FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE CRYPTO COMMERCIAL PROFESSIONAL
professional fighting and the glamorous French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain. The company has signed endorsement deals with U.F.C. Last year, bought the naming rights to the home of the Los Angeles Lakers, Clippers and Kings for a reported $700 million the former Staples Center is now Arena. Surveys have shown that some 40 percent of all American men ages 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used a form of cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency industry’s marketing efforts are focused on young people, especially young men. (A resulting class-action lawsuit accuses Kardashian and other Ethereum Max promoters of aiding and abetting a “pump-and-dump scam” her attorney describes the allegation as “without merit” and says they will “defend the action vigorously.”) In a recent article in the online magazine Slate, the actor Ben McKenzie, writing with Jacob Silverman, characterized the shilling of crypto by celebrities as “a moral disaster.” His words are high-flown - all that stuff about history and bravery - but they amount to a macho taunt. Last June, Kim Kardashian promoted the little-known token Ethereum Max on Instagram after her post went up, the value of Ethereum Max cratered, dropping by 98 percent. Entertainers and athletes have ample money to risk in speculative bubbles their millions of admirers don’t have that luxury and may be left holding the bag when a bubble bursts. Cryptocurrencies, after all, are in many cases not so much currencies as speculative thingamabobs - digital tokens whose value is predicated largely on the idea that someone will take them off your hands at a higher price than it cost you to acquire them. There is something unseemly, to put it mildly, about the famous and fabulously wealthy urging crypto on their fans. On Twitter, Reese Witherspoon is a vocal booster ( “Crypto is here to stay”), and Snoop Dogg, an NFT aficionado, offers investing advice ( “Buy low … stay high!”). Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen have appeared in commercials for the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a competitor in which they have an equity stake. Damon is just the latest A-list star who has taken to hawking crypto. The burden of spreading that gospel has been placed on the beefy shoulders of Matt Damon, whom hired as its “brand ambassador” in advance of a $100 million global marketing push. “ ‘Fortune favors the brave’ is deeply personal,” he says. Launched under the name Monaco in 2016, the Singapore-based company claims to have 10 million users and projects that the number will boom to 100 million by 2023 Kris Marszalek, its chief executive, told The Financial Times in November that the company had seen “20-times revenue growth this year.” In a making-of video released in tandem with the new commercial, Marszalek outlines a messianic vision. Most people remain fuzzy about what cryptocurrency is and may never have heard of. It’s only in the final shot - as Damon turns his gaze from the camera to stare out a window at what appears to be, yes, Mars - that a logo flashes onscreen and the product on offer is revealed: .įor many, the ad may simply be baffling. But what, exactly, is Damon pitching? A self-driving car? Erectile-dysfunction pills? “The Martian 2,” starring Matt Damon? The questions hover, ominously, through nearly all 60 seconds of the commercial’s running time. effects are top-notch, and the services of a pitchman like Matt Damon don’t come cheap.
“In these moments of truth,” Damon intones, “these men and women - these mere mortals, just like you and me - as they peer over the edge, they calm their minds and steel their nerves with four simple words that have been whispered by the intrepid since the time of the Romans: Fortune favors the brave.” Apparitions appear: a mountain climber summiting an icy peak, an aviator manning a primitive flying machine, astronauts striding down a gangway. As Damon speaks, a camera tracks his progress through a so-called Museum of Bravery. The language has a ripe flavor that is normally confined to halftime pep talks and voice-overs in History channel documentaries. On the one hand, he tells us, the annals are haunted by “those who almost adventured, who almost achieved, but ultimately, for them, it proved to be too much.” Yet there are others: “the ones who embrace the moment and commit.” He is in a cavernous gallery space, delivering lines that almost make sense, with an affect that almost seems human. “History,” Matt Damon says, “is filled with almosts.” He’s got a point.
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