- This is not your father’s “Got Milk” ad campaign.
Bitcoin, the six-year-old fledgling cryptocurrency with an image problem, will be getting a makeover. Unless you’re familiar with social-media stars like Julia Kelly, Jorden Keith, and Acacia Brinley, though, it’s going to be an ad campaign unlike any you’re used to.
A consortium of bitcoin insiders, including the Bitcoin Foundation, BitFury, BitGo and Tally Capital, hired avante garde ad agency TheAudience to rebuild the currency’s reputation among the general public. The goal is pretty standard: highlight bitcoin’s positive aspects – its potential to help the “unbanked,” for instance – and get people to forget about Mt. Gox and Silk Road.
“We need to highlight the opportunity of bitcoin, we need to educate people on what it is,” said Oliver Luckett, the firm’s CEO, sounding as passionate about it as any bitcoin evangelist. What’s different is how the firm will go about achieving that goal.
There have been very brief efforts at bitcoin ads. BitPay, the merchant-services firm, bought a U.S. college football bowl sponsorship. The “Bitcoin Bowl” (the company boldly chose to use not its name but the currency’s) put the name before millions of sporting fans; the company ran ads during the game, too (which North Carolina State won, 34-27, over the University of Central Florida).
What is different is how TheAudience plans to go about selling that message.
The firm, founded in 2011 by a threesome of Mr. Luckett, a former Walt Disney Co.DIS +0.96% executive, super-agent Ari Emanuel, and Naspter co-founder Sean Parker, doesn’t just create spots and buy ad space. The firm taps a network of social-media stars – some call them microcelebrities, Mr. Luckett prefers to call them influencers – to tout products on their own networks, their YouTube or Vine channels.
This campaign from TheAudience will feature social-media stars like, for example, Ms. Brinley (none of the firm’s stable of online stars have been specifically tied to the bitcoin campaign), who would incorporate the product, in this case bitcoin, into their work they produce online, maybe a mention of it, or a photo on Instagram. Social-media stars like Ms. Brinley aren’t a household name in the way that, say, a show like The Simpsons is. But she does have 640,000 followers on Twitter, 530,ooo on YouTube, and 1.7 million on Instagram (moreover, those followers – online, tech savvy, millennials – also happen to be a perfect target audience for an online currency).
“These influencers are the key,” Mr. Luckett said, and while he touts this method as new, it’s really just the platform that’s new. He compared this kind of collaboration between artist and brand to the earliest days of radio and television, when companies would sponsors shows like soap operas, which got their name because the sponsors were soap and detergent companies.
The microcelebrity names may not resonant like Peyton Manning, who’s made an entire second career out of being a pitchman, but these are powerful channels TheAudience is tapping. “They can push a button and 8 million people will sit down to watch their content,” Mr. Luckett said of his influencers.
So, it won’t be “got bitcoin.” More like Little Orphan Annie and Ovaltine, and that worked out nicely for both Annie and Ovaltine. (Paul Vigna)
