In the glorious world of traditional finance – which I still love – I’m frequently stumped by the misconceptions that some marketers still hold about crypto finance.
Many of these individuals don’t yet operate in the digital asset arena and certainly haven’t considered that they will have to do so in the near future.
Traditional finance conferences have, for years now, discussed relevant issues such as disintermediation, tokenisation, and emerging asset classes. Yet, there remains a sizeable group who believe that their world is separate and their jobs in some way superior.
When our agency started working with crypto banks and asset management firms with an interest in tokenised assets, I recall meeting one marketer who explicitly said “oh, I don’t think you want to be getting involved in all that.” I was stunned.
After all, while some of these briefs were from smaller firms, we were also building campaigns for global banking giants. I took a breath and paused for a moment before responding. I wanted to know a little more about what was driving his hesitation.
Much of his concern was driven by media coverage of industry bad actors, company failures and well publicised risks of criminals harnessing decentralised finance. While none of these examples were inaccurate,
his emotion-driven response just wasn’t logical.
Now, this was a marketer of many years. Someone I respect enormously. But I had to remind him that we haven’t stopped using investment banks because of Lehman Brothers. We haven’t abandoned mortgage lenders because of Northern Rock. We haven’t ceased working with auditors because of Enron, and so on.
The defence that followed was that the digital asset world was “so unregulated” that it’s still “the wild west” at which point I again reminded him that the strongest names in digital finance are indeed regulated and the ones who want to be successful use compliance with regulations as one of their marketing pillars.
Similarly, in the UK, it wasn’t that long ago that payments, mortgages, loans and other forms of finance weren’t regulated either. That didn’t stop the world’s largest media and marketing companies from working with them.
My colleague again interjected to outline several examples of “crypto bro parties”, which illustrate the immaturity of the sector. I laughed, recalling dozens of traditional finance gatherings where I’d seen drunken behaviour, fist fights, clipboards being passed round where people were “ordering” prostitutes, drug taking, not to mention the odd person falling through a glass table.
Trust me, inappropriate behaviour at corporate events is by no means the preserve of digital finance. It has been happening in the old world for decades.
For all of that, I did concede that there is work to be done on professionalising some aspects of digital asset marketing and, indeed, corporate operations. But this is an industry that is coming out of its adolescent years and growing up fast.
There are always going to be chancers, rogues and snake oil salespeople, but the digital assets world is also bringing heaps of innovation and diversity. We have a generation of young, ambitious leaders who are increasingly working with the grey-hairs at the global banks.
These are the risk-takers, the grafters and the freethinkers who are not afraid to put it all on the line in the products they develop, the marketing they adopt and the partnerships they enter into. And, while every individual is not likely to get things right all of the time, let’s not for a second kid ourselves that professionals in traditional finance do.
While I’m always keen to know the business credentials of companies we work with and to understand how they make their money, I welcome the opportunity to tackle different campaigns and embrace new ideas. And I hope, that through some of our work, we can change the opinions of the minority that are still living in the past.
Joe McGrath is the founder and CEO of Rhotic Media