Playboy Wants To Build a New Mansion In the Metaverse

Playboy has plans to reboot its brand in the digital world through NFTs, digital subscriptions and a new mansion in the metaverse. CNBC reports: 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. 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. The plane is an homage to the black-painted DC-9, known as the Big Bunny, flown by Hugh Hefner in the '70s. The Global Express, which started off white, was gut-renovated before re-emerging five month's later with a sleek all-black body emblazoned with bunny logos and the same tail number used on its predecessor that whisked Hefner, celebrities and an entourage of Playboy bunnies around the world...

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