Celebs We've Lost To Crypto: Creed Bratton
The beloved star of The Office has entered the metaverse and created his own cult, in that order.
Scrolling my for you page the other day, I was greeted by a familiar face: Creed Bratton, the actor best known for playing Creed Bratton on NBC’s The Office. Like most millennials, I loved The Office, but the nostalgia for it has become a bit overwhelming; it’s definitely entered cheugy territory, I fear, and mentioning that you like it on your dating app profile is now an easy way to signal that you’re not a particularly interesting person (see also: sharing your opinion re: pineapple on pizza, or posting a photo holding a dead fish).
Two things about The Office remain true, however:
“The Injury” (season 2, episode 12, written by Mindy Kaling) is one of the funniest television episodes of all time.
Creed Bratton is an icon.
So when I saw videos on my FYP about his having started a cult, I didn’t even question it — I just assumed it was how he was referring to his fans. Tragically, this is not the case.
Unfortunately, Creed Bratton has hopped aboard the web3 bandwagon, and this ‘Cult of Creed’ refers to people who have bought one of his animated NFTs, or are hoping to.
The first CryptoCreed NFT drop was the above NFT, an animated version of Creed that can travel throughout the metaverse. I can’t even explain that to you in any more detail because thinking about all of this stuff gives me a headache, but it currently costs $175USD on OpenSea, a secondary marketplace, although the NFTs cost $20.22 during their initial drop.
Buying the NFT gives you access to a video trailer called “Introducing CryptoCreed”, which is the “first installment of a video series documenting Creed’s adventures in the metaverse”. It also gives you access to a CryptoCreed Discord server which comes with perks like exclusive content and bi-weekly chats with Creed himself.
The ‘buying an NFT in order to watch exclusive content’ is the same approach being used by Mila Kunis’ production company and their NFT project, Stoner Cats. I can just watch The Office or That ‘70s Show online though, so it’s not immediately clear why I would want to pay more than the cost of a Netflix subscription (in the case of Stoner Cats, a lot more - each NFT initially sold for $1000USD apiece) just so I can say I’ve seen this content nobody has heard of. Also: cats only smoke weed when they’re very distressed!!!!
As of writing, Creed has accrued almost 800,000 followers on TikTok and 6 million likes, as well as over 14,000 users of the Discord server run by his NFT company (I guess?), Alien Chicken.
In addition to NFTs, you can also buy Cult of Creed merch, from DFTBA of all places (people who used Tumblr or YouTube in the late 2000s will know what that acronym means).
The only piece of merch that mentions NFTs is this decal that reads, “You have more fun as a human, but you make more money as an NFT.”
It’s a reference to one of Creed’s lines on The Office about his time spent in cults, where he says, “you have more fun as a follower, but you make more money as a leader.”
The media production company behind Alien Chicken is Propagate Content, of which Ben Silverman is the co-CEO and chairman. Silverman was also an executive producer on The Office.
That suggests to me that Silverman and Bratton hoped to capitalise on people’s nostalgia for The Office and Creed in particular (you’ll note his NFT is dressed like Creed the character, not Creed the actual person) while also taking advantage of the myriad opportunities available to anyone with enough capital in the wild wild west of web3.
I’m not sure how successful it’s been, however. Creed’s social numbers are good, but I suspect a lot of people interacting with his TikTok content don’t even realise what the videos are ultimately promoting; most of the comments reference The Office.
The same thing happened when Creed held an AMA on the r/DunderMifflin subreddit earlier this year: not many questions about his crypto cult or NFT, many questions about his time on The Office, as well as some about his band.
One person even asked if the NFT stuff was satire because they couldn’t tell, to which Creed replied, “If you can’t tell, I can’t tell.”
Responses from his fans on Instagram were even more overtly negative, with commenters describing NFTs as a scam or pyramid scheme and joking about screenshotting the NFT rather than buying it.
Alien Chicken’s website has an FAQ section that includes answers to such pertinent questions as, “Why is Creed Bratton doing this?”
