Playboy is on a mission to spread its famous bunny logo across the digital universe.
The company has dropped thousands of Playboy NFTs featuring bunny avatars, launched a digital social platform called Centerfold and has plans to build a new Playboy Mansion in the metaverse.
These plans are unfolding while an A&E documentary focuses on the company's unflattering past. “Secrets of Playboy” is a 10-part series making headlines by featuring former employees, playmates and past girlfriends of the company's founder, Hugh Hefner, alleging Playboy had a dark side.
Even before the series' debuted in late January, company leadership posted an open letter to its website noting, “today's Playboy is not Hugh Hefner's Playboy.”
The futuristic moves come almost five years after Hefner's death and two years since the last legacy print magazine hit the newsstands. Staging its digital reinvention for the next wave of internet innovation, which technologists call Web3, is the next big challenge.
“The magazine was one product of the company. But it was really that rabbit head that's worth billions and billions of dollars and not replicable,” Playboy CEO Ben Kohn told CNBC in a recent interview.
While the brand drives billions in consumer spending worldwide, much of it through licensed products sold overseas, Kohn said that business model is broken and that the company needs to make changes.
The CEO's fixes rely heavily on that not-so-secret weapon: the world famous bowtie-wearing rabbit.
“When you think about what this brand represents, from a marketing perspective, from an awareness perspective, we pretty much have 100% awareness everywhere in the world,” he said.
Kohn compared Playboy's brand awareness to Nike and Apple — companies with logos that are also instantly recognizable across the globe.
The company is focused on trying to leverage that “inherent value” in the digital world. For example, a Playboy SEC filing last year shows the company paid $12 million to purchase a Bombardier Global Express BD-700 so Kohn could unleash that priceless bunny logo across not just the sky, but also on the internet.
花花公子的使命是在数字世界中传播其著名的兔子标志。 该公司已经放弃了数千个以兔子头像为特色的花花公子 NFT，推出了一个名为 Centerfold 的数字社交平台，并计划在元宇宙中建造一个新的花花公子大厦。
这些计划正在展开，而 A&E 纪录片则关注该公司不光彩的过去。 “花花公子的秘密”是一个由 10 集组成的系列，以公司创始人休·赫夫纳的前雇员、玩伴和前女友为主角，称花花公子有阴暗面。
甚至在该系列于 1 月下旬首播之前，公司领导层就在其网站上发布了一封公开信，指出“今天的花花公子不是休·赫夫纳的花花公子。”
在赫夫纳去世将近五年后，距离上一本传统印刷杂志登上报摊两年后，这些未来主义的举措才出现。为下一波互联网创新（技术专家称之为 Web3）进行数字化改造是下一个重大挑战。
“该杂志是该公司的产品之一。但它确实是那个价值数十亿美元且不可复制的兔子头，”花花公子首席执行官本科恩在最近的一次采访中告诉 CNBC。
虽然该品牌在全球推动了数十亿的消费者支出，其中大部分是通过在海外销售的授权产品，但科恩表示，商业模式已被打破，公司需要做出改变。
首席执行官的解决方案在很大程度上依赖于那个不那么秘密的武器：世界著名的戴领结的兔子。
“当你从营销的角度，从知名度的角度考虑这个品牌代表什么时，我们几乎在世界各地都有 100% 的知名度，”他说。
Kohn 将花花公子的品牌知名度与耐克和苹果公司进行了比较——这些公司的标志在全球范围内也能立即被识别。
该公司专注于尝试在数字世界中利用这种“内在价值”。例如，去年花花公子提交给美国证券交易委员会的文件显示，该公司支付了 1200 万美元购买了庞巴迪全球快车 BD-700，这样 Kohn 就可以在天空和互联网上释放这个无价的兔子标志。
