[Short #134] Brands filing Web3 Trademarks
PLUS: 📢 Warner Brother's Twitter Ads for their NFT
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Brands filing for Web3 Trademarks
Reminder: None of this is legal advice, I’m dumb.
Last week I came across a Twitter account that tweets out companies and brands filing for trademarks.
Wait, this guy is a trademark attorney and and astrophysicist? WTF am I doing with my life. Is this guy trademarking stars and galaxies or something?
Anyway, what’s a trademark?
TLDR: A type of intellectual property (IP) where words or symbols represent a company or product.
There are 45 classes of trademarks, so depending on the use case there may need to be multiple classes referenced in the application.
As many of us are aware, some of the largest brands have already filed for Web3 related trademarks. There’s a whole lot more from where that came from.
Thanks to Mike’s twitter account, here are some other brands that have filed for Web3 related trademarks in the past couple of months. The list has brands you’d expect and many you wouldn’t:
XFL, Seattle Space Needle, Nissan, Steph Curry’s Curryverse, Visa, Ulta, Viking Cruises, Western Union, Paypal, Muhammad Ali, Telecaster (Fender), Kraft’s Weinermobile, Ford, Takis, In N Out Burgers, Del Monte Foods, Formula One, Lizzo’s Flute, Moët Hennessy, Christina Aguilera, Jack Daniels, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mean Girls, Nickelodeon Slime, Jockey, Sony Music, Hermès.
My personal favorite in the list is the Weinermobile. Lizzo’s flute takes second place, only because I didn’t know Lizzo is a classically trained flautist 🎵
Coming to a metaverse near you!
Shit, is Kraft going to sue me now?
Mike (my new favorite trademark attorney) puts this momentum into perspective with some numbers:
Naturally, brands are preemptively making moves to protect their brand. After all, we don’t want to ride around the Metaverse in a knock-off Weinermobile.
However, it’s clear that everyone (quite literally) is preparing for a push into Web3. Who knows when or how it might happen, but everyone is getting ready 👀
Warner Brother's Twitter Ads for their NFT
Yesterday night I came across a Twitter ad for WB’s new Lord of the Rings movie NFT.
TLDR: WB recently released a new NFT for the movie franchise that unlocks special features.
There were two tiers of this NFT:
10k Premiere Mystery Edition @ $30 each
999 Premiere Epic Edition @ $100 each
The Epic Editions sold out likely due to the limited supply, but the 10k collection is still sitting.
So what does a multi billion dollar entertainment brand do in this situation? Run ads of course! 🤑
Let’s take a look at the ad (if you want to see the screen recording, check it out here. No special features though, sorry lol).
WB ran a 3-panel carousel ad which shows the NFTs in full display.
Unfortunately IMO, this is where the the issues begin:
There is no call-to-action in the ad itself. Even if someone seeing the ad wanted to purchase, they don’t know where to go
The written description doesn’t share any details about the product
The ratio of replies to likes indicates this ad is really good…or really bad
Seems like this is in the ‘really bad’ camp.
‘NFpee’, good one.
We do have someone going through the comments and defending though. We all choose a hill to die on at some point, and seems like this is @NFTink3r’s.
So let’s say you’re convinced and you want to purchase one of these NFTs, what do you need to do?
Click on the WB NFT Twitter profile, then click on their link in bio. 2 more clicks than the ideal scenario of an ad click directly taking the user to the product.
What are the takeaways here?
Paid ads not the ideal way to grow your Web3 product, at least for now. Most of us are aware of this.
There is a preference towards scarcer digital products. If you launch multiple tiers at the same time, expect the rarer tier to sell out first.
People aren’t dumb. Many people quickly realized this was a NFT that functioned as a DVD with extra features. This NFT collection may have sold out quickly if launched last year, but not in this market.
Audience targeting can only do so much (I’m assuming this was a targeted campaign)
To be fair, this may be a successful ad campaign, I don’t have the numbers. But my gut tells me otherwise…
Either way, I’m sure the WB NFT team has a notebook full of learnings.
Oh, BTW it’d be a good idea to make sure your test product variants don’t show up in search filters. Maybe that’s on Eluvio, their blockchain partner 🤷🏻♂️
Regardless, I applaud WB for this effort. I’m confident they will continue testing and iterating to raise the bar. I look forward to seeing how they creatively evolve their Movieverse offering from ‘meh’ to ‘I gotta get one’.
Maybe…just maybe…we’ll see the ultimate collab that will result in the collection selling out.
Please don’t sue me.
See you tomorrow!