The owners of the Bored Ape Yacht Club have used their “permissive commercialization rights” to put images from their Ethereum NFTs on toys, clothing, restaurants, and alcohol packaging, among other things. But you can now eat a few Bored Apes if you eat a special edition of M&Ms.
Today, the candy company Mars announced that it had made a deal with the label 10:22PM of Universal Music Group (UMG) to make limited-edition M&Ms based on Kingship, a virtual band made up of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club avatars.
In a press release, Mars Wrigley Global Vice President Jane Hwang said, “Consumers’ expectations for what they want from their favorite brands [have] shifted, and at Mars, we know we need to be more innovative than ever with such a culturally famous brand like M&M’s,”
Jimmy “j1mmy” McNelis, an investor and businessman, used NFTs to make Kingship, a “metaverse band.” Last November, this information was made public. Following in the footsteps of the famous virtual band Gorillaz, the label 10:22PM has created characters based on the Bored Ape drawings and is writing original music for the group, which will play concerts in metaverse realms.
The group has also made its own NFT “key cards” that give their owners special access and benefits. The candy M&Ms were given first to people who owned NFT devices. As part of the agreement, Mars has made a limited number of branded M&M’s chocolate candies with artwork from the Bored Apes and Kingship. Mars will only sell 10,000 of these sweets in gift boxes and gift jars.
An NFT is a blockchain token that can be used for things like profile pictures, art, and collectibles. It works like a title deed for a virtual item. As the NFT market has grown, brands are getting into it more often through partnerships or their own digital collectible drops. In 2021, trading in this market will reach $25 billion.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club may be the most popular project in the area. According to data from CryptoSlam, Yuga Labs’ collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has already led to almost $2.4 billion in secondary trading. When secondary trading and follow-up and spin-off projects are added together, Bored Ape-related NFTs have made more than $5.6 billion so far.
So everyone knows, neither Yuga Labs nor the real Bored Ape Yacht Club brand is involved in this M&M’s deal. Instead, Bored Ape NFT owners can use their own photos to make items and projects, and if they want to, they can sell licenses to businesses for that artwork.
One of these license agreements is the one between Kingship and UMG’s 10:22PM label. This new connection with Mars adds another layer to it. Pictures of the bored ape have also been used on the packaging of alcohol, drugs, clothing, souvenirs, and other things.
The band Bored Apes has also made a lot of noise in the music business. Timbaland, a well-known music producer and musician, has also made songs about his alter ego, Bored Ape, and set up a record label to encourage other musicians to do the same. Snoop Dogg is opening a dessert shop that looks like one of his apes, and he and fellow rapper Eminem have also made a music video with their apes in it.
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