PENGU price bucked the crypto market lull and rallied against the market after the Pudgy Penguins brand made an appearance on the famous Las Vegas Sphere.

PENGU price has been on a downtrend since Dec. 10, and is down over 18% this month. However, as the Pudgy Penguins ad campaign appeared on the iconic LED-covered dome, the token reversed course and jumped into a short recovery, rallying approximately 7.5% from its Dec. 24 low.

Launched in 2021, Pudgy Penguins is a digital collectibles brand that features a set of 8,888 uniquely generated penguin characters, and over time, it has become one of the more popular NFT collections that has managed to stay relevant even as the overall NFT market has cooled over the past few months.

PENGU is the official utility and governance token for the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem and serves as a social currency for the brand’s ecosystem, enabling access to digital experiences, in-game rewards, and future governance decisions.

At press time, PENGU had backtracked some of those gains but was still up over 6% on the 24-hour time frame. In contrast, other major tokens such as Ethereum (ETH), BNB (BNB), XRP (XRP), and Solana (SOL) were mostly trading sideways or held minute gains between 0 and 2%.

Pudgy Penguins becomes the second to feature on the sphere

The Las Vegas Sphere is a one-of-a-kind immersive entertainment venue and a popular tourist destination that features the largest programmable LED screen in the world. As such, appearing on the Sphere means the Pudgy Penguins brand has been exposed to millions of viewers both on-site and across social media.

Pudgy Penguins has also become one of the only two crypto-native brands to be featured on the Sphere, which is known to be quite selective when it comes to ad placements. Besides the NFT brand, only Crypto.com has run a display campaign, as a part of which the Bitcoin logo was featured on the Sphere last year.

The team behind Dogwifhat, another meme coin, raised roughly $700,000 through a crowd-funded initiative in a bid to run a Sphere campaign earlier this year, but ultimately failed to secure a deal due to venue restrictions.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Pudgy Penguins’ chief of strategy and brand, Vedant Mangaldas, said the project spent roughly $500,000 on the ad campaign which will run for several days starting Dec. 24.

“It’s sort of showing that a crypto project can exceed and go out of crypto, touch the hearts and minds of everyday consumers,” Mangaldas said.

For PENGU, this is not the first time the token has reacted positively to mainstream exposure. Back in September, the token surged over 10% after the Pudgy Penguins team revealed the token was featured in the Q2 earnings report and conference call of NYSE-listed Bullish.