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On stage at AdNews Melbourne L!VE, Corrine Barchanowicz, head of brand marketing and experience at Vicinity Centres, said: “We worked with Fabric, our creative agency, for our Christmas campaign, but we started in September, which is really late for our industry because we didn’t know if our stores could reopen for Christmas or not.
“The Galleries, our property based in the City of Sydney, is a shopping destination that really suffered the worst of the pandemic.
“We were actively trying to think through solutions that would create a safe space for people to feel comfortable coming back into the city.
“Creating a digital experience was something that we thought maybe our customers might see as a novelty or unexpected in a shopping centre.
“So with our creative agency, we redesigned the concept of a Christmas tree using NFT items. The idea was to leverage the skills of the artists to be able to create that experience.
“At the same time, the NFT project was really about recognizing the artists as creators who had also suffered quite a lot through the pandemic.
“We partnered with eight different artists, and we created an NFTree that was part of the Christmas tree experience.
“For us, we wanted to cultivate community and we had a great experience doing so, as we let the NFT artists take the lead themselves - in the design of the experience and the art.
“As a result, we saw a really strong drive in traffic into that property. You know this is gonna sound bad but it’s promising in context.
“We got traffic to within 10% of what it had been pre-pandemic, which in the CBD market at that time we hadn't seen for a while.
“So customers came into the centre, saw the art and the novelty of an NFTree guided them through to the blockchain and to buying the NFTs.
“We were then able to capture customer data as well and get those people onto our database, which was important for us too.
“At the end of the day, we made sure that everything was set up so that the NFTs were sold directly to the artists. We had no interest in taking a portion of that - it wasn't commercial in that respect.
“But as a result, we sold all of the NFTs with one of selling close to $15,000.
“We learnt about the role of NFTs and how technology can back our purpose of cultivating community and leaning into those experts who can help guide the way.
“And it really became a talking point in our industry, because initially telling people in the shopping centre industry we were doing NFTs we got a lot of really funny faces.”
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