NEW YORK – Creatd, Inc. (Nasdaq CM: CRTD), the parent company of Creatd Studios, announced the creation of an advisory board for the OG Collection, tasked with guiding the Company toward maximizing the potential value of the media library, which comprises a cache of rare and never-before-published materials and artwork originating from Bob Guccione’s personal and professional archives. These materials are rich sources for the colorful storytelling Creatd has become known for, painting a complicated picture of a highly influential and previously mysterious figure of 1960s-2000s popular culture.
In addition, the portfolio includes a number of transmedia projects that the Company has released previously or currently has in development, including:
- Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story: An insightful look into the mind of an artist, an entrepreneur, and an emperor. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013.
- Till Human Voices Wake Us: A fashion short starring Lindsay Lohan and directed by renowned artist and photographer Indrani. Premiered in 2015 and won Best Picture at International Fashion Film Awards.
- The Mind’s Eye: The Art of OMNI: An art book celebrating the remarkable creators who contributed to the most innovative and artistic science-fiction magazine in publishing history, OMNI. The book was published in partnership with Powerhouse Books in 2014. Red Bull Studios celebrated the release with a collaborative, experiential event.
- In production: The re-release and film adaptation of No One’s Pet: The Autobiography of Sheila Kennedy: Exploring Kennedy’s life in Guccione’s New York penthouse and out, punctuated by her time as Penthouse Pet of the Year 1983. The book-to-film adaptation of the No One’s Pet intellectual property includes a planned series for a streaming service, podcasts, and additional books on the lives of Penthouse Pets and individuals associated with the Guccione empire in the 20th century.
- In development: a fictionalized series inspired by the life and history of Bob Guccione, illustrating the personal life and inner workings of the man behind a media empire that would change the industry forever.
- In development: two podcasts on health and wellness inspired by the Company’s intellectual property Longevity and Viva. Both trademarks are part of the Company’s proprietary portfolio.
- In development: Sci-Fi anthology TV series inspired by the content of OMNI. In partnership with a streaming service, the Company is excited to bring the legacy content of OMNI Magazine back to life.
The Company previously announced on March 30, 2022, its intention to spin off the OG Collection into a new publicly-traded entity, an initiative expected to be a key liquidity event for the Company. The new company will maintain an ongoing partnership with Creatd Studios. The Company is actively in discussions with a number of M&A advisors and is reviewing multiple options including listing the new company on both the Nasdaq and tZERO.
As the Company has stated previously, the Collection is not currently valued on the Company’s balance sheet based on purchase price accounting guidance, despite its physical assets alone having been independently appraised at as much as $10MM. The copyright and additional media assets since acquired could see the value increase significantly. Upon its completion, the spin-off should strengthen the Company’s balance sheet and reward Creatd’s shareholders.
To help spearhead the effort, the Company today announced that it has established an advisory board consisting of several highly experienced archivists and headed by Creatd’s Lead Editorial Innovator and published author, Erica Wagner.
The advisory board includes:
- Martha Ball, the Processing Archivist for the OG Collection, is an emerging archivist who specializes in conscientious archiving of mixed media materials that illuminate and complicate popular culture history. Martha comes to the OG Collection from The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the D.C. Punk Archive, where she began her focus on describing and revealing the stories of women in cultural spaces.
- Consulting Archivist Parker Fishel is an archivist and curator who has spent the last decade preserving and celebrating popular music collections. Most prominently he has worked extensively with the Bob Dylan Archive® as well as the Grammy Award-winning Bootleg Series releases that explore the collection. With experience facilitating appraisals, acquisitions, archival organization, and public access, Parker’s focus is on bringing private collections to light and surfacing the stories within.
- A professional archivist for over 15 years, Jenifer Monger has focused on engaging communities and promoting responsible collections stewardship to foster a rich understanding of archival collections. She is currently the Assistant Institute Archivist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with roots in the curatorial and museum collections management sector.
