This month, Ad Age is expanding its "Creativity Top 5" series to include new roundups of our favorite special-interest campaigns and ideas from brands. We kick it off with a ranking of the best brand NFT ideas. Visit our site each Thursday for a new list of niche campaigns from the past month. Check back next month for another installment of top brand NFTs.
This month: the McRib goes digital, "The Matrix" joins the metaverse and NFTs fight for gender equality.
McDonald’s continues to make the McRib’s occasional return to menus an event. The sandwich’s most recent reappearance was accompanied by the fast-food giant’s first NFT for the U.S. market, the McNFT. Combining tech, brand nostalgia and viral marketing, the non-fungible token looks like a trading card with the McRib's saucy image as the central focus. Bonus: it cost only a retweet. McDonald’s selected fans from over 95,000 who participated in the sweepstakes to win one of ten unique McNFTs.
Related: How NFTs and the metaverse could solve holiday chain issues
Like a spiritual parent to the metaverse, "The Matrix" franchise's entrance into the NFT market seemed inevitable. In anticipation of the upcoming film “The Matrix Resurrections,” Warner Bros. teamed with social NFT platform Nifty's to launch 100,000 unique avatar NFTs for $50 each. Starting Nov. 30, the line of avatars will launch in their base form: randomly-assigned and hyper-realistic animated characters lost in The Matrix. Two weeks later, the ordinary avatars will be given the opportunity to consume a blue or red pill, the latter of which will transform the character into a resistance fighter with new clothes, accessories and hairstyles. Warner Bros. reports that this is the first avatar NFT launch featuring a mainstream intellectual property.
Music NFTs present a unique opportunity beyond mere possession: revenue. An increasingly common practice in crypto-based music marketing gives owners of music NFTs not only the track they purchase, but a percentage of its streaming royalties. Bacardi took that one step further in its campaign to address the gender disparity among producers, of whom only 2% of whom are women. The liquor brand teamed with three rising female producers to sell original songs as NFTs. The campaign has already raised over $115,000 for the producers.
Though a pending lawsuit could squash it, this is one of the most inventive NFT ideas we saw this past month. Quentin Tarantino offered a new fix to his fans when he announced a collection of seven NFTs based on his massively popular film “Pulp Fiction.” The tokens outwardly appear to be never-before-seen scenes from an early version of the film, but each contains a secret. Housed on Secret Network, the first privacy-focused blockchain, each of the tokens is attached to exclusive information, only accessible to the buyer, about the film and creator. The exclusives include handwritten scripts, exclusive artwork and commentary from the legendary director.
The “Pulp Fiction” NFT release date has not yet been announced, and it ultimately could be delayed, or even nixed, due to a lawsuit over rights to the film. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Miramax is working on its own line of NFTs and is pursuing legal action as of November 16. The film studio wrote in its lawsuit that, "left unchecked, Tarantino’s conduct could mislead others into believing Miramax is involved in his venture. And it could also mislead others into believing they have the rights to pursue similar deals or offerings, when in fact Miramax holds the rights needed to develop, market, and sell NFTs relating to its deep film library."
Fed up with all the NFT digital quirks? Brands have begun making moves to make the non-fungible a bit more tangible, as with cryptocurrency platform Gemini’s NFT billboard in New York. Previously home to the CNN logo, the digital billboard began displaying mysterious messages late last month, each of which correlated to one of 105 matching NFTs. Combined, the collection creates the abstract from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, the original proposal for the cryptocurrency, and the auction coincided with the 13th anniversary of Nakamoto’s work. NFTs from the collection sold for up to $7,000.
