This has the same feel as "CashConverters Arena". Something about cryptocurrency brand names screams "scam" to me most of the time. Perhaps it's because you often see a lot of crypto related ads on the less wholesome parts of the internet.
It’s because 99.9% of crypto companies are either scams or at least illegal in some fundamental way. I’m not even sure that’s hyperbole. People I know who work at legit, follow-the-letter-of-the-law crypto companies will freely admit the industry is a cesspool. Even when the company is honest, a significant portion of their customers will be scammers of one sort or another.
The safest bet for consumers is to assume anything crypto is a scam until proven otherwise.
It doesn't help that ".com" is in their brand name, especially now that there's going to be a physical place named after it. "Let's meet at Crypto.com Arena" is hard to understand and sounds lame at the same time.
It can join the auspicious ranks that include “Guaranteed Rate Field” - if I had any positive thoughts about crypto.com, they vanished when they got a field named after them. I find that to the sleaziest marketing of all.
Every one I've seen has the same basic storyline:
"Look at this person who missed out on everything, because they didn't jump instantly. -- crypto.com"
There are at least 4 crypto trading apps advertising during prime time on Dutch TV, a country of 17mm people. Insane. It just feels like it's 2000 all over, in so many respects. I look at my stock brokerage accounts every couple of days and it's all up up up, at insane rates. The only thing I wonder is not if but when the music will stop.
WOW these guys are going all-in on advertising. I see them everywhere, from soccer to F1. Makes me wonder if they're investing more on ads than on their products?
They are advertising heavily during sporting events (I've seen their ads on football and baseball games here in the U.S.). Their flagship ad stars Matt Damon, and so presumably cost a fortune. It also attempts to make an absurd equivalency between speculating on crypto on your phone and being an astronaut or a captain in the Age of Discovery or something.
Between crypto and the sports book apps, it seems you hardly see a good old-fashioned beer commercial anymore.
Nothing says 'cyber' more than a dotcom spending silly money to rename a stadium. I still remember that Pets.com commercial that played in the 2000 Super Bowl.
Scrolling through https://crypto.com/nft is like scrolling through https://www.deviantart.com ... except the themes in the NFT art are often related to wealth, there are crypto logos all over the place and the NFTs are MUCH more expensive than DeviantArt.
Take this with a large grain of salt, but possibly about 1/3 the size of coinbase and nearly 1/15 the size of binance by volume.
Using https://etherscan.io/gastracker#gassender to see who spends the most gas in ether (not the best metric but it's something) they're somewhere in the realm of a quarter the gas spending compared to binance and coinbase in the last 24 hours.
IMO - they're relatively tiny. They are not a common name in the crypto space outside of their aggressive marketing, and only recently have people really talked about them at all (in the crypto space).
They are not well established in the crypto space, I think they're going for a brute-force marketing approach to force their way in.
The return on investment of this deal is easily worth it for Crypto.com -- "perception is reality"; they are paying around $35 million per year, and they probably already earned back the first few years of expenses in the form of new customer deposits, the mainstream consumers who saw the announcement of this deal on their local morning news or radio host gossip. Foris DAX MT Limited (d/b/a Crypto.com) being a Malta entity, funded with crypto, the principals can easily back out of the deal before the 20-year term... Genius.
Excuse me, I have been living under a rock lately, has there been a breakthrough in blockchain's utility I missed? Other than money laundering and an investment bubble?
The "utility" is purely number go up. "Look how much money you'd have made if you invested a year ago!" is a surprisingly strong marketing message to unsophisticated investors (aka, most people).
Nope, the bubble is still inflating. Just sit back, relax, and wait for it to pop. I make a point to shield the people I care about by letting them know myself and the majority of hackers consider it to be a big fad/scam.
I never understood this at all. What do the MBAs think? Let’s pay people to be forced to use our name even if it has nothing to do with us! Great idea!
I mean, talk about brand name dilution… you’ll never see Hermes arena or Porsche stadium, smh. And of course you’ll never get metrics to prove that even a single sale was generated from this. It’s pure ego.
It's not about being related or not, it's about building familiarity. Their name will be reaching millions with an extremely high frequency, and this is how you build your space in people's minds.
Basically crypto.com wants to breakthrough crypto folks and go mainstream, just like any other service (Mastercard, VISA, Robinhood, etc).
This sort of things helps you to achieve this goal. It might take years, decades, but that's one way to build a brand.
>you’ll never see Hermes arena or Porsche stadium
Maybe because Hermes and Porsche don't want to go mainstream
But it wouldn't surprise me if they had branded a race-track in Dubai.
I can give you an example, in my country Apple used to buy outdoors (yeah, outdoor advertising) next to Rolex outdoors. I doubt I've ever seen an Apple ad online.
>And of course you’ll never get metrics to prove that even a single sale was generated from this. It’s pure ego.
This is the problem of current day marketing, like people think that if you can't measure then it didn't happen... or that branding it's voodoo/scam that marketers built to bleed businesses out of cash... when in reality marketing and advertising is part of the reason why you have global brands, even before we could measure any direct engagement like we can today.
Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Coke, pretty much any big car manufacturer, were built via this sort of activities that you couldn't measure direct sales from.
Don't underestimate it. It's not ego, or faith. You just think that a human behavior (the action to click) represents the only relationship we have with what we perceive as reality - this is farm from the truth.
Thanks for the explanation. I can certainly see how it would benefit certain brands that need to break into the common lingo. But once you’re already there, surely there’s no point? Who hasn’t heard of Chase, PetCo (if they have an animal), AT&T, Minute Maid, Coors, Miller, and most of the rest?
>But once you’re already there, surely there’s no point?
The problem here is that we have to keep reminding people if you want to remain relevant and on top of their minds.
For example, you might have some positive emotions towards some brand from your childhood, but you're not constantly recalling it. Even if you had a positive experience with such brand, if you haven't heard of it in years you just forget it, or others take their place.
You might recognize that brand if you happen to see it in the right context, but that's too much effort. We have too much going on with our lives to care.
That's why Coca-Cola advertises with Santa every single year since 1931. Because they want to guarantee that in "(...) the most wonderful time of the year (...)", they're there. They're the happiness brand, that's what they sell you. And maybe, just maybe, you might choose them, over the thousands of options, for your family dinner, simply because of what they represent.
Try to picture a supermarket (for the sake of a concept, since it's easier to visualize than ecommerce) - it's a fucking jungle, and we have to make choices every time we go there. Any nudge in the direction of your brand is a bias that people will have when they make a decision, a lot of times unconsciously.
It's an expensive game, because you have to build it up and maintain it. Else you risk someone else taking your place. It worked very well in the past because a lot of those brands had a large "share of voice" in a time when attention was focused on few media (mostly TV).
In this case, Crypto.com will be in the news just for this announcement, that's already free coverage. Then in every single game/show, people will hear and see them.
They'll experience a range of emotions there. They'll grow accustomed to crypto.com, it will become familiar. It won't be the thing your nerd friend keeps talking about when you meet him, it'll just be there.
And then maybe when someone wants to choose a crypto service, MAYBE, they'll default to crypto.com instead of other services that might look "shady" in comparison to the guys that have an arena with their name - those guys are more real than the rest.
