Bring Nouns to 2m+ People over 15 Months at Japan’s Best Ski Resort and Integrate Nouns into the Alpine Subculture
TL;DR
Introduce nouns to an estimated +2 million people over 15 months (2 ski seasons), at the largest all-season resort in Hokkaido, Japan from January 2023 through May 2024.
Core initiatives will include IRL activations, physical/rideable features, posters, interactive engagement, education and sponsorship opportunities throughout the resort.
A lot of it will be captured by film makers and photographers and we’ll compile a CC0 media bank that will offer the nounish community assets to use in their productions that capture the nounish spirit in the alpine.
Total ask: $198k USD
Introduction
We recently launched Alps DAO, which is a fork of Nouns DAO that is focused on establishing long term relationships with alpine resorts to proliferate Nouns, provide unique membership perks to DAO members and support proposals that enhance on-mountain environments and experiences.
Founded by Benbodhi and ThaSwami who both share a common passion for Nouns and the alpine, Alps DAO has been self funded to date. This has included all development of concepts, code, community and forking the Nouns DAO protocol.
We’ve partnered with Rusutsu Resort, 4 time winner of Best Ski Resort in Japan. The resort accommodates in excess of 3,000 guests per day across 1000+ hotel rooms attracting 400,000+ overnight stays and 1,100,000+ million day visitors per year with a mix of 60% local and 40% foreign visitation. The resort also hosts events like the G1 Summit where the attendees represent entrepreneurs and next generation leaders from Japan.
ThaSwami holds a senior management position within the company that owns Rusutsu Resort, enabling preferential advertising rates and enhancing a cooperative relationship with the resort.
- +2,000 hectares across 3 Mountains
- 14 Ski Lifts and 4 Gondolas accessing 37 Ski Runs
- Hokkaido’s Largest Theme Park with 60 Attractions
- 72 Holes across 4 Golf Courses
- 3,000,000 Person Catchment
- 39,000 Vehicles Per Day
- 2,300 Capacity across 14 Conference Facilities
- +1,000 Hotel Rooms
- 20 Food & Beverage Outlets
- 15 Retail Stores
Nounify Hokkaido’s Largest All-Season Resort
We’ll create bilingual visual awareness, call to action signage, branding sponsorship throughout the resort, physical structures for long lasting film opportunities, activities to engage resort guests, social media presence on multiple platforms and provide educational materials about Nouns DAO.
Take a look at the scale of this activation!
Resort Activation Map
Some of the things we’ve lined up:
⌐◧-◧ Thousands of noggles distributed for free across the resort
Noggles handed out en masse to really get the attention of guests and encourage social sharing with strategic hashtags.
⌐◧-◧ Resort Socials takeover
Periodic takeover of the official Rusutsu Resort social media feeds (Instagram 22k followers, Facebook 37k followers, Twitter 14k followers).
⌐◧-◧ Posters in 247 gondolas
60 x 16cm posters will capture undivided attention with an average 9 minute travel time per gondola trip, 6,000 person carrying capacity per hour, and operating daily from 9am-4pm.
⌐◧-◧ Signage at 3 gondola stations
168 x 119cm signs at gondola station lift lines provide large format visuals to skiers and snowboarders before riding gondolas, creating a call to action pre-gondola rides.
⌐◧-◧ Signage at 2 on-mountain restaurants
Signage at 2 on-mountain restaurants with a capacity of 750+ seats will be visible for the entire winter season. On-mountain restaurants represent 60% of the resort’s daytime food and beverage activity and are patronised by almost every person on the mountain.
⌐◧-◧ Terrain park naming, branding and feature
- Renaming of the terrain park to Nouns Terrain Park that will appear on digital trail maps and the resort website.
- Custom banners planted strategically near rails, boxes and jumps to maximise photo and video opportunities.
- Custom built nounish terrain park feature similar to what was created in Rio de Janeiro will also be produced and installed at the resort.
