He’s big. He’s orange. He’s a carrot.
He’s not quite Santa Claus, but Carrot Guy still walks the streets bearing gifts for students: $5 gift cards for answering questions in a new social media app the mascot was created to promote.
As the Carrot Guy travels throughout campus, students flock towards him to take pictures or to steal the vegetable from his pail. Each time the Carrot Guy is present on campus, he holds a sign with the new trivia of the day.
When students take a carrot or answer the trivia question, they are handed a free carrot with a QR code from the mascot that links to a download for the app Carrot. It is a social networking app that promotes “authentic” communication between users, while simultaneously allowing users to earn free digital currency.
“[The founding team] wanted to do something that was an alternative to current social, that was this healthier alternative where people felt like they could be genuine, and they were learning about each other, and digging deeper friendships,” Carrot Guy said.
The app itself is fairly new, about a year old, and has been first promoted to college students. The Carrot Guy has not only explored USC’s campus, but has walked through UCLA as well.
“We think that college students really probably want to express themselves more than anybody else,” Carrot Guy said. " The Carrot app gives you an opportunity to do that because these questions really kind of dig into who you are, and what you believe, and what you think is funny, or cool. And so it’s a way of really expressing yourself, and that’s with college students.”
Founder and CEO James Tashjian said the idea of the mascot is not to specifically solicit the app, but instead to spread cheer to students while on campus, and advertise the app when asked. The company’s policy is to never reveal the current identity of the Carrot Guy, though Tashjian said he’s played the orange enigma in the past.
Carrot Group Inc. is a Los Angeles-based company, and this is one of the main reasons why Carrot has been targeted to students on both USC and UCLA campuses. However, Tashjian hopes that Carrot will continue to spread beyond local schools.
The app sends out “The Daily Dig” which is a new trivia question that users can answer to earn coins, deemed Carrot Coins, which can be redeemed for app-exclusive NFTs, or transferred to an external wallet. The NFTs purchased within, or added to the app, can be used to react to fellow users’ messages.
“The NFTs in the app are a way to decorate your messages. [Our team] thought it’d be super fun to be able to use the digital currency to buy really cute, fun animations,” Carrot Guy said. “Not expensive, like all that crazy NFT madness, but really, you know, you’re getting the coins for free and it’s something you can use the coins on to make your messages more unique.”
According to Carrot’s white paper, the Carrot Coins can be used to “send messages to their friends, redeem them for in-app NFTs, or transfer their coins out of the app into their external wallet to exchange tokens for other cryptocurrencies.”
Students on USC’s campus can download the app, answer the daily dig and show the Carrot Guy that they completed the trivia question. If it is completed, he gives students a five-dollar gift card to Starbucks.
Malini Pandey, a sophomore studying business administration and political science, was curious why there was someone dressed as a carrot, and “walked up and [she] then saw that you get a $5 Starbucks gift card.”
Pandey does not actively use the app, but every time she sees the Carrot she opens her phone and answers the daily question to score a prize.
Terence Holton contributed to this report.