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How Closeup Built a Metaverse Wedding Chapel for Every Kind of Love
Closeup's City Hall of Love is an immersive virtual experience launched in Singapore in April 2022, built inside Decentraland, where diverse couples can create avatars, propose, exchange vows with a virtual officiant, and mint a free NFT marriage certificate onto the blockchain as a permanent record of their union.
The campaign arrives from a precise strategic position. Closeup is a Unilever oral-care brand whose creative platform has, for several years, centred on the idea that closeness is a universal desire — and that the barriers standing between people and the ones they love are worth dismantling. City Hall of Love extends that platform into one of 2022's most discussed media environments: the metaverse. By choosing Decentraland as its venue, the brand selects a blockchain-native, publicly accessible virtual world where any couple — regardless of gender, age, race, or social class — can participate without the legal constraints that govern physical marriage ceremonies in many jurisdictions.
Published in Singapore and developed by IPG's MullenLowe Group, the experience unfolds as a structured journey rather than a passive advertisement. Participants build personalised avatars, explore the virtual City Hall space, interact with a wedding officiant, move through a proposal sequence, and conclude by minting their own NFT certificate — a cryptographically unique digital asset recorded permanently on the blockchain. The campaign was submitted to the industry by Sarah Okrent of MullenLowe Group, and its creative framing carries the tagline that everyone is free to marry whoever they choose. Gaurav Datta, Global Brand Vice President at Closeup, stated directly in The Drum on 30 March 2022: "We believe that love of all kinds is special and must be championed." That declaration functions as both a brand position and a campaign brief.
Closeup built City Hall of Love on a consumer insight that is both commercially urgent and culturally charged. The oral-care market in Singapore, as in most of Southeast Asia, is a highly competitive category dominated by global players including Colgate-Palmolive and Procter and Gamble, whose brand communication tends to concentrate on functional efficacy — whitening, protection, freshness. Closeup has long pursued a differentiated emotional territory, and by 2022 that territory required a medium capable of demonstrating, rather than merely claiming, the brand's inclusivity credentials.
According to reporting by WARC, the campaign team identified budget constraints as a defining strategic condition. Rather than attempting mass-media reach, they concentrated resources on content creation and a digitally oriented early-adopter audience — precisely the demographic already inhabiting virtual worlds like Decentraland. WARC also noted that the metaverse and the NFT certificate were deployed deliberately as symbols of permanence: love recorded on the blockchain cannot be revised, revoked, or erased. That permanence carries rhetorical weight in markets, including Singapore, where legal recognition of same-sex relationships remained restricted at the time of the campaign's launch in 2022.
The strategic lineage matters here. According to reporting tracked by Clapboard, Closeup and MullenLowe had been building this platform since 2019, when the #FreeToLove campaign launched in the Philippines, using influencer couples and long-form interview-style films to reposition the brand away from toothpaste efficacy toward emotional closeness. City Hall of Love represents the most technically ambitious execution in that arc — moving from social video into an interactive, blockchain-verified virtual experience. As Paul from MullenLowe noted in LBBOnline, the campaign "leverages on Closeup's belief" and stands as "a great example of using technology for good." That framing is precise: the metaverse here is not a novelty layer but a functional tool for delivering an inclusive space that geography and law had not yet made available in the physical world.
City Hall of Love operates as a designed environment rather than a conventional advertisement. The creative execution centres on Decentraland, a browser-accessible, blockchain-based virtual world where Closeup constructed a dedicated space that users could enter without specialist hardware. The experience is structured as a sequential journey: avatar creation, environmental exploration, interaction with a virtual wedding officiant, a proposal sequence, and the culminating act of minting an NFT marriage certificate — a unique digital asset permanently recorded on the blockchain and issued at no cost to the participant.
The choice of Decentraland as the platform is itself a creative decision. Unlike closed branded environments, Decentraland is a publicly accessible metaverse with an existing community of users, which means the City Hall of Love space could be discovered organically rather than requiring a separate app download or registration barrier. The NFT certificate mechanism adds a layer of craft that distinguishes the campaign from purely visual or video-based work: each certificate is cryptographically unique, tied to the specific couple's interaction, and verifiable on the blockchain. This transforms what might otherwise be a symbolic gesture into a genuinely permanent digital artefact.
