The Worst Part About FTX? The Shameless Self-Promotion
While reading about all this FTX drama, I keep remembering all the silly promotional stuff the company had been doing over to get more users.
Tom Brady. Major League Baseball. The Miami Heat. Steph Curry. Larry David. These recognizable names gave credence to FTX.
Yep, the same FTX which promptly used customer funds when shit hit the fan for its adjacent trading firm Alameda Research and vaporized itself almost overnight.
Maybe we should have known it was a ploy all along?
“Crypto. FTX. You in?”
This is the main line from the Tom Brady FTX ad, the one that was playing just months ago. Brady, perhaps the greatest NFL player of all time, with seven Super Bowl rings, is basically goading people into crypto along with his now-ex-wife and supermodel Gisele Bunchen.
Another all-time sports great, the NBA’s Steph Curry, was involved in this marketing as well, clearly without any knowledge of what he was getting into.
“I’m not an expert, and I don’t need to be,” Curry explains. “With FTX I have everything I need to buy, sell and store crypto safely.”
Today, watching the ad, it just seems stupid. So do many of the other ones. The Larry David commercial is the only one that seems prescient today, where he deftly passes on crypto.
Man: “It’s FTX. A safe and easy way to get into crypto.”
Larry David: “Eh. Nah.”
It’s important to remember these ads were played en masse in and around Super Bowl LVI. It’s a really bad look for the brand now, a Pets.com-like permanent and laughable stain on the FTX brand (I said this about Mt. Gox back in 2014, and it holds true here as well).
What was the goal of such marketing? It had nothing to do with getting people using blockchain technology and its potential to change the way we all think about money.
No, it was all about FOMO’ing people into FTX. Especially in a market that started heading south back in November 2021. In addition, FTX didn’t immediately shut down new user sign-ups at the first sign of a liquidity crisis. No, they kept allowing people to “get in”, as Tom Brady might say, only stopping once there was a backlash.
This FTX thing is actually pretty pervasive. The Miami Heat played at FTX Arena (until they didn’t). Major League Baseball umpires wore FTX patched on their jerseys all season. Every umpire. Thus, tons of TV shots of a big league ball game this past summer showed the FTX logo - prominently.
Source: True Blue LA
Seriously, who came up with the idea to do this type of marketing at FTX? It didn’t educate people at all about crypto, it just created apprehension people were missing out on something. The next big thing. Believe me, spend some time in this industry, and there isn’t a rush going on. It’s a long slow climb towards mass consumer adoption. These things take time.
The hard truth is that speculation brings in new crypto users. It brings in waves of people trying to understand this whole blockchain thing. But nonsense language like crypto is some secret club you have to “get into” as Brady says in his ad is just ridiculous.
“I’m getting into crypto. With FTX. Are you in?”
Yeah, a lot of people are in now. And they can’t get out - because it’s pretty clear FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF wasn’t serving the best interests of crypto. He was there simply to help himself. Just like what he did with his own user’s money.
“What matters right now is trying to do right by customers. That’s it,” SBF said. You weren’t doing that in the first place with your crazy-ass marketing tactics. Why trust you now?
Besides crypto holders remembering “not your keys, not your cheese” to keep assets off of exchanges, another lesson here is this. Look for sources that can educate rather than prognosticate. In fact, with lawyer David Boies now sniffing around this, these FTX promotions may be heading for legal trouble.
In the end, always be suspicious of crypto marketing. There aren’t too many people who know much about how crypto works. And it’s certainly not celebrities or big names, as this FTX blow up surely attests.