- Potential for permanent installation beyond the proposed 15 months.
⌐◧-◧ Pop-up dioramas in-resort
- Locations within the resort will allow for pop-up dioramas, backdrops and life-size cutouts, similar to Nouns Fair at ETH SF (Prop 162) and NFT Fest Australia (Prop 164).
- Pop-ups will include call to actions to take selfies and photos of eachother post photos on social media, using hashtags as well as QR codes and website links to track metrics.
⌐◧-◧ POAP pull-up banner
Banner installed in high traffic area of resort for POAP claims.
⌐◧-◧ POAP treasure hunt
- Wallet and POAP onboarding website guide.
- 20 NFC/QRcode activation touch-points in-resort and on-mountain.
- Prizes for completing a full POAP collection.
- Ongoing engagement through holders of the collected POAPS.
- Onboarding opportunities, introducing people to the technology, Nouns DAO and community artists.
Why The Alpine Subculture?
- Typically snow sports attracts a predominantly wealthy demographic which leads us to believe the onboarding potential is immense.
- The art, the technology and the community are culturally relevant to alpine enthusiasts.
- There is a huge global audience of 135 million skiers/snowboarders worldwide and 2,000 ski resorts across 68 countries.
- The scalability of proliferation spans the globe.
- It’s an untapped market in terms of bringing Nouns DAO, NFTs and crypto in general into the lifestyle.
- The alpine enthusiast subculture is super passionate about their lifestyle which brings value to proliferation. People share their story with friends, family and online. Nouns can be a big part of that story.
- User generated content is a powerful flywheel where a large subset of the culture films everything they do.
Why Japan?
- Nouns has a strong and growing following in Japan with Nouns DAO Japan (+3,000 Twitter followers and +4,000 discord members) and is the only foreign language currently translated on nouns.wtf.
- Japanese culture resonates with the Nouns artwork.
- It is predicted that the NFT industry in Japan will grow significantly through 2028, with an anticipated compound annual growth rate of 38.7% from 2022 to 2028 (source).
- The Japanese government is supportive of the technology, having awarded NFTs to 7 mayors for their achievements in using digital technology to solve issues and announcing NFT and Metaverse expansion (source).
- “Nouns DAO” receives the most interest globally on Google Trends from Japan.
- Hokkaido, Japan is known as the powder mecca of the world.
Expression Sessions
We’ll organise expression sessions to onboard the alpine and snowsports sub-culture to the Nouns ecosystem through community engagement. Both local guests and professionals will be invited to have fun and showcase their skills on the mountain while wearing nounish gear provided and/or riding nounish features.
In the spirit of being nounish, we’ll hold engaging contests and offer prizes throughout the expression sessions for fun and creative categories. We’ll also educate on the potential of sponsorship via proposals through Gnars DAO and Alps DAO.
We will encourage people to capture photos and film of the activities that can then be added to a CC0 repository and shared on social media with strategic hashtags.
CC0 Media Repository
Capturing this nounish alpine resort takeover with world class skiers and snowboarders in the heart of northern Japan will not only proliferate the Nouns brand in Japan, but allow us to start building a CC0 media repository that demonstrates this subculture to the world.
By creating this repository and encouraging the use of the media, it will spin up an incredibly rich nounish content generation flywheel. This has the potential to reach the rest of the world, resonating with the global ski and snowboard community totalling 135 million people.
We will also have independent filmers and photographers on mountain to capture many of the nounish moments and activities throughout the season.
During their time in Hokkaido they will be documenting attendee activities, the proliferation of Nouns at Rusutsu Resort and throughout the local community, athletes and local talent, and all things culturally unique to Japan.
Anyone in the world will able to cut together footage from the repository, all featuring the iconic noggles and create their own films and promos. Imagine the following video at Rusutsu Resort, but nounish.
Measuring Success
Analytics over the activation period will be captured through a variety of touch points and made available to the community. These include:
- QR code scans - posters and signage will contain QR codes leading to a landing page with further directions to project specific websites, enabling more granular data on customer click throughs.
