NFT Advertising: What Brands Got Right and Wrong

NFT advertising is the practice of using non-fungible tokens as a marketing vehicle, whether through branded token drops, NFT-gated experiences, or campaigns built around digital ownership. At its peak in 2021 and 2022, it attracted serious budget from serious brands. By 2023, most of those brands had quietly moved on.

What happened in between is worth studying, not because NFTs are necessarily finished as a marketing tool, but because the cycle they went through tells you something useful about how brands make decisions under hype pressure, and what separates a commercially grounded campaign from one that just chases novelty.

I’ve spent more than two decades watching marketing technology cycles play out. The pattern is almost always the same: a genuine innovation emerges, the trade press amplifies it, agencies pitch it before they understand it, brands approve budget to avoid looking behind, and then the results come in. NFTs followed this script more faithfully than almost anything I’ve seen since the early days of social media advertising. The difference is that the NFT cycle compressed into roughly 18 months, which meant the hangover arrived before most brands had even finished celebrating.

What Were Brands Actually Trying to Do?

If you strip away the technology, most NFT advertising campaigns were trying to do one of three things: generate press coverage, reward loyal customers, or attract a younger demographic. Those are legitimate marketing objectives. The problem was that NFTs were rarely the most efficient or reliable way to achieve any of them.

Press coverage is the easiest to understand. In 2021, launching an NFT collection guaranteed you a mention in every marketing trade publication. Brands that had nothing interesting to say found that minting a JPEG with their logo on it was enough to generate a news cycle. That’s not a marketing strategy. It’s a PR trick with a short shelf life and, in many cases, a significant production cost attached to it.

Rewarding loyal customers is where NFTs had the most genuine potential. The idea of giving your best customers a digital asset that carries real utility, access to events, early product releases, exclusive content, is a sound loyalty mechanic. It’s essentially a membership token with a blockchain wrapper. Some brands executed this well. Most didn’t, because they focused on the token’s speculative value rather than its utility, which meant the moment the market dropped, so did the perceived value of being a loyal customer.

Attracting younger demographics was perhaps the most misguided objective. The assumption that Gen Z and millennials were uniformly excited about NFTs was always shaky. Plenty of younger consumers were deeply sceptical of the environmental impact, the speculation, and the scam culture that surrounded the space. Brands that launched NFT campaigns to signal cultural relevance often ended up signalling the opposite.

This connects to something I’ve thought about a lot when reviewing go-to-market decisions, which is that the first question any campaign should answer is not “how do we do this?” but “why would our customer care?” Most NFT briefs I saw in that period never got to the second question. If you’re thinking through how your digital or brand strategy maps to actual customer behaviour, running a proper checklist for analysing your company website for sales and marketing strategy is a more productive starting point than chasing whatever format is trending.

Where NFT Advertising Actually Worked

There were campaigns that worked, and they share a common structure. Nike’s acquisition of RTFKT gave them a credible presence in digital collectibles without having to pretend they understood the space from the inside. Starbucks Odyssey used NFT mechanics to extend their existing loyalty programme, tying digital tokens to real-world rewards rather than speculation. Both cases involved genuine strategic thinking about what the technology could do that other tools couldn’t.

The Starbucks example is instructive because it treated the NFT as an infrastructure layer rather than a campaign. Customers earned “experience stamps” through activities, and those stamps carried tangible value within the Starbucks ecosystem. The token was a means to an end, not the end itself. That’s the right way to think about any emerging technology in a marketing context.

There’s a parallel here with endemic advertising, where the placement is native to the context in which the audience already exists. The NFT campaigns that worked were endemic to communities that already cared about digital ownership. The ones that failed were brands parachuting into a culture they didn’t understand, hoping the association would transfer.

