A new category of advertisers is showing up on televisions across America -- crypto wallets and crypto trading platforms -- and it's aiming to upend banking, investment and financial services as we
know them. Over the past months, we’ve seen amazing creative work from Coinbase showing the massive inflation-beating value of bitcoin
versus bank deposits or stock. Then there are ads from Interactive Brokers’ IBKRForecastMarkets, which let you buy and trade crypto contracts on U.S. election outcomes.
The
emergence of crypto shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. The idea of global digital currencies that can be traded seamlessly and transparently without the massive centralized processing costs and
delays of legacy currency transactions has been growing for decades. All you need to do is read some history to understand that changes in currency issuance and trading have disrupted society and
trading markets as long as humans have had money. I’m old enough to remember when President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard.
But with a user base seemingly dominated today
by “crypto bros,” why would major crypto companies be testing out their marketing messages on TV? Here are some reasons why.
Winning mainstream customers. Most
crypto users today would certainly fall into Geoffrey Moore’s “innovator” and “early adopter” buckets, but with crypto platforms focusing their sights on legacy big
banks, brokerages and credit card companies, it’s all about reaching the mainstream. And nothing reaches more mainstream Americans faster with high impact sight, sound and motion ads than TV
does.
TV’s power to drive testing and usage. TV doesn’t just reach lots of Americans efficiently; it’s great at getting them to take action, whether it is selling
burgers, putting “butts in seats” for restaurants, “heads in beds” for hotels, or driving script lift for pharma companies. If you want many folks to download your crypto
wallet or test election prediction contracts, TV ads work.
TV has targeting, too. The fragmentation of TV viewership over the past decade or so is actually a real plus for
marketers. Audiences can be targeted by specific content like daytime finance shows, or by previous and predicted behaviors through data-driven linear buying. Plus, closed loop measurement now means
that TV ad campaigns can be directly linked to app downloads, usage, account funding and trading volumes -- just what crypto companies need.
So, why are crypto companies discovering TV
ads? Because that’s where their next 100 million customers are.
What do you think?
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