Archived on 15/05/2025

Bring Nouns to 2m+ People over 15 Months at Japan’s Best Ski Resort and Integrate Nouns into the Alpine Subculture

Benbodhi

Bring Nouns to 2m+ People over 15 Months at Japan’s Best Ski Resort and Integrate Nouns into the Alpine Subculture

TL;DR

Introduce nouns to an estimated +2 million people over 15 months (2 ski seasons), at the largest all-season resort in Hokkaido, Japan from January 2023 through May 2024.

Core initiatives will include IRL activations, physical/rideable features, posters, interactive engagement, education and sponsorship opportunities throughout the resort.

A lot of it will be captured by film makers and photographers and we’ll compile a CC0 media bank that will offer the nounish community assets to use in their productions that capture the nounish spirit in the alpine.

Total ask: $198k USD

Introduction

We recently launched Alps DAO, which is a fork of Nouns DAO that is focused on establishing long term relationships with alpine resorts to proliferate Nouns, provide unique membership perks to DAO members and support proposals that enhance on-mountain environments and experiences.

Founded by Benbodhi and ThaSwami who both share a common passion for Nouns and the alpine, Alps DAO has been self funded to date. This has included all development of concepts, code, community and forking the Nouns DAO protocol.

We’ve partnered with Rusutsu Resort, 4 time winner of Best Ski Resort in Japan. The resort accommodates in excess of 3,000 guests per day across 1000+ hotel rooms attracting 400,000+ overnight stays and 1,100,000+ million day visitors per year with a mix of 60% local and 40% foreign visitation. The resort also hosts events like the G1 Summit where the attendees represent entrepreneurs and next generation leaders from Japan.

ThaSwami holds a senior management position within the company that owns Rusutsu Resort, enabling preferential advertising rates and enhancing a cooperative relationship with the resort.

  • +2,000 hectares across 3 Mountains
  • 14 Ski Lifts and 4 Gondolas accessing 37 Ski Runs
  • Hokkaido’s Largest Theme Park with 60 Attractions
  • 72 Holes across 4 Golf Courses
  • 3,000,000 Person Catchment
  • 39,000 Vehicles Per Day
  • 2,300 Capacity across 14 Conference Facilities
  • +1,000 Hotel Rooms
  • 20 Food & Beverage Outlets
  • 15 Retail Stores

Nounify Hokkaido’s Largest All-Season Resort

We’ll create bilingual visual awareness, call to action signage, branding sponsorship throughout the resort, physical structures for long lasting film opportunities, activities to engage resort guests, social media presence on multiple platforms and provide educational materials about Nouns DAO.

Take a look at the scale of this activation!


Resort Activation Map

Some of the things we’ve lined up:

⌐◧-◧ Thousands of noggles distributed for free across the resort

Noggles handed out en masse to really get the attention of guests and encourage social sharing with strategic hashtags.

⌐◧-◧ Resort Socials takeover

Periodic takeover of the official Rusutsu Resort social media feeds (Instagram 22k followers, Facebook 37k followers, Twitter 14k followers).

⌐◧-◧ Posters in 247 gondolas

60 x 16cm posters will capture undivided attention with an average 9 minute travel time per gondola trip, 6,000 person carrying capacity per hour, and operating daily from 9am-4pm.

⌐◧-◧ Signage at 3 gondola stations

168 x 119cm signs at gondola station lift lines provide large format visuals to skiers and snowboarders before riding gondolas, creating a call to action pre-gondola rides.

⌐◧-◧ Signage at 2 on-mountain restaurants

Signage at 2 on-mountain restaurants with a capacity of 750+ seats will be visible for the entire winter season. On-mountain restaurants represent 60% of the resort’s daytime food and beverage activity and are patronised by almost every person on the mountain.

⌐◧-◧ Terrain park naming, branding and feature

  • Renaming of the terrain park to Nouns Terrain Park that will appear on digital trail maps and the resort website.
  • Custom banners planted strategically near rails, boxes and jumps to maximise photo and video opportunities.
  • Custom built nounish terrain park feature similar to what was created in Rio de Janeiro will also be produced and installed at the resort.
  • Potential for permanent installation beyond the proposed 15 months.

⌐◧-◧ Pop-up dioramas in-resort

  • Locations within the resort will allow for pop-up dioramas, backdrops and life-size cutouts, similar to Nouns Fair at ETH SF (Prop 162) and NFT Fest Australia (Prop 164).
  • Pop-ups will include call to actions to take selfies and photos of eachother post photos on social media, using hashtags as well as QR codes and website links to track metrics.

⌐◧-◧ POAP pull-up banner

Banner installed in high traffic area of resort for POAP claims.

