The opportunity

As the exclusive NFT art sponsor at Art Basel, Tezos was facing a delicate challenge by plunging into a community of art purists that considered NFTs an inferior gimmick compared to “real art.” For us, this became a challenge worth accepting: how could we turn skepticism and indifference toward Tezos into genuine appreciation and engagement? 

To reach this stubborn audience in an impactful, memorable way, we started by asking a provocative, central question pertinent to digital art created on the blockchain: When generative art is dominating NFT marketplaces, what is the role for humans in an increasingly machine-driven creation process? More importantly, how can humans and machines coexist, if at all? 

The idea

Through this lens, we created what became “Human + Machine: NFTs and the Ever-Evolving World of Art”—a multi-faceted program inclusive of an art exhibition, an educational speaker series, experiential learning, and community engagement. By exploring the role of humans and machines in the new world of digital creativity, we sought to show how these two elements were not opposing forces, but collaborators—and what that meant for the future of ownership, value, and creativity.

The centerpiece of the exhibit featured a collaboration with Mario Klingemann, a renowned pioneer of AI art from Berlin. Visitors could interact with Klingemann’s algorithm to generate a unique self-portrait, mint it as an NFT in real time, and collect it by creating a Tezos wallet. Supplementing this was a gallery with NFT artists from all over the world, and a thought-provoking speaker series where audiences could examine the larger questions about creating art in a digitally native world. With a global roster of panelists in these talks—including legends such as such as Refik Anadol and Nancy Baker Cahill—we demonstrated Tezos’ commitment to the thriving artist community in every region across the world. 

All of this was housed in a 2,500 sq ft immersive exhibition space designed and built by our team at Huge. We managed the choreography of hundreds of assets onsite and details behind the scenes. In addition to designing and programming the activation, we also promoted it—orchestrating the launch party, strategic press and influencer outreach around the exhibit, and follow-up pitching around key story angles to further create buzz around Tezos' presence.

The result

The activation surpassed our goals of increased network activity on the blockchain, and generated awareness of the up-and-coming NFT artists within the global community. We garnered 417M earned media impressions, 42.8M paid social impressions, and more than 2.2M speaker series views through live streaming, YouTube, and Vimeo. The press took note as well, with more than 550 articles about Tezos at Art Basel, 50 earned articles and features in 4 major broadcast segments. The month following our stake at Art Basel, Tezos received more than six million contract calls, indicating a substantial spike in network usage. Most importantly, we successfully engaged an elusive target audience and seeded the kind of conversations to drive awareness of the Tezos blockchain.

After appearing at Art Basel, Tezos shifted their marketing approach to embrace more real-life interactions and thought leadership opportunities—following Art Basel Miami, we brought Tezos to SXSW and helped lay the groundwork for subsequent Art Basel activations around the world, developer conferences, and NFT-centric events.