Dear Bankless Nation,

Love it or hate it, the Super Bowl is the biggest television event in the U.S. by a long shot.

2021’s showdown had nearly 100M viewers. This marked a down year for interest. In contrast, the upcoming matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals is expected to bring in closer to 200M viewers!

Many of these people will be more interested in the Super Bowl’s commercials rather than the game itself, and this year more than a few of these folks who watch closely will see Nouns glasses for the first time ever.

That’s per a recent partnership between Bud Light, America’s most popular beer brand, and Nouns DAO, the collective of Nouns NFT holders. Let’s cover the basics and the big picture takeaways for today’s Metaversal,

-WMP

Inside the Bud Light x Nouns partnership

Context

Nouns is an experimental PFP project whose influence and treasury have surged since the first Nouns NFTs arrived in Aug. 2021. I recommend reading my Nouns 101 guide to catch up on the basics. Simply put, though, the project is building a bottom-up, open-source IP universe that is owned and steered by its community rather than a single company.

Why Bud Light

In Nov. 2021, Gremplin — one of the handful of artists that helped compose the aesthetics of the Nouns — created and tweeted an illustration of a Budweiser beer can wearing the iconic Nouns glasses. Then 4156, one of the Nouns project’s founders, brought up the possibility of a trade with the beer company:

The Bud Light team, which at the time had just launched its first NFT collection, got intrigued and things proceeded from there.

Talks accelerated, and then last month the Nouns DAO community voted and approved Prop 33. This initiative ratified trading a Noun NFT to a “prominent beverage company [that] will include Noun glasses in a 2022 Super Bowl commercial.”

Things solidified on Jan. 18th when the Nouns Foundation acquired beer-heeded Noun 179, which has since been delivered to Bud Light per the Prop 33 agreement.

The commercial

On Feb. 7th, Bud Light debuted its Super Bowl commercial as part of a marketing campaign for Bud Light NEXT, a new zero-carb beer line. The company noted of the release:

“Featuring four vignettes synced to the tune of Barbra Streisand's hit song Gotta Move, the new commercial titled, ‘Zero in the Way of Possibility’ demonstrates what's possible when you choose to break traditional conventions and challenges fans to re-think the status quo … The spot also marks another milestone for the brand's recent entry into the NFT space, by featuring a Nouns DAO partnership. The partnership comes to life in the third vignette when their famous glasses, as well as a token from the new Bud Light N3XT NFT Collection, make an appearance.”

The big picture

I think it’s safe to say that the Nouns glasses appearance in Bud Light’s Super Bowl commercial will probably go over most peoples’ heads for now, and that’s perfectly fine.

However, to me what’s interesting about this appearance is that it represents a big early cultural victory for the Nouns. The NFT project’s become a force to be reckoned with after launching only six months ago, and this Super Bowl commercial is the latest big advance to acutely solidify and expand the influence of the Nouns and its open-source IP.

Where’s this all heading toward, then? To be sure, the Nouns project is open-ended so there is no singular answer here. One of the best general explanations I’ve seen comes from 4156, who noted in the Nouns Discord yesterday:

“Economies of scale unlock different kinds of opportunities. If [Nouns DAO] spends only 10% of its capital and gets to interact with the largest brands and agencies in the world at current scale, what can it do with 10x the scale? 100x? Can we build the modern Louvre? Something even larger? In my opinion, part of the goal is to aggregate a huge amount of capital and discover what we can do with that optionality.”

Action steps

• Learn more about Nouns at nouns.wtf
• Learn more about Noun trait names by reviewing The Noundred, a repository I created to track the first 100 Nouns’ attributes