An ad for cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com in which actor Matt Damon equates buying digital tokens with space exploration has been pronounced cringeworthy by the internet.

‘Fortune Favours the Brave’ has been around since October 2021 but became an object of widespread ridicule after it aired during an NFL game on 2 January.

The ad, though awful on its own merits, also had the misfortune of hitting the crest of a fresh wave of Web 3.0 scepticism.

A lot of the vitriol is aimed at NFT enthusiasts who spend their time on social media getting a little too pumped about the latest batch of Tiny Terrapins or whatever. 

But there are also more cutting critiques about the ecosystem's infrastructure coming from those with bona fide tech credentials.

Moxie Marlinspike, the cryptographer who created messaging app Signal, published his first impressions of Web 3.0 last week, and they weren’t good.

Blockchains were invented to allow people to trust transactions without involving a centralised institution, like a bank or government. But Marlinspike’s point (grossly oversimplified here) is that almost all blockchain activity, like trading NFTs or building distributed apps, must go through intermediary companies. So what’s the point of a distributed consensus mechanism when everyone is relying on a handful of brokers to interact with it?

Programmer Stephen Diehl argued something similar in a December blog post in which he states that ‘blockchain networks don’t scale except by becoming the very same plutocratic and centralised systems they allegedly were designed to replace’.

And this centralisation was in plain view when NFT marketplace OpenSea froze $2.2m of stolen Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs in December, effectively stopping the thieves from selling their loot.

Marlinspike still thinks NFTs and distributed apps will survive the backlash because they have captured enough hype and cash to self-sustain. But the early promise of blockchains to create a decentralised internet free of dominant corporations doesn't look so hardy.

Campaign of the Week /

911

Apple’s new ad campaign broadcasts snippets of emergency calls made with its smart watch.

The ad, which was created in house at Apple, uses recordings of real 911 calls – including from a woman trapped in a car filling with water and an elderly farmer who had broken his hip – to position the device as a potential life saver.

Some people on social media have accused the campaign of fear mongering, which it is, but it’s also an interesting example of how the brand has broadened out beyond its message of enabling creativity as the tech market has matured. Read our full analysis here. Contagious.

Download this /

Most Contagious Report 2021

Still shaking the cobwebs from your brain after a long break? Download the 2021 Most Contagious Report for free and catch up on the best campaigns from 2021, as well as some of the trends that will continue to reverberate throughout 2022. Contagious.

Read this /

Short-lived, long remembered

Once dismissed as a gimmick, the idea of ephemeral social media posts has demonstrated remarkable staying power, which is kind of ironic. But what does the expectation of disappearing content mean for advertising?

A new study published in the Journal of Interactive Marketing investigates the effect of ephemerality on recall and finds that people are more likely to remember ads they think will disappear.

Read our summary in the latest edition of Strategist’s Digest, here. Contagious.

Read this /

3 steps to more honest advertising

Advertisers should be less concerned with storytelling and more focused on imparting truths, according to Mekanism’s CSO, Ambika Pai.

Click on to read Pai’s three-step process to ‘ensure that truth stays at the core of what we offer our clients and what we deliver as their partners’. Contagious.

Read this /

Catholics, cancel culture and corporations

The Pope may be concerned about cancel culture, but a new report suggests brands have little reason to fear it.

Market research company Forrester reviewed more than 40 supposed brand cancellations over the past 10 years and found most of them suffered ‘negligible financial impact’.

And brands that do suffer financial consequences – most commonly in the form of slowing customer growth, or dips in revenue or stock price – tend to return to growth once the news cycle has moved on.

A large portion of Forrester’s report is based on an online survey of UK and US respondents, which is hard to trust given that people have little incentive to be honest when they’re put on the spot about their own morality.

That said, a couple of the responses piqued our interest. For instance US respondents were far less likely than their UK counterparts to say they would boycott a brand that has ‘racist or offensive origins’.

And we have nothing but respect for the honesty of the 24% of US respondents and 27% of UK respondents who admitted that all a brand needs to do to redeem itself after a transgression is offer them a discount.

Read our full report here. Contagious.

Play this /

Wordle

A simple-but-engrossing word game has become the first internet craze of 2022. Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, who used to work at Reddit and came up with the website’s Place experiment.

Wardle credits the game’s breakout success (it now has more than 300,000 players) to its application of the scarcity principle by limiting players to one game per day. Wardle has also promised to keep the game ad-free and says he won’t turn it into a hoover for personal data. Wordle.

P.S. Anyone jonesing for an extra fix of Wordle can play Ravi Parikh’s evil version, which evades your guesses by changing the answer until there is only one possible solution.

Drink this /

Corona swaps booze for vitamin D

Creative agency David Miami has come up with a new product for Corona, an alcohol-free beer that provides 30% of a person’s recommended daily intake of vitamin D.

Corona Sunbrew 0.0% took two years to develop and is being promoted with a stop-motion film directed by Juan Cabral, who also shot Gorilla for Cadbury and Balls for Sony. The ad is set on a sunny Costa Rican beach, which seems to us like the last place anyone would go looking for an extra hit of vitamin D, but perhaps we’re missing the point.

The market for 0.0% beers increased 30% in the US in 2020, according to research firm IWSR, and the number of brewers pushing booze-free options has proliferated, too.

Even Pabst Blue Ribbon released a zero-alcohol beer in 2019. Perhaps it should have suggested Dry January participants buy some of it, instead of telling them on social media to ‘try eating a**!’ (Pabst has since apologised and blamed the tweets on an associate with ‘poor judgement’.) Adweek.