• Alongside other brands trying out non-fungible tokens, Macy’s is hosting a virtual Thanksgiving Day Parade that lets viewers vote on their favorite NFT projects and mint virtual gallery passes, according to a Monday press release. Viewers can choose from five galleries with NFT projects made by Boss Beauties, Cool Cats, Gmoney, SupDucks and VeeFriends to select the design that will be made into a balloon for the 2023 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
• The retailer is charging $50 to mint a virtual gallery pass and donating all of the proceeds to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Consumers who have NFTs from the creators’ collections will have additional voting power to decide next year’s balloon, per the press release.
• Macy’s will host the virtual edition of this year’s parade within the OnCyber metaverse starting Thanksgiving Day at 9:00 a.m. ET. Customers can view the parade through their desktops and mobile devices, and they don’t need virtual reality headsets or a cryptocurrency wallet to participate, according to the announcement.

Dive Insight:

Macy’s latest Web3 foray follows its previous experimentation with NFTs. In June, the retailer 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 countdown 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 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, said in a statement. “Our genesis 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 be transformed into a real-world Macy’s Parade balloon, while also creating an opportunity to raise critical funds for our partner Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.”

More brands have been trying to intertwine their businesses with the metaverse to generate revenue from digital goods. Earlier this month, Nike, announced that it’s beta testing a virtual platform to showcase its 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.

Though the metaverse is predicted to generate substantial value for brands and retailers, early reports suggest consumers don’t fully understand it yet. A 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 prior found that only 15% of respondents could explain the metaverse concept to someone else.