Archival processing will establish the Company’s organizational and intellectual control over the Collection, supporting the asset’s ability to generate significant revenue. The Collection represents an impactful and popular sector of 20th-century cultural history that is not often explored or analyzed, representing new opportunities to further the understanding of sexuality, gender, and American studies among other disciplines. Without proper preservation and storytelling, this swath of history, one that is both complicated and prominent in cultural memory, is at risk of being lost forever.
The advisory board will execute curation, bespoke rehousing, documentation, and research to ensure the Company can fully leverage the contents of the collection, which include:
- Over 250,000 unique photographs, slides, and negatives:
- The photography collection is the largest component and is made up of photographic prints, original 35mm and 120mm transparencies, and even glass negatives. Penthouse photo shoots dating between 1973-1995 constitute much of this series, featuring unpublished photographs from the most recognized centerfolds, celebrities, and politicians.
- Images include those taken for iconic magazines in addition to Penthouse, including OMNI, Longevity, and Viva. Both OMNI and Viva were trailblazers in the magazine space, launching the genres of science fiction and futurism coverage and erotic magazines for women, respectively. HBO’s current series Minx, chronicling the business of a 1970s feminist porn magazine, is reportedly based on Viva.
- Approximately 30 portfolios and five flat slides containing 65,000 bound and unbound drawings, sketches, cartoons, and artwork by legendary illustrators, including Guccione himself, Alexander Wolfgang Olo, Michael Cummings, Bill Lee, and V. Kotyonochkin as well as satirists, humorists, and sci-fi artists. Highlights of these materials include the original 1969 Penthouse advertisements targeting Playboy‘s famous bunny logo.
- Nearly 1,000 documents of published and unpublished contracts, interviews, exposées, legal proceedings, handwritten letters, and other unique materials relating to contents and subjects throughout the General Media library of magazines, including some of the most recognizable figures in 20th-century history.
- Thousands of hours of original video taken by the creative groups at General Media and their associated magazines, Penthouse, OMNI, Longevity, and Viva.
Commented Creatd’s Founder and Executive Chairman Jeremy Frommer, “We have long waited to recognize and unlock the tremendous value embedded in the OG Collection, Inc. Due to particular accounting guidance, this collection has never been carried on our balance sheet. Spinning off the asset is the only way for shareholders to be rewarded. This one-of-a-kind collection can unlock tremendous value from my favorites, such as retelling the OMNI stories and reimagining the film Caligula in partnership with the Creatd Studios pillar.”
The market for NFT membership and use case projects continues to expand as Reddit, Snap, GameStop, and Universal all push forward with bold new NFT initiatives to support creators.
In addition to the vast physical components of the media library, the OG Collection, Inc. maintains a Web 3.0 portfolio, primarily created during the significant pull-back in asset prices, the portfolio includes:
- Metaverse plots in Decentraland, a 3D virtual world browser-based platform for digital assets, to digitally house the OG Gallery, NFT portfolio, and experiential event hosting
- The internally created OG Gallery NFT portfolio was established at minimum cost given the ownership of the underlying art by the OG Collection.
- In addition to the proprietary collection, its externally created NFT portfolio consists of artwork from creators, brands, and artists the Company is inspired by and associated with, including influencers under Creatd’s WHE Agency. These NFT assets were purchased at floor and early-stage level during the recent significant pull-back in NFT asset valuations.
- The Company additionally purchased cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, Polygon, and Mana to fund the OG Collections’ future Web 3.0 initiatives.
The OG Gallery sets the standard for the synthesis of e-commerce for physical art and the inherent benefits of an NFT linked directly to it. It is a new era in our Web 3.0 strategy, where we look to find further connectivity between the physical world and the digital one through the use of smart contracts, unlockable content in the experiential space, and membership/loyalty programs. The six Decentraland locations, owned by OG Collection, Inc., will begin development and design later this fiscal year and will offer experiences in the metaverse where the Company can showcase its collaborations with creators from musicians to digital artists.
Source: Creatd, Inc.