THE NOTORIOUS magazine Playboy is entering the metaverse – releasing thousands of NFTs and even launching a virtual Playboy Mansion.
Controversial for its sexual nature and nude pictures, the lifestyle entertainment brand is looking to the future and planning a shift to Web3.
Playboy scrapped its print publication two years ago and is now online only.
The company believes adopting to NFTs – non-fungible tokens – and the potential of the metaverse is the obvious next move to remain relevant.
Executives hope the brand is so iconic it will transfer easily into the virtual world.
“The magazine was one product of the company.
“But it was really that rabbit head that’s worth billions and billions of dollars and not replicable,” Playboy CEO Ben Kohn said in a media interview recently.
“When you think about what this brand represents, from a marketing perspective, from an awareness perspective, we pretty much have 100 percent awareness everywhere in the world.”
Almost 12,000 NFTs based on Playboy’s well known logo have been sold on the OpenSea digital market place.
Known as Rabbitars, the artworks depict a series of rabbits often wearing bow ties to mimic the iconic image that has represented the magazine since 1953.
NFTs have also been made from photographs that have featured on front covers over the years.
Ownership of the NFTs provides exclusive offers and metaverse giveaways with the company.
Kohn said: “We have 10 million pieces of content in our archive that we can also drop as NFTs moving forward.”
The digital artwork has exploded in popularity over the past two years.
In 2020 $94.9million of trading was done in NFTs, in 2021 that grew to an estimated $23billion.
Off to a roaring start in 2022, January alone saw also $15billion in sales.
But NFTs, Playboy is looking at the how adapting to the metaverse world could help deepen engagement with members.
The Playboy Mansion, the former home of the magazine’s founder Hugh Hefner and one of the most well high-profile pieces of real estate in the world, could now go digital.
The physical mansion was well known for hosting lavish parties in the 1970s and acting as the bad-drop for explicit photoshoots.
Kohn said: “I look at the mansion coming back first in the metaverse, because I think we can reach a global audience through that.
“It will be part of our membership plan.
“And then I can see a world down the road where we have physical mansions as well.”
He added: “As we move into 2022, we’ll begin with Playboy membership and members will have a whole host of benefits moving forward and a lot of our membership will be based on blockchain.”
The brand has already hosted a number of parties in Decentraland.
However, Playboy is still determining which metaverse will act as the home of its new virtual mansion.
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