⌐◧-◧ POAP treasure hunt

  • Wallet and POAP onboarding website guide.
  • 20 NFC/QRcode activation touch-points in-resort and on-mountain.
  • Prizes for completing a full POAP collection.
  • Ongoing engagement through holders of the collected POAPS.
  • Onboarding opportunities, introducing people to the technology, Nouns DAO and community artists.

Why The Alpine Subculture?

  • Typically snow sports attracts a predominantly wealthy demographic which leads us to believe the onboarding potential is immense.
  • The art, the technology and the community are culturally relevant to alpine enthusiasts.
  • There is a huge global audience of 135 million skiers/snowboarders worldwide and 2,000 ski resorts across 68 countries.
  • The scalability of proliferation spans the globe.
  • It’s an untapped market in terms of bringing Nouns DAO, NFTs and crypto in general into the lifestyle.
  • The alpine enthusiast subculture is super passionate about their lifestyle which brings value to proliferation. People share their story with friends, family and online. Nouns can be a big part of that story.
  • User generated content is a powerful flywheel where a large subset of the culture films everything they do.

Why Japan?

  • Nouns has a strong and growing following in Japan with Nouns DAO Japan (+3,000 Twitter followers and +4,000 discord members) and is the only foreign language currently translated on nouns.wtf.
  • Japanese culture resonates with the Nouns artwork.
  • It is predicted that the NFT industry in Japan will grow significantly through 2028, with an anticipated compound annual growth rate of 38.7% from 2022 to 2028 (source).
  • The Japanese government is supportive of the technology, having awarded NFTs to 7 mayors for their achievements in using digital technology to solve issues and announcing NFT and Metaverse expansion (source).
  • “Nouns DAO” receives the most interest globally on Google Trends from Japan.
  • Hokkaido, Japan is known as the powder mecca of the world.

Expression Sessions

We’ll organise expression sessions to onboard the alpine and snowsports sub-culture to the Nouns ecosystem through community engagement. Both local guests and professionals will be invited to have fun and showcase their skills on the mountain while wearing nounish gear provided and/or riding nounish features.

In the spirit of being nounish, we’ll hold engaging contests and offer prizes throughout the expression sessions for fun and creative categories. We’ll also educate on the potential of sponsorship via proposals through Gnars DAO and Alps DAO.

We will encourage people to capture photos and film of the activities that can then be added to a CC0 repository and shared on social media with strategic hashtags.

CC0 Media Repository

Capturing this nounish alpine resort takeover with world class skiers and snowboarders in the heart of northern Japan will not only proliferate the Nouns brand in Japan, but allow us to start building a CC0 media repository that demonstrates this subculture to the world.

By creating this repository and encouraging the use of the media, it will spin up an incredibly rich nounish content generation flywheel. This has the potential to reach the rest of the world, resonating with the global ski and snowboard community totalling 135 million people.

We will also have independent filmers and photographers on mountain to capture many of the nounish moments and activities throughout the season.

During their time in Hokkaido they will be documenting attendee activities, the proliferation of Nouns at Rusutsu Resort and throughout the local community, athletes and local talent, and all things culturally unique to Japan.

Anyone in the world will able to cut together footage from the repository, all featuring the iconic noggles and create their own films and promos. Imagine the following video at Rusutsu Resort, but nounish.

Rusutsu
https://youtu.be/RgTjl4_h4Kg

Measuring Success

Analytics over the activation period will be captured through a variety of touch points and made available to the community. These include:

  • QR code scans - posters and signage will contain QR codes leading to a landing page with further directions to project specific websites, enabling more granular data on customer click throughs.
  • POAP claims - the gamified POAP treasure hunt will deliver data on the number of participants throughout the activation period based on POAP claims. Additionally, further engagement with holders can also be measured.
  • Resort visitor numbers - general branding awareness will be measured by data from the resort with respect to hotel guest numbers and daily visitation statistics.
  • Analytics on media content produced and strategic hashtags used.
  • Physical items distributed.
  • In-resort onboarding can be measured via verifying POAP claims from Rusutsu Resort along with nounish NFTs in a token gated channel in the Alps DAO Discord.
  • Media repo usage stats and attribution where available from further created content.
  • Hashtags - posts using strategic hashtags.
  • Engagement during resort social takeovers.
  • Number of people engaged in expression sessions.

Timeline

Expression sessions and POAP “Treasure Hunts” will be pop-up by nature and held multiple times throughout the 15 month engagement, as will the resort socials takeovers.

There will be ongoing marketing engagement throughout the resort the entire time as well.

The following key elements will take place on this timeline:

Q1 2023

Proposal process, begin engagements at resort, artwork and asset creation, installation of posters, signage and banners, terrain park branding online, design physical nounish feature/structure.