The answer:
“While some might call Creed Bratton an American treasure, he believes he is more of an American trinket. On top of that, Creed has always been comfortable with people playing with him. That’s where CryptoCreed comes in. Creed’s life has always involved blurring reality and fiction, and the digital sphere was the next logical step in his journey. Blockchain technology provides an opportunity to be truly creative without the fear of network overlords, and it gives us normal humans the chance to finally roam the weird and wacky mind of Creed Bratton. And hey, if we’re being frank… Creed has always wanted to scam the world.”
I’m sure that the last sentence about Creed wanting to scam the world (which, tbh, would be incredibly on-brand for Creed Bratton the character) was meant to be funny, but joking about scamming people when you are charging people real money for an animated version of yourself is a little on the nose.
Capitalising on nostalgia is nothing new, particularly in Hollywood, but doing so by creating NFTs feels grubbier than the tried-and-true hacky reunion special or reboot. People with far more knowledge than me have eloquently outlined why NFTs are a scam, and that’s before you even get into the more obvious scams being carried out by hackers that I seem to be hearing about almost every week now.
Speaking to Amanda Marcotte, Dan Olson of Folding Ideas talked about NFT sellers targeting groups who’ve historically felt alienated by more traditional money-making ventures like investing in stocks. He explained that:
“Sellers are targeting people with a very specific economic narrative about the system, with these myths of freedom and liberation. It's like, "Oh, the man can't track your money anymore. You don't need those pesky regulations. Those regulations just exist to keep you excluded.””
The marketing team behind CryptoCreed is too smart to use that kind of online libertarian rhetoric with Bratton’s fanbase, which undoubtedly skews liberal thanks to The Office writers and stars being largely left-leaning themselves. Instead, they’re aiming to mimic the success of cult brands that sell more traditional products: think Glossier, or SoulCycle, or Moleskine. (For more on how brands like SoulCycle make use of cultish language, check out Cultish by Amanda Montell.)
They’re acknowledging this by playing up the cult angle and making it literal, while also capitalising on Bratton’s existing fame and fanbase in the hopes he has enough of a cult of personality from a decade on one of the most-beloved sitcoms to drive sales of non-fungible tokens.
Instead of buying into crypto in an effort to bypass existing economic systems, you’re buying into Creed — the crypto is almost secondary. Based on the responses from Bratton’s fans on social media, however, it’s not clear that this strategy is working.
Bratton is far from the only celebrity who’s bought into the potential of NFTs as a get-rich-quick scheme. Celebs like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Eminem and Shawn Mendes have all auctioned off NFTs using their likenesses. Quentin Tarantino is selling ‘secret’ NFTs based on his original Pulp Fiction screenplay, which is an incredibly bleak and depressing sentence to write.
(Sidenote: Apparently secret NFTs “are a new asset class of non-fungible tokens, enhanced with privacy and access control features to create hidden content and experiences”. Whatever that means; I’m pretty sure people will still be able to screenshot them and taunt their owners on Twitter regardless of any new privacy and access features.)
Interestingly, Mila Kunis has sought to distance herself from pre-existing narratives about NFTs as investments, telling attendees of an online event featuring herself and Randi Zuckerberg, “I don’t ever want people going into NFTs thinking it’s an investment. Go into it because you love it, because you think it’s beautiful, because it brings you joy.”
I think as more celebrities and influencers with built-in audiences (read: potential customers) try and capitalise on those audiences in an effort to make money in the metaverse, we’re going to see more of a shift away from the idea of NFTs as investments, and more of a shift towards NFTs as another form of merchandise you can buy to show your support for a celebrity or creator. This would particularly be the case with NFTs that are more affordable, like Bratton’s, as they can then serve as an entrypoint into the world of web3, and particularly for NFTs like Bratton’s that promise access to the celebrity in question.
It remains to be seen whether people who are not already interested in web3 will be drawn in (and converted into web3 enthusiasts) by celebrity NFT releases. It’s hard to predict where all of this is headed, as Ryan Broderick has pointed out:
“We don’t know where crypto is going. It could be a massive bubble ready to burst any minute. It could be a series of overlapping bubbles. It could be gold that billionaires will eventually hoard in their palaces on the moon. We just have no idea yet.
Consider this my vote cast for ‘bubble ready to burst at any minute’.