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Blockchain Ads and Ads on the Blockchain
Ads are central to brand recognition strategies. In the crypto industry, there are a lot of ways companies have made an effort to stand out.
I want to take some time to thank everyone for reaching out with their thoughts and feedback over the last few weeks. I love seeing you guys reply to the newsletter with your takes on these marketing topics. My goal with this project was really to just write what I wanted to read about. It’s exciting to see how many great conversations are kicking-off from this.
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All emerging industries are free-for-alls. No best practices. No rules. That leaves a lot of space for trailblazing. And we’ve seen quite a few brands take a stab at leaving a mark in the blockchain space. Some less permanent than others.
There’s one example that stands out as a particularly powerful piece of advertising that still feels relevant today. One company put out an ad that not only exemplifies the new frontier that blockchain technology represents, but also directly addresses my obsession with arbitrage marketing opportunities.
I’ll let the ad explain what I’m getting at:
“From telephone poles to tattoos, and pre-roll to spaceships, we’ve put ads in, on, and around everything imaginable. So in today’s congested media channels, how does a brand be first in anything?”
That’s a great question, and they figured it out.
In 2018, TD Ameritrade put an ad on the blockchain and used it as a PR opportunity. Leveraging the bitcoin blockchain’s op_return function, they embedded an ASCII image over 68 individual transactions to create the first-ever permanent ad, all for $23.15 (or 0.00247766 BTC) in transaction fees. By the end of the first week, they gained 51.6 million impressions and a 229% increase in social media mentions.
Brilliant, right? And the video provides an elevated communication tool for explaining the vision and ethos of the ad. This, coming from a major institution. How uncrypto. How cool.
The thing about crypto is that everything in our industry is so fleeting. This is partly due to the fact that most of our industry’s community lives on Twitter (💡 ohhh, that’s why they’re called Fleets). It’s also partly because we work in emerging tech. A lot of the things being built right now, particularly in DeFi, are what I think of as “future tech.” They’re being built for a decentralized future that doesn’t exist yet.
Back in 2018, most DeFi tools we way over the average person’s head — both because they were generally hard to use but also because it was difficult to communicate the value propositions clearly. Permissionless money and lending is cool, but why? We saw huge leaps towards changing that paradigm in 2019 and 2020. Look at DeFi now. It all moves so quickly.
What we looked at above is just one example of many ads that have been produced to help promote the crypto industry to the average consumer. Every brand takes a different approach to communicating this difficult set of value propositions. I think it’s worth highlighting some of the great work marketers have done in our space with a bit of a round-up. So here we go…
“HODL (feat. Kristian Nairn)” by eToro
I’m going to kick this off with an ad produced by my employer, eToro, in 2018 (before my time at the company). Jumping on the worldwide success of Game of Thrones, eToro produced an ad combining the the timeless HODL meme with actor Kristian Nairn (who plays Hodor in the show). To date, this spot has over 1.2 million views on YouTube alone. I love it.
“Exchange (feat. William Shatner)” by Blockchain.com
Another one of my favorite crypto ads to date comes from Blockchain.com. Promoting the 2019 launch of their exchange, they tapped William Shatner to rob a bank and educate the masses on the power of the blockchain. Very well done.
“History of Money (Go Digital)” by Grayscale
Over the last couple years, Grayscale has released a few ads to promote their investment products to mainstream investors. The campaign kicked off running with their “Drop Gold” campaign, supported by an ad. They also produced another ad (above), outlining some of the key philosophical ideas behind why one might want to invest in cryptocurrencies -- as hedge against money-printing inflation and, duh, because it’s the future of money.
“Do Digital Currency Right” by Coinsquare
Coinsquare launched an ad in 2018, promoting the tag line "Invest with pros. Not with cons." Playing up a bunch of the popular negative stereotypes of the space, the Canadian exchange tried to attract customers by presenting themselves as a trusted platform for crypto trading. Turns out that messaging didn’t really age well. Yikes…
“Be the only one in charge of your money” by Ledger
In true “be your own bank” fashion, Ledger launched an ad last year with a funny gag that demonstrates how blockchain tech allows you to be a buyer, seller, lender, borrower, and custodian at the same time. This is one of the hardest value propositions to teach newcomers to the space and I think they did a pretty great job with it.
There’s a lot of great crypto marketing content out there. This round-up is far from a comprehensive list. I’d love to hear about your favorites. Tweet at @MarketMix_ on Twitter and I’ll RT them for the rest of the community to check out.
Who’s Hiring in Crypto?
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