Macy’s to host Thanksgiving Day Parade in metaverse with NFT design contest
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Dive card:
- Along with other brands trying out non-fungible tokens, Macy’s is hosting a virtual Thanksgiving Day Parade that allows viewers to vote for their favorite NFT projects and create virtual gallery passes, according to a press release on Monday. Viewers can choose from five galleries of NFT projects created by Boss Beauties, Cool Cats, Gmoney, SupDucks and VeeFriends to choose the design to be made into a balloon for the 2023 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
- The retailer charges $50 to create a virtual gallery pass and donates all proceeds to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Consumers who have NFTs from the creators’ collections will have additional voting rights to decide next year’s balloon, according to the press release.
- Macy’s will host the virtual edition of this year’s parade in OnCyber metaverse starting Thanksgiving Day at 9:00 a.m. ET. Customers can watch the parade through their desktop computers and mobile devices, and they don’t need virtual reality headsets or cryptocurrency wallet to participate, according to the announcement.
Diving Insights:
Macy’s latest Web3 foray follows its earlier experimentation with NFTs. In June, the dealer introduced 10,000 free Macy’s Fireworks NFTs to celebrate Independence Day. The retailer distributed the NFTs on the Polygon blockchain to customers who registered on the Macy’s Discord server.
“As we count down to the 96th Macy’s Parade, we are excited to bring this spectacle once again to the web3 virtual landscape with a fun experience that empowers our fans, collectors and our highly engaged Discord community,” Will Coss , executive producer of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, said in a statement. “Our origin collection of Parade NFT’s last year was so successful that we wanted to give our digital community the opportunity to select a native NFT design to transform into a real Macy’s Parade balloon, while creating an opportunity to collect critical funds for our partner Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.”
Several brands have tried interweaving their businesses with the metaverse to generate revenue from digital goods. Earlier this month, Nike, announced that it is beta testing a virtual platform to showcase their products. The brand plans to launch a digital collection through the platform next year using consumer input, and it has secured a welcome.swoosh.nike domain name for the effort, which it says will create a “safe, trusted” digital environment.
Although the metaverse is predicted to generate significant value for brands and retailers, early reports suggest that consumers don’t fully understand it yet. ONE June McKinsey report projected that the metaverse will generate $2.6 trillion for e-commerce and $5 trillion overall by 2030. But a Wunderman Thompson survey released a month before found that only 15% of respondents could explain the concept of metaverse to someone else.