Early in my career, I made the mistake of overvaluing lower-funnel performance signals. If someone was already searching for your brand, already in-market, already warm, it was easy to attribute a conversion to whatever touchpoint happened to be last. NFT campaigns suffered from a version of this same attribution problem. The brands that saw “engagement” from their NFT drops were often just activating existing fans who would have engaged anyway. The token was the occasion, not the cause. Real growth requires reaching people who weren’t already looking for you, and very few NFT campaigns were designed to do that.

Understanding what drives genuine commercial growth, rather than activity that looks like growth, is something I cover in more depth across The Marketing Juice’s go-to-market and growth strategy hub, where the focus is consistently on outcomes over optics.

The Due Diligence Problem

One of the things that made the NFT advertising cycle so damaging for some brands was the speed at which decisions were made. The hype compressed the timeline. Brands that would normally spend months evaluating a new channel were approving NFT budgets in weeks, partly because they feared being left behind and partly because the agencies pitching them were equally underprepared.

I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which means I’ve seen a lot of campaigns in their most polished form, with the best possible narrative wrapped around them. Even in that context, you can tell when a campaign was built backwards from a technology rather than forwards from a problem. The NFT entries I reviewed had a particular quality: they were very good at explaining what they did and very vague about why it mattered commercially.

Proper digital marketing due diligence would have caught most of the bad NFT bets before they were made. The questions aren’t complicated: Who is the target audience and do they actually want this? What is the measurable outcome we’re optimising for? What happens to the customer relationship if the token loses value? What is the exit strategy? Most NFT campaigns couldn’t answer any of these cleanly.

This is not a technology-specific failure. It’s a planning failure that technology made worse by providing a veneer of innovation. The same dynamic plays out with any new channel. The brands that survived the social media advertising wave, the programmatic wave, the influencer wave, were the ones that asked hard questions early rather than chasing the headline. BCG’s work on commercial transformation makes this point consistently: sustainable growth comes from rigorous market understanding, not from being first to adopt whatever is new.

What NFT Mechanics Taught Us About Audience Segmentation

Even if the NFT moment has passed for most mainstream brands, the mechanics it introduced are worth keeping. Token-gated access, digital proof of ownership, tiered community membership, these are all ideas that can be applied without the NFT label and without the volatility that came with it.

The most commercially interesting application was always audience segmentation. If you could identify the subset of your customer base willing to engage with a digital token, you had, almost by definition, identified your most committed customers. That’s valuable data regardless of what you do with the token itself. The mistake was treating the NFT as the product rather than treating it as a segmentation signal.

I think about this in terms of the clothes shop analogy. Someone who tries something on is dramatically more likely to buy than someone who just browses. The act of trying on is a signal of intent, not just interest. An NFT holder who paid real money for a brand’s digital asset is the equivalent of someone already in the changing room. The question is what you do with that signal. Most brands collected it and then did nothing with it, which is a waste of a genuinely useful data point.

For B2B contexts, the logic is similar. If you’re running pay-per-appointment lead generation campaigns, you already understand the value of a qualified signal over raw volume. An NFT-gated event or community functions the same way: it filters for people who have demonstrated a level of commitment that casual browsers haven’t. The filter mechanism matters less than what you do once someone has passed through it.

This is particularly relevant in sectors where trust and relationship depth matter more than reach. B2B financial services marketing is a good example: the audience is small, the sales cycle is long, and the cost of a shallow relationship is high. Token-gated communities or digital membership mechanics could, in theory, create a more committed inner circle of prospects and clients. Whether the NFT label helps or hinders that in a regulated sector is a different question, but the underlying mechanic has merit.

The Measurement Problem That Nobody Solved

NFT advertising had a measurement problem that the industry never adequately addressed. On-chain data gave you transaction transparency, which was genuinely novel. You could see exactly who held a token, when they acquired it, and what they paid. But connecting that on-chain data to offline business outcomes, revenue, retention, lifetime value, was almost impossible for most brands.

