Evan Keast, a.k.a “Tulip”—the co-founder of NFT collection Doodles—wants to see his cartoon avatars in every household.

“Our plans are to be as big as Mario was to Nintendo, [to] be synonymous with NFTs,” he said. 

Doodles launched in October as a series of 10,000 characters styled in vibrant pastels and, at times, with rainbow puke streaming out of their mouths. The non-fungible tokens have generated over $325 million in sales on marketplace OpenSea and belong to a community of roughly 4,700 owners. Now, the collection—which is run by the newly formed Doodles, LLC—is looking to move beyond its core digital assets in a bid to capture mainstream audiences. 

“We're doing merchandise, we're doing physical collectibles, we're doing events and activations … The only difference [from traditional brands] is that the means to how we sourced our original capital was through community funding,” Keast said.

After an explosive year for the NFT market, which saw year-over-year profits increase more than 200-fold, a handful of notable collections have cast their eyes on becoming the next generation of digital-native brands. Following in the footsteps of Bored Ape Yacht Club—which has become the most well-known brand in the NFT space—these projects are leveraging mounds of fresh capital and scores of passionate fans to market themselves across a variety of mediums.

In addition to Doodles, Nouns and World of Women (WoW) are two collections at the forefront of these efforts. Nouns is an experimental initiative that aims to be a kind of open-source Hello Kitty, in which all of its intellectual property is freely available in the public domain, said co-founder Punk4156, who uses a pseudonym for their digital identity. The collection has already teamed with Bud Light Next for its Super Bowl commercial and Wieden+Kennedy to raise brand awareness. 

WoW is also a purpose-driven project, and has sought to enhance female representation in Web3 through NFT illustrations of diverse and powerful women. With two collections under its belt for a total of over 30,000 characters, WoW has interests more aligned with those of a media brand. In fact, the project recently struck a deal with production company Hello Sunshine to adapt its NFTs into movies and TV shows.

The efforts made by WoW, Nouns and Doodles illustrate Web3’s increasing movement into the public eye. But as opposed to waiting around for mass consumers to adopt new and complex technology, which could take years, these brands are marketing themselves to appeal to a broader audience.

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Beyond the digital 

Each collection has made efforts to offer more than merely digital tokens.

Physical merchandise has seen particular interest from Doodles and WoW, likely given their NFTs’ focus on animated characters that make for good collectibles. WoW, for example, selected action figure manufacturer Jazwares to be its master toy/collectible licensee, Adélina, WoW’s director of communications, wrote in an email (she chose to only use her first name). The partnership plans to produce and offer high-end figures and dolls at physical stores.

At SXSW, Doodles and Shopify teamed up for a retail experience that merged the former’s apparel with the latter’s point-of-sale checkout technology. The NFT project also runs a digital shop that sells branded t-shirts, stickers, a hoodie and mascot figure.

In the video space, WoW struck a deal with media company Hello Sunshine to adapt its NFTs into movies and TV shows. And Nouns has already made a major cameo, appearing in Bud Light Next’s Super Bowl commercial. The project also recently became a benefactor of a feature film titled “Calladita,” which is funded entirely by NFTs. Both Nouns’ hallmark pixelated glasses and a Noun NFT will appear in the film, and Nouns DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) will be listed as an associate producer in the credits.

Social platforms have been another important medium for these projects, especially given their focus on building communities. WoW recently partnered with The Sandbox, a virtual real estate platform, to create a $25 million fund to increase the representation of women in decentralized spaces. The tie-up includes an in-game series of 10,000 3D avatars inspired by the NFTs and a WoW Museum on a 2x2 plot of land.

Doodles, perhaps recognizing that many consumers are still in Web2, previously teamed with Snapchat to create an augmented reality filter featuring its imagery. Efforts that slowly introduce Web3 technology, especially if they tie back to the real world, may help to onboard more people into Doodles’ brand.

And while not exactly a social tie-up, Nouns took over a sponsored image offering inside Brave, an open-source web browser, during the annual NYC.NFT meet-up last November. The placements, which greeted users who opened a new tab, generated 12.2 million impressions and 141,646 clicks, per data from Brave.

Finally, owing to their NFTs’ origins as digital art, the projects have each dabbled in out-of-home installations. WoW plans to display its NFTs in over 20 airports worldwide through a partnership with tech nonprofit Code Green, while Doodles has targeted festivals like SXSW and Art Basel for its own OOH exhibits. As for Nouns, the project is developing plans to install a series of sculptures in a major international city.

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Building relationships with traditional companies

While WoW, Nouns and Doodles have achieved notable success in the Web3 space, appealing to mass audiences requires a different strategy.

“I don't think we know for sure, in terms of reach outside of the crypto community, what will have the most impact,” Punk4156 said.

For this reason, they’ve teamed with agencies to guide their marketing: WoW has a current partnership with design studio ThoughtMatter; Doodles has collaborated with VaynerNFT; Nouns, which also worked with VaynerNFT, recently partnered with Wieden+Kennedy to build awareness of the brand and attract more people to its DAO, an agency spokesperson confirmed.