Q2 2023

CC0 Media Repository build, nounish physical feature/structure build.

Q3 2023

CC0 Media Repository launch and proliferation, engage with film makers to make nounish content using the media collected, nounish feature/structure Summer installation.

Q4 2023

Further artwork and asset creation, terrain park branding both online and in print, nounish feature/structure Winter installation.

Q1-Q2 2024

Organised film session with nounish feature/structure, compile and present the results and effectiveness of the activation.

Funding Breakdown

  • Nounifying the Resort: $109k USD which equates to less than $248 per day for the entire 15 month activation.
  • Expression Session Activations: $24k USD.
  • Content creation by independent film/photo crew and editing: $15k USD.
  • Team/Staff Compensation & Operations: $50k USD.

Total Funding Request: $198k USD

Detailed breakdown:

Who We Are

Benbodhi

I’ve been a dev for over a decade and have created software that over 1 million websites are actively using. I was attracted to Nouns DAO towards the end of 2021 while digging through smart contracts that were implementing onchain art. I was immediately drawn to the elegance of the protocol and shifted everything I was doing to embrace the nounish lifestyle and have been working full time in the ecosystem since.

As a nounish builder, I’ve founded and been working with multiple teams and projects during my time in nouns. I’m very passionate about nouns, snowboarding and alpine culture!

Having lived at ski resorts in the past, I hope to be a catalyst for making nouns synonymous with alpine culture and introduce this huge audience to the power of community building through the DAO structure while ultimately onboarding this subculture to Nouns DAO.

I’m @benbodhi on Twitter

ThaSwami

I’ve been active in the Nouns community since May 2022 when my then 12 year old daughter @lilpurpberry joined the Nouncil as its youngest member.

I’ve been a real estate professional IRL for over 18 years and specialise in asset management, master planning, development and operations within the ski resort and hospitality sectors. I hold a senior management position with the owners of Rusutsu Resort, one of the largest ski resort owner operators in Japan and as such will enhance communication and delivery of the proposal objectives.

I co-founded Alps DAO with Benbodhi in late 2022, with a view to proliferate Nouns through my industry specific network and help build a treasury that will support alpine communities and enthusiasts.

I’m @tha_swami on Twitter

Summary

Building on the momentum of the awareness of Nouns DAO in Japan, we’ll introduce Nouns to Japanese and alpine culture through IRL marketing activations over 15 months with an audience of over 2 million people, executed by a passionate team at Japan’s 4 time winner of best ski resort in Japan, Rusutsu Resort.

The success of this proposal will set precedent for this type of activation to be scaled globally and harness the potential for a deeper relationship within Rusutsu Resort’s network, allowing us to integrate Nouns branding further.

Thanks for your time and consideration!

Benbodhi

Thank you for reading this far!

We’re here to answer any questions and listen to feedback for a couple of days before we put this proposal onchain.

ThaSwami

Thanks frens. I’m here as well so feel free to hit me up with any questions and comments as well

fiveoceans_dev

Love the idea! Well done AlpsDAO!

BigshotKlim

Absolutely love the idea and excited about the possibilities for all sorts of excellent things we all can do with signage, merchandise, AR and other forms of media with you. Great job on putting this together

Benbodhi

Thank you! Super excited to finally get the ball rolling!

Benbodhi

Thanks Klim!
I am too! Looking forward to chatting more about some of the opportunities.

Nouns-Whisky

This is awesome guys! If our prop passes we will be sending some whisky your way in 2026 to keep everyone warm. Cheers.

BigshotKlim

I think activations like this will be able to bring all of the projects together for a glorious showcase of what is poissible

ThaSwami

We hope so too. There are so many opportunities when dealing with a wholly owned and operated resort partner. Brand, lodging, food and beverage, season specific activities, retail, conferences. We’re excited with what long-term activations and partnerships can develop into.

supriyo

@Benbodhi this is really cool :slight_smile: . Love that you are using POAPs etc as a way of measuring reach.

BigshotKlim

Absolutley! we do a lot of work with Disney Consumer products , Universal and other brands that have huge IRL activations so I see the potential of doing this and look forward to playing with you when the time comes

Benbodhi

Thank you!
We’re definitely going to try and capture as much data as possible and poaps are a great way for quick, easy and free onboarding.
We’ve got a few other ideas up our sleeve similar to poaps too.

Appreciate the support.

SuperTightWoody

This is an amazing initiative and the cost is relatively low for the deliverables. No feedback other than HELL YES (and, make sure we include something on the Noggles like “Don’t wear these when skiiing”!)

Great job guys- looking forward to this one :slight_smile:

Benbodhi

Thanks man!

