Why has the advertising industry been so slow to embrace crypto?

By Martin Canellakis

Given that advertising has historically been the go to business for trend-leaders and early adopters, it’s no surprise that you’ll find crypto currency enthusiasts sprinkled throughout the ad community.

Those folks were certainly easier to spot during the crypto run up of a few months ago, when Bitcoin topped out at $20,000 per, and Ethereum was making similarly impressive strides. During those heady days, you could reliably predict weekend trade volume as investors in Asian markets spent more and more time on Saturdays and Sundays in front of their computers trading. Everyone with a crypto token to spare was the new Peter Thiel and you didn’t have to go further than the agency latte bar or ping pong table to overhear a conversation about crypto.

But now that the market has cooled off, and many of the weak hands have been shown the door, ad peeps aren’t as likely to wear their crypto cred on their sleeve. However, this relative retrench doesn’t mean that the friendship between the advertising and the crypto community should remain fair weather. To the contrary, as new crypto companies rise from the digital ether, advertising has the opportunity to lead the conversation, shedding some guiding light on how these businesses will become relevant to a larger public.

As we in adland trade theories about the future price of bitcoin or which ALT coin is going to break out, there are technologies being built, financed, making their way through alpha, rebuilt, retested and ultimately finding support among relatively small groups of technologists and investors. And many of these new projects deserve our collective bandwidth.

Take for instance, Bloom. It’s a company with no smaller ambition than to revolutionize the way credit markets work, using the blockchain to connect lenders with borrowers and essentially remove banks from the equation. If it’s successful, it has the power to provide access to credit to the “unbanked,” — the millions of people in the third world and beyond who may be perfectly good credit risks but don’t have a bank account.

As ambitious a platform as Bloom is, as strong as their advisory board may be, and as clever as their development team has been in building a platform that’s truly brilliant, the average person on the street has no clue who they are.

The problem as I see it is, most of the conversations coming from new blockchain projects are in dev-speak, bearing no resemblance to anything that could be understood, processed or supported by the outside world. Given this, the chasm between an elegant idea and an idea that the world is begging to adopt remains wide. With the proper support, many of these blockchain startups could take the world by storm and be recognized for the truly revolutionary thinking they represent. With the right support from the advertising community, a company like Bloom could become relevant to everyone from the billionaire tech company looking for alternative credit funding to the Waziri goat herder looking to increase the size of his flock.

But to do so, these never-before-imagined technologies needs to tap into some tried and true communication principles that we in advertising have spent years honing. Disciplines that make messages focused, reveal the human side of a brand, and get people excited about the marvelous things their new platform has to offer. The Blooms of the world can benefit from our expertise. And since it seems likely that the next Google, Apple or Amazon will be built on blockchain technology, the advertising community would do well to get up to speed on it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way singling out Bloom as a case study. It just so happened to be the last great idea that has captured my imagination. There have been countless crypto based companies in the past year that have done the same.

But alas, in today’s world, it’s the last sweet idea that lingers on the palette until of course another sweet idea takes its place. Which is precisely why we advertising people need to get involved. We need to put our skill-sets to use, finding ways to make cryptos more than confection, but a meal that will sustain us well into the future.