Traditional brands also offer a pathway to the mainstream, which is why Nouns’ relationship with Bud Light Next has been such a powerful step in the project’s growth. Six weeks after including the NFTs in its Super Bowl commercial, the brewer produced cans for its Next drink featuring more Nouns imagery and served them at an NFT-themed beer festival at Anheuser-Busch’s brewery in St. Louis. The event was accessible to holders of Bud Light and Budweiser’s 25,658 combined NFTs, and was promoted on the brands’ social channels.

The visibility accrued from its partnership with Bud Light has inspired Nouns to seek out other brands that can help to elevate the project in the public eye. In a recent Twitter post directed to the Nouns community, Punk4156 fielded proposals for brand collaborations; members responded with numerous ideas, from Lego to Haribo, though no partnership has yet materialized, Punk4156 said.

Back in January, Doodles was developing its plan for SXSW. The founders wanted to activate the festival in a physical way that introduced the project to greater audiences. Recognizing that the Doodles’ color palette, full of pastel blues and pinks, was a pillar of their brand’s identity, they decided that a partnership with Behr Paint could bring those colors to life and create a memorable experience.

The result was a 20,000 square-foot installation that featured a virtual painting wall, limited-edition Behr paint cans with Doodles imagery and POAP (proof-of-attendance protocol) NFTs, which would serve as keepsakes for visitors that represented their participation at the event. With the project’s color-focused identity front and center, Behr was able to provide Doodles the resources it needed to make a grand entrance into the physical world.

As for WoW, the project hopes to make strides in consumer reach via its storytelling partnership with Hello Sunshine. The media company shares an emphasis on increasing female representation in the arts, and with influential stakeholders like Reese Witherspoon and Tom Staggs (formerly of Disney), Hello Sunshine could trampoline WoW toward mass visibility.

That the partnership focuses on video content is even more advantageous to WoW as it looks to grow its brand and the NFT space overall, said Adelina. Streaming is a booming industry and may offer the fastest way to present WoW’s IP in front of millions of eyeballs.

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Engaging owners versus non-owners

An important consideration for these NFT collections is how they plan to scale beyond the owners of their tokens. After all, a typical collection only includes 10,000 NFTs, which is not a large enough audience upon which to build a brand.

“This is kind of analogous to traditional brands,” Punk4156 said. “If any NFT project is going to become famous on a scale of Hello Kitty or Disney or any pre-crypto brand that we know and love … it seems inevitable to me that [they] are going to have to incentivize or attract participation from non-owners.”

Nouns hopes to deliver this attraction via its open-source IP, through which anyone—whether they’re an owner or not—can create goods with the NFTs’ imagery and even sell it without having to get permission from the project. These efforts benefit the brand by maximizing its proliferation, which may, in turn, increase the value of the actual NFTs.

Engagement beyond mere ownership makes sense for a collection that is popular and thus prohibitively expensive; the winning bid for a Noun NFT, one of which is auctioned each day, tends to hover between 50 and 70 ETH (or $155,273 and $217,382, at the time of writing).

WoW’s first NFT collection is also in high demand, having quickly sold out in the project’s sale and moved to secondary marketplace OpenSea, where the floor price is currently 7.75 ETH ($24,067). But while its IP is not open source, WoW has shown that it wants to include non-owners via more traditional engagement efforts, such as offering toys through Jazwares and filmed content through Hello Sunshine.

Doodles, on the other hand, exclusively sees its NFTs as the products of its brand, and thus hopes to gain mainstream adoption by turning non-owners into owners to some degree. The project aims to do this by dropping subsequent Doodles NFT products that are more accessible and cost-friendly (the core collection has a floor price on OpenSea that is currently 15.9 ETH, or $49,377), said Keast. 

One potential pitfall with this method is the dilution of the core NFTs’ value, which would alienate existing owners. The parallel would be if a traditional brand attempted to bring in new consumers at the expense of its already loyal base, such as through newly available discounts or products that supplant those previously manufactured.

“The logical next step for a lot of NFT projects is to add another 20,000 NFTs [to] an interactive project, and now you have 30,000 members. There's no kind of net positive to the brand, in that sense,” said Keast.

Conferring special rewards to existing owners is one way these collections are hoping to navigate this issue. Licensing opportunities, for example, may appease owners looking to capitalize on their early adoption. Owners of WoW NFTs maintain 100% of rights to the asset’s IP, meaning they can use it in whatever way they want; the same goes for Nouns since the project is open source.

Instead of conferring 100% rights to owners of Doodles NFTs, the founders are hoping to develop sales mechanisms for its community to capitalize on their specific NFTs. Each Doodle will essentially be its own brand, and be commercialized up to $100,000 in revenue.

“What we've seen in the market is when you give people too much control, they don't know what to do with it,” Keast said.