Crypto exchanges gun for the mainstream | WARC | The Feed

Crypto exchanges gun for the mainstream

With revolutionary potential for few and a mystifyingly complex lore for everybody else, the cryptocurrency world is attempting to create an image in the mainstream through major sponsorships and prime-time advertising and to expand its audience beyond the technology’s ‘cult’.

Why it matters

Blockchain technologies, best known as cryptocurrencies and NFTs, are genuinely exciting and carry the potential to upend several industries, but much of their use remains theoretical. In addition, their most vocal advocates have a cultish reputation that, along with the tech’s complexity, is off-putting to the general public.

One of the purposes of advertising is to make new things normal: removing uncertainty and instilling trust in the public that this is not a weird product to be using. It’s telling that for a digital technology emerging into a world more digital than it’s ever been, the media tools of choice have been old-school, high reach, and often celebrity-driven.

What’s happening

• Entering the US market, the crypto derivatives exchange FTX is ploughing $20 million into a TV campaign to air during the first game of the National Football League in the US as it seeks to battle incumbents by bringing on a new type of non-endemic crypto user, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• The ad, featuring the NFL legend Tom Brady alongside his wife, model and businesswoman Gisele Bündchen, is part of the company’s effort to expand its name through sports stars. The firm has also signed up the NBA’s leading three-point scorer Steph Curry as part of this effort.
• Meanwhile in Europe, even football clubs with longstanding brand partnerships are having their heads turned. Inter Milan’s iconic blue and black striped shirts have dropped tyre brand Pirelli in favour of the Socios.com-backed Inter Fan Token. The club joins other big clubs from around the continent in expanding their fan token businesses.
• The most significant show of this new power, however, was the news that Lionel Messi – widely regarded as the greatest-ever footballer – had accepted crypto fan tokens as part of his lucrative deal with French giants Paris Saint-Germain. Alongside their financial worth, which can rise with demand, these tokens confer some voting rights over minor club decisions.

Careful now

Given the sector’s murkiness, however, regulators are beginning to take note of cryptocurrency claims on both sides of the Atlantic, the Drum reports. The landscape is complex: Google and Facebook, having banned crypto ads, are now accepting them; TikTok’s position varies between ads and regular content. The industry is getting serious too, the Wall Street Journal recently reported on an emergent class of lenders willing to take crypto-holdings as collateral against loans, another concern for regulators. 

Ultimately, the technology is all about finance and in this speculative phase it carries a lot of risk, is moving quickly, and the ludicrous sums being made overnight make it no less confusing.

FTX’s tagline in the new ad is a simple “I’m in”, but there remains work to do in explaining to consumers what exactly they’re getting into.

Sourced from WARC, FT, Wall Street Journal, Sports Pro Media, The Drum, CNBC. [Image: FTX]