- POAP claims - the gamified POAP treasure hunt will deliver data on the number of participants throughout the activation period based on POAP claims. Additionally, further engagement with holders can also be measured.
- Resort visitor numbers - general branding awareness will be measured by data from the resort with respect to hotel guest numbers and daily visitation statistics.
- Analytics on media content produced and strategic hashtags used.
- Physical items distributed.
- In-resort onboarding can be measured via verifying POAP claims from Rusutsu Resort along with nounish NFTs in a token gated channel in the Alps DAO Discord.
- Media repo usage stats and attribution where available from further created content.
- Hashtags - posts using strategic hashtags.
- Engagement during resort social takeovers.
- Number of people engaged in expression sessions.
Timeline
Expression sessions and POAP “Treasure Hunts” will be pop-up by nature and held multiple times throughout the 15 month engagement, as will the resort socials takeovers.
There will be ongoing marketing engagement throughout the resort the entire time as well.
The following key elements will take place on this timeline:
Q1 2023
Proposal process, begin engagements at resort, artwork and asset creation, installation of posters, signage and banners, terrain park branding online, design physical nounish feature/structure.
Q2 2023
CC0 Media Repository build, nounish physical feature/structure build.
Q3 2023
CC0 Media Repository launch and proliferation, engage with film makers to make nounish content using the media collected, nounish feature/structure Summer installation.
Q4 2023
Further artwork and asset creation, terrain park branding both online and in print, nounish feature/structure Winter installation.
Q1-Q2 2024
Organised film session with nounish feature/structure, compile and present the results and effectiveness of the activation.
Funding Breakdown
- Nounifying the Resort: $109k USD which equates to less than $248 per day for the entire 15 month activation.
- Expression Session Activations: $24k USD.
- Content creation by independent film/photo crew and editing: $15k USD.
- Team/Staff Compensation & Operations: $50k USD.
Total Funding Request: $198k USD
Detailed breakdown:
Who We Are
Benbodhi
I’ve been a dev for over a decade and have created software that over 1 million websites are actively using. I was attracted to Nouns DAO towards the end of 2021 while digging through smart contracts that were implementing onchain art. I was immediately drawn to the elegance of the protocol and shifted everything I was doing to embrace the nounish lifestyle and have been working full time in the ecosystem since.
As a nounish builder, I’ve founded and been working with multiple teams and projects during my time in nouns. I’m very passionate about nouns, snowboarding and alpine culture!
Having lived at ski resorts in the past, I hope to be a catalyst for making nouns synonymous with alpine culture and introduce this huge audience to the power of community building through the DAO structure while ultimately onboarding this subculture to Nouns DAO.
I’m @benbodhi on Twitter
ThaSwami
I’ve been active in the Nouns community since May 2022 when my then 12 year old daughter @lilpurpberry joined the Nouncil as its youngest member.
I’ve been a real estate professional IRL for over 18 years and specialise in asset management, master planning, development and operations within the ski resort and hospitality sectors. I hold a senior management position with the owners of Rusutsu Resort, one of the largest ski resort owner operators in Japan and as such will enhance communication and delivery of the proposal objectives.
I co-founded Alps DAO with Benbodhi in late 2022, with a view to proliferate Nouns through my industry specific network and help build a treasury that will support alpine communities and enthusiasts.
I’m @tha_swami on Twitter
Summary
Building on the momentum of the awareness of Nouns DAO in Japan, we’ll introduce Nouns to Japanese and alpine culture through IRL marketing activations over 15 months with an audience of over 2 million people, executed by a passionate team at Japan’s 4 time winner of best ski resort in Japan, Rusutsu Resort.
The success of this proposal will set precedent for this type of activation to be scaled globally and harness the potential for a deeper relationship within Rusutsu Resort’s network, allowing us to integrate Nouns branding further.
. Love that you are using POAPs etc as a way of measuring reach.
