Cool Cats, an NFT collection launched at the height of the non-fungible craze, will have a balloon of its turquoise felines in Macy’s  Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. The opportunity could perhaps be the most significant moment to date for the sub-20-person team attempting to become a household brand.

But going mainstream has not come easy. Cool Cats has needed to negotiate a turbulent market for NFTs, in which demand has withered to a husk of what it was two years ago. The collection of 10,000 tokens is also competing against several other NFT upstarts with the same goal, including Gary Vaynerchuk’s VeeFriends and Walmart-supported Pudgy Penguins.

Jaclyn Woo, Cool Cats’ head of marketing and strategy, spoke with Ad Age about how the brand is hoping to stand out among the crowd. Its strategy includes finding bigger fish (i.e. Macy’s) to help it along, marketing around the holidays and leaving part of its Web3 roots behind in search of more predictable and prosperous territory.

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This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How did Cool Cats become involved in Macy’s Thanksgiving festivities?

I​​t all started last Thanksgiving when Macy’s hosted five NFT brands [Cool Cats, Boss Beauties, gmoney, SupDucks and VeeFriends] in a virtual parade. For this year, Macy’s held a contest for one of the five brands to have their own physical balloon. The winner was ultimately based on community vote, so the Cool Cats community just rallied together and we ended up winning the spot in the parade.

Macy’s has a history of Web3 interest, and just opened a metaverse hub. As one of the retailer’s NFT partners, can you share a sense of its interest in this space?

I think they seem really excited about the technology. Just the sheer fact of investing in a team to run the virtual parade and adopting all different types of Web3 technology [including an NFT collection and a Discord channel] and integrating them into their current business model speaks to how they’re open to experimentation.

There are tons of opportunities [in Web3], especially when it comes to customizing and marrying digital identity with a traditional business model, like selling the physical aspect of things.

Cool Cats is now the latest NFT-native brand to sell plush toys in major stores, following VeeFriends and Pudgy Penguins. Why is physical merchandising so important?

I see it as a proof of concept. We’ve already seen that the branding works, the characters work, so now we’re setting our sights on scaling our brand into a household name. And the only way we can do so is by growing our audience.

We can grow our audience in a few ways. We have our social presence that we’re focusing on, we’re building longer-form content, but one of the more powerful ways is partnering with established partners in this space and creating physical items that everyday consumers can see and interact with. A partnership with Macy’s, like this one, is just a way to launch our brand in front of more eyeballs that wouldn’t otherwise get to know us.

And a big-box presence just in time for the holidays doesn’t hurt either, does it?

Definitely. We’re looking at the next four to six weeks as a huge build-up towards the holidays, with the parade moment itself, as well as a marketing campaign that leads up to the parade. 

The campaign’s storyline is that Blue Cat and Chugs [two Cool Cat characters] have been separated in New York and the two of them do all sorts of wacky things to find each other. So we’ll have physical “missing cat” posters that we’re going to put up around the city. We’ll have a series of animated shorts that follow the same storyline. We're working with a set of influencers to drive participation in a photo contest that’s going to launch on the day of parade, and we’ll be offering a $10,000 cash prize for whoever takes the most creative picture of the balloon on the day of the parade and shares it on Instagram.

And then, following the parade, we’ll also have new merch and new items and new content that we're going to put out across all of our channels to offer a secondary touch point to all of these new eyeballs that we’re onboarding.

What kind of audience response are you hoping to drive through the Cool Cats balloon?

We want people to be able to recognize the balloon when they see us and be like, ‘Oh, it’s the Cool Cat character’—hence us launching this campaign a few weeks leading up to the parade. 

But on the flip side, we feel really confident about the balloon design, and that it will prompt people to Google us when they see our balloon. So we also want the balloon to be a moment of brand discovery. We’ll have all the content ready on our website and we’ll have our social channels lined up to onboard people the moment they look us up.

At this point in the brand’s evolution, how important is Web3, blockchain, crypto—any of that technology associated with the NFT space?

We’re Web3-rooted. We love using Web3 technology, such as this avatar system we recently launched, which gives people more opportunities to customize their PFPs [profile pictures.] So we’ll always stay rooted on the Web3 side and build products that experiment with the technology.

I think it’s just about looking at other opportunities to scale the brand. I feel like staying extremely Web3-focused is a little limiting at this point in time, just because Web3 adoption hasn’t really picked up at the pace that it really needs to be in order to become what we can call mainstream. And we don’t want that to hold us back from being able to introduce the brand and the characters in the story to way more people than we could. 

Why do you think Web3 and NFT adoption has faltered?

My personal POV is that it has to do with the regulatory environment, and also how NFTs and crypto have been portrayed in mainstream media. There was obviously a lot of attention and energy in 2021 and 2022 that brought mainstream interest. But the narrative has changed. While a lot of these NFT brands are still using the technology to onboard people to their products, the narrative is now brand- and product-driven, as opposed to NFT-driven.

Do you consider Cool Cats an NFT brand?

At this point, the official marketing answer is that we consider ourselves a global character and storytelling brand. I do really believe that NFTs and Web3 are one of the core pillars that launched Cool Cats. But the core of our brand from the beginning, and as we look towards the future, has always been about building the story and building the characters and becoming an entertainment brand, as opposed to being a Web3 brand.