that to the new technologies and possibilities they provide.”
Her dynamic and vibrant personality and what she conveys is enough to get anyone fired up about the future, but what is she the most excited about and what legacy does she wish to create? “I’m excited and honored to be the custodian and creator of important IP that, due to smart contracts and blockchain technologies, can create a legacy and longer-term financial sovereignty for women. These new and constantly improving technologies become even better based on how they are used over time, so there is a deep well of opportunity for women (and everyone) to create and define their own use cases toward self-sustainment.“
