Matt Damon’s Crypto.com Ad Goes Viral For All The Wrong Reasons

Last Updated on 7 January 2022 by CryptoTips.eu


Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / [email protected]

Back in October, Crypto.com thought it was a good idea to hire Hollywood star Matt Damon to promote their brand in an ad that mostly did not ruffle any feathers.

Probably having some marketing budget left, the team at Crypto.com decided to run the ad again, this time in the beginning of 2022, just in the halftime of an NFL game.

Few days later, it is going viral for all the wrong reasons.

From a first look at it, it might be hard to spot. Damon has an interesting storytelling voice which was used before to entertain audiences by giving them information. His NSA speech in Good Will hunting was legendary as from the start, and afterwards he was used to narrate the fate of Iceland, the big banks and all those subprime mortgages in the 2010 documentary Inside Job about the global financial crash of 2007-2008.

YouTube video

With that in mind, you might think that a story about history told by Damon about adventurers and explorers in order to finally end up with the new discoveries made by the world of cryptocurrencies is a good idea.

Memecoins and DeFi or a Ponzi Scheme

And you’d not be totally wrong, but it was apparently the last phrase that bothered many of the audiences and social media trolls who reacted to it like being stung by a bee. Damon claims that ‘fortune favours the brave’, which some claim is endorsing young people to go and invest in things like memecoins and DeFi, which ‘serious’ analysts claim can still only fail.

Guardian columnist Carole Cadwalladr stated that Damon was encouraging a ‘Ponzi scheme’ by lending his services for the commercial. Many of her peers in classic media agreed that comparing the moon landing to the invention of crypto was a step too far.

Whether you agree or not, by now, the Crypto.com ad has been seen 12 million times on YouTube alone. For a commercial, that is an incredible result. Whether it is negative or positive publicity, is beside the point.

Paolo_galasso / Depositphotos.com