Why Is Matt Damon Shilling For Crypto?
The burden of spreading that gospel has been placed on the beefy shoulders of Matt Damon, whom Crypto.com hired as its "brand ambassador" in advance of a $100 million global marketing push. Damon is just the latest A-list star who has taken to hawking crypto. Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen have appeared in commercials for the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a Crypto.com competitor in which they have an equity stake. On Twitter, Reese Witherspoon is a vocal booster ("Crypto is here to stay"), and Snoop Dogg, an NFT aficionado, offers investing advice ("Buy low stay high!"). There is something unseemly, to put it mildly, about the famous and fabulously wealthy urging crypto on their fans. Cryptocurrencies, after all, are in many cases not so much currencies as speculative thingamabobs -- digital tokens whose value is predicated largely on the idea that someone will take them off your hands at a higher price than it cost you to acquire them. Entertainers and athletes have ample money to risk in speculative bubbles; their millions of admirers don't have that luxury and may be left holding the bag when a bubble bursts. [...]
The cryptocurrency industry's marketing efforts are focused on young people, especially young men. Surveys have shown that some 40 percent of all American men ages 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used a form of cryptocurrency. [...] Damon offers a particular kind of appeal to that demographic. His star power is based on brains and brawn; he can recite magniloquent phrases while also giving the impression that he could fillet an enemy, Jason Bourne style, armed with only a Bic pen. In the ad, his words are high-flown -- all that stuff about history and bravery -- but they amount to a macho taunt: If you're a real man, you'll buy crypto.
The bleakness of that pitch is startling. In recent weeks, while watching televised sports -- where the Crypto.com spot airs repeatedly, alongside commercials for other crypto platforms and an onslaught of ads for sports-gambling apps -- I could not shake the feeling that culture has taken a sinister turn: that we've sanctioned an economy in which tech start-ups compete, in broad daylight, to lure the vulnerable with get-rich-quick schemes. Yet what's most unsettling about the commercial is the pitch it doesn't make. Traditionally, an advertisement offers an affirmative case for its product, a vision of the fulfillment that will come if you wear those jeans or drive that truck. This ad doesn't bother. It shows a brief glimpse of a young couple locking eyes in a nightclub -- an insinuation, I guess, that crypto has sex appeal. But the ad builds inexorably toward that final shot of Mars, where Matt Damon's astronaut was marooned in a hit film and where Elon Musk, the world's second-richest man and a crypto enthusiast, says he plans to build a colony to survive the end of civilization on Earth.
The burden of spreading that gospel has been placed on the beefy shoulders of Matt Damon, whom Crypto.com hired as its "brand ambassador" in advance of a $100 million global marketing push. Damon is just the latest A-list star who has taken to hawking crypto. Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen have appeared in commercials for the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a Crypto.com competitor in which they have an equity stake. On Twitter, Reese Witherspoon is a vocal booster ("Crypto is here to stay"), and Snoop Dogg, an NFT aficionado, offers investing advice ("Buy low stay high!"). There is something unseemly, to put it mildly, about the famous and fabulously wealthy urging crypto on their fans. Cryptocurrencies, after all, are in many cases not so much currencies as speculative thingamabobs -- digital tokens whose value is predicated largely on the idea that someone will take them off your hands at a higher price than it cost you to acquire them. Entertainers and athletes have ample money to risk in speculative bubbles; their millions of admirers don't have that luxury and may be left holding the bag when a bubble bursts. [...]
The cryptocurrency industry's marketing efforts are focused on young people, especially young men. Surveys have shown that some 40 percent of all American men ages 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used a form of cryptocurrency. [...] Damon offers a particular kind of appeal to that demographic. His star power is based on brains and brawn; he can recite magniloquent phrases while also giving the impression that he could fillet an enemy, Jason Bourne style, armed with only a Bic pen. In the ad, his words are high-flown -- all that stuff about history and bravery -- but they amount to a macho taunt: If you're a real man, you'll buy crypto.
The bleakness of that pitch is startling. In recent weeks, while watching televised sports -- where the Crypto.com spot airs repeatedly, alongside commercials for other crypto platforms and an onslaught of ads for sports-gambling apps -- I could not shake the feeling that culture has taken a sinister turn: that we've sanctioned an economy in which tech start-ups compete, in broad daylight, to lure the vulnerable with get-rich-quick schemes. Yet what's most unsettling about the commercial is the pitch it doesn't make. Traditionally, an advertisement offers an affirmative case for its product, a vision of the fulfillment that will come if you wear those jeans or drive that truck. This ad doesn't bother. It shows a brief glimpse of a young couple locking eyes in a nightclub -- an insinuation, I guess, that crypto has sex appeal. But the ad builds inexorably toward that final shot of Mars, where Matt Damon's astronaut was marooned in a hit film and where Elon Musk, the world's second-richest man and a crypto enthusiast, says he plans to build a colony to survive the end of civilization on Earth.