The campaign was developed by IPG's MullenLowe Group, with the project submitted to the industry by Sarah Okrent of MullenLowe Group. Production credits for the full technical build team behind City Hall of Love are not comprehensively documented in publicly available sources, though WARC's case documentation confirms the Web3 execution was a deliberate, budget-conscious production choice that prioritised digital craft over traditional media spend. The visual language of the space, as described in The Drum's coverage on 30 March 2022, emphasises warmth and ceremony — a virtual City Hall designed to feel like an occasion rather than a demonstration, reinforcing Closeup's core brand promise of intimacy and closeness through the architecture of the experience itself.
No single comprehensive performance dataset for City Hall of Love is publicly available, but the campaign generated a documentable trail of industry recognition and media impact that provides meaningful evidence of its effectiveness. According to WARC, media coverage of the campaign appeared in 95 publications against a stated target of 50 — nearly double the original benchmark. According to Unilever's own reporting, the campaign contributed to Closeup gaining a growing number of additional households in 2022 compared with the prior year, though specific household figures are not confirmed in independently verifiable public sources.
On the awards circuit, the campaign earned a Bronze Pencil at The One Show 2023 in the Social Channel — Single Platform category, as documented by The One Club with entry ID OS23_SM025B. According to Unilever's reporting, the campaign received nine Creative Circle Awards trophies including a Grand Prix, as well as Silver and Bronze recognition at Spikes Asia, though specific categories and years for those Spikes entries are not confirmed in independently available sources. WARC documented the campaign in an Asian Strategy case dated 29 November 2022. The campaign also received a nomination at Cannes Lions 2022, though a win is not documented in available sources.
The Clapboard Score for City Hall of Love is 70 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign with genuine creative and strategic distinction — an early and purposeful deployment of NFT and blockchain mechanics in service of an inclusive brand message in Singapore — tempered by the limited scale of verifiable audience data and the relatively contained reach of a metaverse-native activation in 2022. The structural effectiveness of the campaign, however, is clear: it generated disproportionate media coverage, earned industry recognition across multiple shows, and advanced a brand platform that Closeup and MullenLowe had been building consistently since 2019.
City Hall of Love is an immersive virtual experience built by Closeup and MullenLowe inside Decentraland in 2022. Launched in Singapore, it allows diverse couples to create avatars, go through a wedding ceremony, and mint a free NFT marriage certificate permanently recorded on the blockchain, regardless of gender or background.
Closeup chose Decentraland to create an inclusive space where any couple could marry freely, bypassing legal restrictions that applied in physical jurisdictions including Singapore in 2022. According to WARC, the team also used the metaverse platform as a budget-conscious way to reach digitally engaged early adopters rather than pursuing broad mass-media spend.
The NFT marriage certificate is a cryptographically unique digital asset minted on the blockchain at the end of each couple's City Hall of Love experience. Issued free of charge inside Decentraland, it serves as a permanent, verifiable record of the couple's union and is central to the campaign's message of enduring, inclusive love.
City Hall of Love was created for Closeup by MullenLowe Group, part of IPG, and published in Singapore in April 2022. The campaign was submitted to the industry by Sarah Okrent of MullenLowe Group. It extends a brand platform MullenLowe had developed for Closeup since the #FreeToLove campaign launched in the Philippines in 2019.
City Hall of Love won a Bronze Pencil at The One Show 2023 in the Social Channel — Single Platform category, as documented by The One Club. According to Unilever's reporting, it also received nine Creative Circle Awards including a Grand Prix, plus Silver and Bronze recognition at Spikes Asia. A Cannes Lions 2022 nomination is noted though a win is not confirmed.
City Hall of Love holds a Clapboard Score of 70 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine creative innovation in deploying NFT and blockchain technology for an inclusive brand message in Singapore, balanced against the limited publicly verifiable audience data typical of metaverse-native activations at the scale achievable in 2022.
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