Marketing: The reality that crypto projects don’t want you to know.
How you hear about the things you hear about
A terse history of advertising
If you are a Boomer or a Gen Xer, most of the way you understand marketing is through specific means of advertising. Growing up you saw ads on TV, magazines and maybe flyers in the mail. You generally trusted that talking heads on the TV were knowledgeable, that news papers fed news of various quality, and that anything that came in the mail was personal, bills, or garbage.
It was simpler. It was harder to be fringe. You had to seek out like minded people to get introduced to your Utne Reader, Village Voice or your National Review or Guns and Ammo magazine. It was on you to seek out what you wanted to be exposed to (unless of course it was handed down to you by your parents).
But since then, over the course of a couple of decades, information became both more accessible (both in effort and cost), and more invasive. Information is now “pushed” at you, rather than “pulled” by you. Information, both fact based and not, now gushes at you like a firehose because most everyone focuses attention to platforms that barrage you with it and tune the information you read according to the behavior you present on those platforms.
Worse, the information you get is often indistinguishable from news, be it advertising or propaganda. Information is shaped into images that look like they come from legitimate sources. Information is filtered through multiple biased positions, and sent to you wrapped in opinion and slant.
Humans have a long history of equating truth to something that was written down or told in a story that elicits emotion. A story about how a garbage truck backed up over one person and killed her is far more memorable than a story with epidemiological statistics about how reverse sirens in the middle of the night deprives people of sleep. So people get riled up and make a bunch of dumb laws that hurt the majority for the conceptual protection of a tiny few and socialize the responsibility of the problem. The power of pushed, low cost, information energizes this process.
Modern advertisers on continuous information platforms like X.com, Facebook, and Rumble know this. The algorithms know your behavior. There are gigabytes of studies and books on how to best trigger people’s emotions utilizing their emotions, values and morals. They know that when you interact with something, it’s because it stirred your emotions, whether it be a sense of righteousness, desire, need, or whatever, you clicked or reacted to something that stirred your emotion. You told them “This affects me” in some way, and it does this in real time. Modern advertisers have far more powerful tools than they ever have had.
And it works…
The worst part is that, even knowing all this, we still apply “truth” to things that appeal to our sense of morals, emotions and value, and if it fits in with our history of acquired knowledge. Things that go against, feel wrong or elicit instant skepticism or anger. It’s far easier to just accept or reject, rather than trying to understand someone else’s position and see the information through different lenses than your own. And thus, we get the great majority of the behavior that we see on these sites. Echo chambers, dopamine clicking, and clicking on ads in the shape of content that address our personal biases. I mean, why wouldn’t I want to see more about a Red, White and Blue lawn chair? I mean, I needed a lawn chair anyway!
What about in Crypto?
Is this any different in crypto markets? Of course not! It’s probably worse due to the 24/7 nature of the industry and the fact that crypto was born into this new realm of advertising.
We will discuss much of the panoply of services within crypto advertising and marketing, but it’s important to understand that these services are available for every industry on the planet. That includes political arenas and social issues. There are organizations that fund these same marketing services to get their thing in front of your eyes, whether it’s their candidate, misinformation about a topic to maintain relevance and prevalence, or some new gizmo for sale.
What can you do about it? Probably nothing, until the proof comes out in the pudding (right? Rabbit? Humane? Anyone out there?). It’s not really surprising, but it is sad, that we really have to wait until the very end. It has been known the smoking causes lung cancer since the late 1800’s, and pretty indisputable since the 1950’s, but “skeptics” were prominent well into the late 1980’s. Let’s just admit now: most of that time, the skeptics were just marketing agencies (including political lobbying) in one way or another. So, the methodology is not very different since the dawn of time, it’s just jacked up on amphetamines now, especially in crypto.
Marketing Services for Crypto
We received the costs for various marketing services from a marketing agency who specializes in the crypto field. It’s very revealing when you see it, and then think about your community experiences and what you see on social media platforms. Here is the list of services:
Virtually everything you see online, especially on Telegram, X and Youtube are a result of paying a marketing company. That’s why the descriptions of these services match your experience with crypto. These agencies have long spreadsheets of prices for hundreds of influencers, all of whom will tout whatever you want them to.
The projects that don’t do this, are the project you really have not heard of, especially not recently. Divi, Navcoin, Feathercoin, Blackcoin, Blocknet. The projects you have heard of, especially the latest memecoin or series of NFTs, are absolutely employing these services to get your eyeballs. There is no way around it, the hyper speculation aspect of some blockchain based projects (Like memecoins and meme NFTs) require that the people who get in early are rewarded by those who get in later, so they need to get the word out, and they need to get it out big and fast.
So? What’s a project to do? Try to thrive doing things organically? The crypto market is dominated by speculators. While there are genuine builders, people who make amazing things, projects that solve many of the issues that older blockchains have as well as many issues with information and financial transactions, in general, well funded projects will have runway to keep the lid on the marketing. Examples of this are Layer Zero and many of the ZK messaging projects that are operational now. Millions of dollars of runway to develop their systems, no need to participate in this until they want users.
Meanwhile, those that are just cruising along, need to gain exposure if they want to grow. For them, it really is an “If you can’t beat ’em, join em” scenario regarding marketing. Even with the best features, the cleanest code, the most exciting prospects, a small project requires these services to get themselves in front of people’s eyeballs.
Do you disagree? Comment with some ideas of how a small, underfunded project can squeeze in front of those with larger pockets to gather eyeballs.
