For those of you not accustomed to the NFT market, specifically the ETH NFT market, Gabriel Leydon (currently 1m followers, pre-Super Bowl 700k), CEO of DigiDaigaku (current floor 9.39 ETH - pre-Super Bowl 11 ETH) and Limit Break (DigiDaigaku studio), pulled a major stunt on the 12th of February by issuing a Super Bowl ad for his new collection entitled DigiDaigaku Dragon Eggs (current floor 0.24 - floor during ad minting phase 0.6) - at roughly $7m of payment.

Supposedly this was done as a means of project exposure and mass Web3 onboarding through the Web2 masses, albeit the execution of it was, from personal point of view in terms of market health and stability, sub-optimal for the space -

Opening sequence of DigiDaigaku's Super Bowl ad

A short animation of the Digi universe was presented during live TV, prompting you to scan a QR code in order to mint one of the DigiDaigaku Dragon Eggs NFTs. All good so far. Major issue? QR code led you to a prompt to follow Leydon's Twitter profile, instead of any educational content on the collection, Web3, or NFTs (or even maybe the concept of digital collectibles to not make it sound like a crypto scam).

What this led to was essentially a $7m stunt to farm Twitter followers from the Web2 audience of the Super Bowl - Leydon earned himself a rough 300k followers through this stunt, arguably pricing each follower gained at $23 a piece.

Results were felt heavily through the Digi community, with the collection's floor dropping rapidly from its stable 10-11 ETH floor all the way down to the 7-8 ETH range - at current date being priced at 9.39 ETH a piece due to the market rally resulted from the $BLUR token liquidity injection into the NFT market the past days.

OpenSea Activity chart of Digi's main collection - DigiDaigaku Genesis

Leydon claims the Super Bowl ad was a massive success for the collection, yet the Digi floors speak otherwise, with all Digi collections having crashed down quite heavily post-ad.

Was it simply an execution error? Tough to tell, but this has to have been one of the worst stunts pulled in terms of Web2 adoption in the past months at an NFT market health level.

What's worst is that these onboarded into the collection haven't even been Web2 people, but rather already-existing participants native to the ETH NFT market who knew the ad was coming, and eagerly waited to grab their NFTs - claims are that the initial 5k supply minted out in a literal 1 second. Essentially - the results were a recycling of the already low numbers of NFT market participants.

What makes it even worse is that the execution could've been done so much better and it could've been a very healthy movement not just for Leydon's Digi collection, but for the NFT space as a whole - heavy onboarding of a fresh Web2 audience into the NFT market would've brought a lot of outside users and liquidity that the market needs.

Instead of leading Web2 people to a (in the case of a Web2 individual, a nobody's) Twitter profile, Leydon could've instead issued educational content for smooth onboarding into the Digi ecosystem.

Massive miss thinking this movement could've been used to instead lead Web2 individuals to a nice and shiny landing page with information on the new collection, along with general information on the NFT market.

Unfortunately, this shows how Web3 is still not prepared to fully blend with Web2, when major pioneers of the space fail to see beyond their own personal focus, instead of aiming for the betterment of Web3 as a whole.