Haha yeah, that will be interesting if people try and wear them as goggles.
Would be epic to make some IRL snoggles though eventually. For now it’s likely going to be Klim’s lofi noggles.

Appreciate the feedback and support🙏

BigshotKlim

FYI these things are Pretty safe after all of the hoops we had to go through remaking the entire production run to make it up to code (*protective eyewear WTF?) the next run will have UV coating on the lenses to actually offer some protection =)

Benbodhi

Just updating this post with the link to the proposal onchain:

Clover

Love The idea @Benbodhi :heart_eyes::heart_eyes:

Benbodhi

Thanks legend! Appreciate the support :heart:

ponti

Has anyone noted that it is only Ugly DAO people that post praise to each other on Discourse? Let us not forget @Benbodhi is the owner of Ugly DAO along with @toadyhawk.

It appears there is a group of people that have figured out how to play the Nouns system very well. They know how to write their proposals. They seem to all know each other and go around telling everyone what a great job they are doing.

And they convince Nouns they are doing something groundbreaking as they do unremarkable things and get overpaid for doing it. Anyone looking from the outside and I presume many on the inside know its burning Eth needlessly. Passing proposals like this does more harm than good. It damages the Nouns brand when others recognize that by purchasing a Noun they are throwing their Eth away like this. It reduces morale for other participants when they see the game that is being played to pass proposals like this.

https://twitter.com/HeyAnoun/status/1615118640927444993

ponti

We must also not forget that @Benbodhi is second in command at Gnars, and one of the “genius” minds behind Proposal 189 and “GamiGate 2022”:

Proposal 189 saw a whopping 298 votes

Breaking the @ nounsdao record for voter turnout of 251 votes held by Proposal 167

But I’ve a confession to make… We pulled a publicity stunt. Here’s the how and why:

Benbodhi

@ponti
Time to sit down and listen for a minute.

Firstly, thank you for the compliment on proposal writing, I appreciate it. We put a lot of work into this proposal so I’m glad that’s clear.

Honestly, discourse isn’t the best spot for feedback, praise is nice regardless of who it comes from and it’s bound to be frens in this space that are paying attention when we’re around everyday.

Now let’s get something clear about Ugly DAO - this is a group of nounish builders who bought nouns together. I created the discord for us to chat in, so yeah I own that, but that’s the extent of it. It’s literally a group of people who bought nouns together and there really isn’t an owner more than any other.

And let’s get to the gnars comment. You are very clearly misinformed and it shows when you say stuff like this. I am a mod in the gnars discord, but I’m a community member like everyone else. I have been a long time supporter of gnars because I love the vision and community. I am not second in charge, that is a weird thing to say and not sure how you came to this conclusion. Additionally, I actually had very little to do with the recent proposal 189. That was put together by a number of other community members and once again, I’m just a big supporter of gnars. It shows how much you don’t know when you say things like this.

While you go around slandering passionate builders with baseless claims, I’m out here putting my time into many nounish projects and helping the community grow. I’m still to see anything of value from you. So please keep your comments civil and factual or don’t bother. Maybe do something cool instead of complaining.

ponti

This is a lie that is quite easy to prove false. Ugly DAO is a 1 of 2 Gnosis multi-sig between you and @toadyhawk. Please see the Gnosis Safe you created below.

Also, this is not a very secure way to store 2 Nouns. Please do better.

ponti

Another lie. You are listed in the proposal and are on the Gnars multi-sig (this one is a 3/5, good job @skateordao)

Also, when did you know that Gami inflated proposal 189 by 273 ETH, and when did you first speak out against it? Actually, have you spoken out against this yet?

Do you denounce this type of deception at the DAO?

Benbodhi

The multi sig doesn’t represent the actual ownership and agree it should have more people on it, we just created it and did the bidding for the nouns. Offered for the crew to be added, but no one has been in a hurry to add themselves because we aren’t going anywhere.

Benbodhi

I think they listed me because I do a lot of things for the DAO for nothing and were looking to add me to rounds for compensation I guess.

I had no input on pricing the prop, like I said, I didn’t work on it. I believe gnars could spend any amount well. I also think Gami is one of the highest value proliferators in Nouns, regardless of your opinion of what happened. Being on a multi sig doesn’t mean I worked on the prop.

This thread is supposed to be for feedback on the proposal, so please try and stay focused.

ponti

When did you know that Gami inflated Proposal 189 by 273 ETH, and when did you first speak out against it? Have you spoken out against this yet?

As the largest holder of Gnars tokens behind Gami (you own 101 tokens, he owns 117 tokens), surely you must have had questions about this?

The answer to these questions will inform the DAO on whether to entrust you with more funds for your Alps DAO proposal.