My NFT obsession started with the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). The Universal Music Group (UMG) announced their new Kingship project featuring Bored Apes. I started investigating. The brainchild of Celine Joshua and Jimmy McNeils, Kingship will be UMG’s label to empower digital creators. The new entertainment platform will feature a new label called Ape-in-Productions (AIP) designed to give creative control back to artists and let them control and profit from their creations.
NFT: Branding + Security
This new market featuring BAYC art and music is a natural launching pad for legal marijuana marketers. There’s a lot of buzz around non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but marijuana distributors are finding that they are an effective way to verify product testing results. By recording their certificate of analysis (COA) as an NFT, ACS Laboratory in Florida raised $10,000 at the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair. The money was good, but Roger Brown, president of the company, found that the immutability of the blockchain solved the problem of COAs being altered after leaving the lab.
Digital Marketing Strategy
NFTs are a key part of your digital marketing strategy, but it takes a comprehensive approach to bring all the elements together. Customer relationships are still key and the blockchain technology underlying non-fungible tokens can move your brand closer to direct relationships with the cannabis community. What your brand needs is a memorable mascot that ties your fanbase together.
Back to the Bored Apes and Universal Music
So back to Bored Apes and Universal Music Group … A music platform like Kingship is a natural space to set up NFT for weed brand recognition. When you buy a Bored Ape, you get more than usage rights, including marketing. So you can use your cool new NFT to jump into the weed marketing space. The owner of Crepe Ape (#6355) was one of the first to work out a deal to put his Ape on cannabis packaging. @SmileFckrs, another BAYC member, is in talks to license his white-tanked, mohawked, Bored Ape #1836 as a weed mascot.
Can a Bored Ape NFT weed grow a company’s market share? They haven’t reached household name status yet, but the colorfully creative creatures have a solid social media following on Instagram and Twitter. Reaching the recognition level of a Disney character is a reach, but the next Tony the Tiger is a reasonable expectation. The legal marijuana market is growing state-to-state and within states. Competition is already fierce in most metropolitan areas and likely to become even more so. Branding is your bridge to increasing and maintaining market share. A growing weed NFT market is in the future. Bored Apes and other NFTs like Stoned Apes offer a creative solution to the digital marijuana marketer. The blockchain security protects the COA and simultaneously provides visual branding. Timothy Mosley’s Ape-In-Productions has already introduced “Thezoo”, a music group tied to an ApeSh!t NFT.
More music, NFTs, and creativity are appearing in the metaverse every day. Companies like The SMUGGLEVERSE have created a Digital Dispensary on their proprietary and patented platform where you can buy, cut and sell digital weed, replicating real world smuggling and dealing. They say they are building a full fledged Web3 game and even have a motion picture tie in as well……More to come on that.
It’s time to see how your company can benefit.