The metrics that got reported were mostly vanity metrics. Floor price, trading volume, holder count. These are interesting if you’re running a speculative asset, not if you’re running a marketing programme. A brand that sold 10,000 NFTs at $50 each might look at $500,000 in revenue and call it a success. But if those 10,000 holders never bought another product, never referred a friend, and never engaged with the brand again, what was the actual return on that investment?

The honest answer, in most cases, was that nobody knew. The measurement infrastructure wasn’t there. Brands were using tools designed for crypto trading to evaluate marketing effectiveness, which is a category error. Market penetration as a metric, for instance, requires you to understand your total addressable market and what share of it you’re reaching. NFT campaigns rarely had that clarity because the audience definition was fuzzy from the start.

I’ve managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across multiple industries, and the discipline I’ve found most useful is insisting on a measurement framework before a campaign launches, not after. It forces clarity about what you’re actually trying to achieve. If you can’t define the metric before you start, you’ll find a metric that fits after you finish, and that’s just storytelling dressed up as analysis.

How to Think About NFT Advertising Now

The NFT label carries enough baggage in 2024 and beyond that most brands are better off describing what they’re doing in functional terms rather than technological ones. “Digital membership” or “token-gated community” communicates the value proposition without triggering the associations that “NFT” now carries for many consumers.

That said, there are contexts where the technology still makes sense. Gaming and entertainment are the most obvious: audiences in those sectors understand digital ownership and have demonstrated willingness to pay for it. Luxury goods have a natural fit because the scarcity mechanic aligns with existing brand values. Sports franchises have found genuine utility in using tokens as fan engagement tools, particularly for international audiences who can’t attend games in person.

The test I’d apply to any proposed NFT advertising campaign is the same test I’d apply to any channel: does this reach the right people, with the right message, at the right moment, in a way that’s measurable and repeatable? If the answer is yes, the technology is justified. If the answer is “we think it’ll generate buzz,” that’s a press relations budget, not a marketing budget.

For brands operating across multiple business units, the question of where NFT or token-based mechanics fit within the broader marketing architecture is worth thinking through carefully. A corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies offers a useful structural lens here: the decision about whether to run a token-based campaign should sit at the business unit level, not the corporate level, because the audience fit will vary significantly by product and market.

There’s a moment early in my agency career that I think about when I see brands chasing formats they don’t understand. I was at Cybercom, early days, and the founder handed me a whiteboard pen mid-brainstorm and walked out to a client meeting. The brief was for Guinness. My first thought was something close to panic. My second thought was: just do the work. The brands that came through the NFT cycle in reasonable shape were the ones that did the work, asked the hard questions, and treated the technology as a means to an end. The ones that didn’t are the cautionary tales that will appear in marketing school case studies for the next decade.

The reasons go-to-market feels harder now than it did five years ago are partly structural and partly self-inflicted. Structural because audiences are more fragmented and attention is more contested. Self-inflicted because brands spent several years chasing novelty over substance, and the trust deficit that created takes time to repair. NFT advertising was a particularly visible example of that pattern, but it wasn’t unique to it.

For a fuller view of how to build marketing strategy that holds up under commercial scrutiny rather than just generating activity, the go-to-market and growth strategy section of The Marketing Juice covers the frameworks and thinking I’ve found most useful across two decades of doing this at scale.

The question NFT advertising in the end forces is one that every new channel forces: are you building something that creates genuine value for your customer, or are you building something that creates a story for your internal stakeholders? The technology is almost never the answer to that question. The thinking that precedes the technology is.

Growth hacking frameworks, including the acquisition loops that underpin many of them, tend to focus on efficiency within a known channel. The more interesting challenge is knowing when a channel is genuinely new and when it’s just familiar mechanics wearing a new label. NFTs were mostly the latter: community, loyalty, exclusivity, and access are not new ideas. The blockchain wrapper was new. Whether that wrapper added enough value to justify the cost and complexity is a question most brands answered too late.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions