Remember those Super Bowl crypto ads I wrote about in February? The ones where Matt Damon told us fortune favors the brave and Larry David dismissed every major innovation in human history to sell FTX? Remember when Coinbase ran a bouncing QR code that crashed their app?
Yeah. So. About that.
Terra/Luna has collapsed. Forty billion dollars evaporated in a week. Bitcoin is below $30K. Celsius is freezing withdrawals. The entire crypto market has lost over a trillion dollars in value since November. And those brave fortune-seekers who downloaded exchange apps after the Super Bowl are currently looking at portfolio charts that resemble a cliff.
This is what happens when an industry markets aspiration before it's built trust.
Let me be clear: I'm not here to say crypto is dead or that blockchain technology has no future applications. I genuinely don't know. What I AM here to say is that the marketing playbook the crypto industry used was a textbook case of putting brand awareness before brand foundation.
Think about it. These companies spent hundreds of millions on celebrity endorsements, sports sponsorships (Crypto.com Arena, FTX Arena, Coinbase NBA deal), and Super Bowl spots. All of which communicate one message: we're legitimate because we're everywhere.
But legitimacy isn't built through ubiquity. It's built through reliability. Through transparency. Through surviving hard times. Through being there when things go wrong, not just when they're going up and to the right.
You can spend your way to awareness. You cannot spend your way to trust. Trust is earned in the bad times, not the good ones.The brands that will survive crypto winter are the ones that invested in education, transparency, and user experience alongside their marketing spend. The ones that explained the risks as clearly as the rewards. The ones that built customer support infrastructure for the moment when scared retail investors need to talk to a human being.
I don't think many of them did that.
For the non-crypto brands watching this unfold: there's a lesson here about bandwagons. A year ago, every brand was being told they needed an NFT strategy, a Web3 presence, a metaverse activation. Consultants were charging six figures for crypto roadmaps. Agencies were hiring "Head of Web3" roles.
If your brand's entry into any space is driven by FOMO rather than genuine consumer demand, you are not building a strategy. You are buying lottery tickets. And lottery tickets are a tax on people who are bad at math.
My cats have no opinion on decentralized finance. They are, as always, the wisest creatures in my household.