And Finally Artist News Brands & Merch Business News Digital

Pharrell named Chief Brand Officer at Doodles NFT

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 23 June 2022

If there’s one good thing that can be said about the NFT boom (I know that’s a big “if”), it’s that it seems to have brought with it a lot of the dafter elements of artist-brand partnerships that I think we all thought had died years ago.

You know, like giving celebs nonsense job titles. Surely that died with Justin Timberlake and MySpace? Well, arise Pharrell Williams, the new Chief Brand Officer at Doodles NFT.

The non-fungible-Pharrell-hook-up was announced yesterday at crypto conference NFT.NYC, as Doodles also revealed that it has raised its first round of funding led by venture capital firm Seven Seven Six. Williams will apparently direct the company’s approach to music, artwork, consumer products, animation and events. So that’ll keep him busy.

“I’m a big fan of the brand”, he said in a video message played at the event, according to Decrypt. “We’re going to build from the core community outward and bring Doodles to new heights, new levels”.

As well as overseeing all that brand stuff, Williams is also going to get to work as executive producer on a compilation album of music that will then be released as a collection of NFTs. I mean, I guess that’s a better use of Williams’ skillset, if you’re willing to ignore the nonsense concept.

Titled ‘Doodles Records: Volume 1’, the compilation will be released through Sony’s Columbia label and will – the NFT firm says – feature a number of “major recording artists”. They didn’t say who, but I suppose we can assume that Williams is one of them. Maybe they could all work together on one track and give us the NFT equivalent of the masterpiece that was the ‘MegaUpload Song’.

Williams wasn’t the only music celeb to appear at the NFT.NYC conference. Or at least so NBC News reporter Kevin Collier believed for a moment, when he thought he saw another pop star in the building who has famously jumped on the NFT bandwagon.

“I’m at the NFT NYC conference again in Times Square, and Snoop walked by, flanked by security”, tweeted Collier. “I grabbed his handler, said I’m a reporter, would love a few minutes. The guy said actually that’s an impersonator, legally can’t say it’s him, they hired him to drum up excitement. Feels like a metaphor”.

A photograph of the impersonator revealed that he was officially at the conference under the name Doop Snogg.