Matt Damon's CRYPTO.com Ad was a Warning Sign of a Crash
Mass Advertising of Financial Services without Substance is a Sign of a Market Peak
The wisdom (or better yet lack there of) of the crowd is commonly examined for investments and sports betting. Often, the crowd gets it wrong and loses their money. They get in during the hype of a bull rally just before the peak and are headed for the exits emotionally during a bearish run. The public generally bets on their favorite teams to win, bet the over on the total points/runs scored because it is fun, bet on parlays because of the high possible payouts and bet on a horse because they like the name. The public is emotional and gets a lot of things wrong and marketers know it.
If you saw the Matt Damon Crypto.com ad on television during a sporting event and felt a bit queasy, it is a very natural reaction. It was your warning to SELL as cryptocurrency assets would be available at cheaper prices in the future.
YES, THAT MATT DAMON AD.
This Matt Damon Crypto.com advertisement was released to YouTube on October 28, 2021.
Matt Damon, a bleeding heart progressive, pitching decentralized finance in the vaguest of terms without even mentioning what Crypto.com does. Does it make sense? Of course not. It's a one minute appeal to emotion that could have been about any subject.
Who is the target audience for this commercial? If the ad buys are an indication, the lowest common denominator. These were ads run usually during sporting events, which attracts an audience that is often the target of untargeted advertisements that are simply trying to get awareness of their brand in any way they can.
Cheap beer, low-grade chain pizza, credit cards, car insurance, pickup trucks, and wireless provider commercials are the common advertisements. They all usually resort to advertisements that follow one of two formulas: Hammer you over the head with a sales pitch or comedy sketches transformed into advertisements. This is the untargeted realm where Crypto.com's Matt Damon ad was placed.
Most of the untargeted audience's perception of all the cryptocurrencies fall into these categories.
- High Risk Investment: High Risk/High Reward.
- Scam
- "To The Moon!!!!!"
- What is a Botcoin?
This particular advertisement does nothing to inform, explain possibilities or actually sell Decentralized Finance. It does not sell anything other than naked greed. Might as well have been an ad for DraftKings.
That's actually the only type of targeted advertisement a person would find during a streaming or televised sporting event in the United States.
Those who jumped in on cryptocurrencies at the time of the Matt Damon advertisement are not feeling so good. They saw cryptocurrency as merely something to be bought and sold that is high volatility, it could make them or break them. Rather than understand the cryptocurrencies, the DeFi revolution, and how they can participate in it, they chose greed and chasing immediate gains. Buying cryptocurrencies with the hopes of selling it back to fiat with a massive profit and spending the fiat currency.
Matt Damon's ad is released, there's a brief pump up and then the fall of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. That's roughly a 57% market drop for those who purchased and chose to HODL Bitcoin.
A lot of people who don't know what they are doing bought during that time.
Then we have the E*Trade Baby
The timing for the return of the E*Trade Baby could not be better, in fact, it was horribly on-the-nose.
This was an ad that ran during the Super Bowl, which attracts the most untargeted viewing audience out of all programs. It was an attempt at relevance in a few ways.
- Referencing "meme stocks" (over a year late to this party)
- Britney Spears "...Baby One More Time" was used in the advertisement. Spears was recently released from her conservatorship at the time of the advertisement's release.
- The "Off-The-Grid" trend that has become of viral interest.
- Inflation is brought up.
The area circled on the S&P 500 Chart is when the advertisement was released. Encouraging people to buy as the price falls from its peak and then experience unrealized losses and then eventually realized losses after being given a bit of false hope. Retail money comes in as institutional money exits.
Then there's Rocket Mortgage
Let's take a time machine back to March 2008.
Sky high valuations/appraisals with home equity loans being pushed to masses. This is a bad sign from an ad that was run in February 2022. The U.S. Housing Market is largely regional in nature in terms of the booms and busts with cities like Boise, Austin, Sarasota, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix all looking bubblicious and just starting to experience price cuts.
The competitiveness among buyers has been a little bit of a punchline in ads including this one that ran during the First Quarter of 2022 and a string of commercials featuring Anna Kendrick starting with their Super Bowl ad.
With rising interest rates, likelihood of more supply on the market, uncapped property taxes, inflation, wages not keeping up with home values, and layoffs that started in this quarter; a more pronounced downturn does seem imminent.
The financial commercials geared toward the untargeted audience selling overconfidence and FOMO are usually a few months before the fall.
Cover image sources:
