How Qurable and adidas Made the First-Ever NFT Marathon Medals

Qurable is a web3 platform that enables creators and brands to leverage NFTs - using blockchain reward tokens - to create new loyalty and relationships with clients. Working with adidas for the first time, Qurable created an NFT finishers’ medal for the Buenos Aires International Marathon - allowing participants to collect a custom digital medal that certifies their finishing times and gives them access to other benefits, including adidas’ AdiClub loyalty program.

Discussing how the first-of-its-kind project came about, Federico Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Qurable says that the BA International Marathon and adidas were looking to add value and innovation to this year’s event - which presented a perfect opportunity for the company to offer a web3 element.   

The race is one of the stops on the Association of International Marathons (AIMS) schedule and had over 8,500 participants in 2022. This was a sufficient volume to make this activation viable for the Qurable team - assisted by adidas and the other sponsors’ willingness to understand the technology’s value proposition for the runners. Understanding the real value that these tokenised experiences can bring to the users is “the most important thing,” says Federico.

“Technology by itself can be interesting, but if it is not applied to the benefit of the consumer, it becomes a mere lab test. Two of Qurable's founders (including myself) are marathon runners - and we have other runners in the team - which clearly made it easier for us to understand the added value of a personalised NFT with the name and time of the finisher.” He continues, “We understand the value of this new technology, and what validation and authenticity processes involve in the blockchain. We picture all marathons around the world awarding this type of medal allowing runners to truly live a decentralised experience and certify their performance before any organisation in the world.”

From an advertiser’s perspective, the NFT medals also add sustainable value for brands by generating persistent experiences, rather than a series of disconnected marketing actions. Collecting these tokens on the blockchain allows brands to maintain a constant relationship with runners from event to event - not to mention opening up the possibility for incorporation into existing loyalty and discount schemes. 

Feeding into the public’s increasing desire to develop digital identities, Qurable designed the NFT medals, supervised by adidas, to incorporate the race’s branding - all with the aspiration of developing a collection of NFT medals for a global community of runners. However, as Federico explains, the real experience begins after a runner collects their NFT, by providing value beyond simply a token that symbolises a runner’s successful completion of a race. Offering exclusive content to holders of a common token is known in the web3 space as ‘Token Gating’ - and in the case of the finishers of the Buenos Aires race, the first benefit was an adidas thermal bottle that they could redeem at a local adidas store.

Onboarding the runners and simplifying the NFT process was the most challenging aspect of the campaign, says Federico, despite Qurable eliminating many obstacles that currently exist for a large portion of web3 use - such as the need for a crypto wallet. Thanks to the platform not requiring runners to have an existing crypto wallet, all 8,500 of the marathon’s participants received their personalised medal and could obtain it through just the click of a link. Of these participants, over 2,000 transferred their NFTs to crypto wallets, whilst the rest remain on Qurable’s platform.

“The familiarisation of users with these technologies is incipient, and we wanted to guarantee an excellent user experience,” he says. “We developed our social networks communication and a landing page… We understand this is a moment of transition from the technology that we use as consumers on the internet, and that simplifying the passage between web2 and web3 is the key to massive adoption - under this exact premise, we were born as a company and carrying it out in a process like this was very important.”

Currently, Qurable is working on a complete experience for another international marathon, hoping to create a “tokenised community of runners”, which - with luck - will eventually lead to the involvement of other major events like the New York, Boston and Berlin marathons. More generally, Federico explains that the company feels the responsibility of helping to form a “new internet” - one that is decentralised and “preserving of users’ identities”. 

He says, “Everything we know today will have a digital twin in the metaverse, or will at least be tokenised. We are facing this paradigm shift, and those of us who lead the market have the responsibility of making it diverse, equitable, accessible and sustainable.”