Last month, the city of Los Angeles hosted a 3-day blockchain conference featuring some of crypto’s most innovative and entrepreneurial minds at NFT LA. While hundreds of influencers drew thousands of badge-holders inside the Convention Center to hear them speak, what made the most noise was a launch activation on the rooftop patio outside West Exhibit Hall.
Ian Feiner, a savvy Hollywood producer turned web3 marketing maven, saw an opportunity to transform Petree Plaza to create a carnival inside a conference. With the help of Jason DeSimone of Formless Creature, Feiner imagineered an outdoor gaming experience and the first-ever brand activation for Freckle Trivia; a POAP and prize giveaway game on 5 interactive touch screen kiosks. While offering a fun-filled excursion from talking heads, Feiner’s Freckle Interactive minted thousands of POAPS, gave 400 free prizes, and welcomed hundreds of new gamers to its Discord over 3 days of deejays and dancing in the warmth of the California sun.
“There was an appetite for product placement and a gap in the placement economy,” Feiner observed. “We want to give brands an opportunity to make their content shoppable through videos and programming we produce.” In partnering with Freckle Interactive, relationships are formed between brands, web3 communities, and people who like to play trivia games. Web3 is still a scary space for normie brands, and the user experience is a daunting task for brands to introduce. “We make the onboarding process easy to get their loyal fans and customers into web3, and at the same time, it allows them to engage with a whole new customer,” Feiner explained. “We partnered with Disney World to give away tickets for 2 with all expenses paid. People’s ears perked up and they played the game,” he said.
Each 55-inch touchscreen kiosk presented trivia questions about a different era of music. Each time you played, you were asked 5 questions about different music artists from that era. Gamers who got 3 out of 5 questions right could collect a POAP from that era and kiosk. A unique code associated with every POAP offered a chance to win co-branded merchandise, and if you collected all 5 tokens, joined the Discord and verified your wallet, you were automatically entered into a raffle for the grand prize. On the last day of NFT NYC, one lucky grand prize winner was handed a statue of a Storm Trooper live on stage with music producer and pioneer of west coast rap, Too $hort. “We want everyone to win,” Feiner emphasized. “The goal for every Freckle Interactive activation is to give all the free merchandise away.” Giveaways were familiar brand names, like Champion hoodies, Andy Warhol, Pink Floyd, and Louis Vuitton. Iconic music album art and other prizes were co-branded with Freckle Interactive and Formless Creature logos to create truly unique, POAP-like, real-world collectibles. Jason DeSimone, Founder of Formless Creature, collaborated with Levi Ponce to create a large-scale mural which was sold as an NFT. His concept to utilize NFTs as street art was born at NFT/Art Basel Miami, where the seed was planted to realize their vision at NFT LA. The physical art was minted on the blockchain as a 1:1 stitched photograph of the mural.
Feiner began planning the Freckle Interactive activation and carnival experience with only 6 weeks to execute from concept to kickoff. Like any successful movie producer, Feiner’s skillset was a perfect fit to strategize, organize, coordinate, fundraise, and build the only place to play during NFT LA. He quickly secured brand sponsorships, curated each vendor, booked live performers like Nelly, and programmed a daily schedule of guest deejays and events. In addition to producing the carnival experience, Feiner had his Freckle Interactive activation to focus on; the trivia game app, the touchscreen kiosks, his merchandise booth, and branding all the collectible giveaways. The point of the activation was to offer our community real value, stored value, and long term utility by holding our tokens,” Feiner said.
On its face, Freckle Interactive is a valuable case study for the gamification of token minting. “Once we release our trivia token, it’s going to create an incredible economy that pairs communities with our brand partnerships to offer incentives and utility in ways we’ve never seen before,” Feiner speculates. With its online Freckle Trivia app, players may earn trivia tokens that offer a store of value, with the potential to grant gated access for holders–like exclusive admission for a CyberKongz-only night, for example.
When it comes to social utility, IRL play to win, play to earn, and play to collect models present exciting opportunities to generate attention currency.
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