Finance

Matt Damon, Cryptocurrency, And The Great Power Of Marketing

The Martian's crypto plug may be ridiculous — until it's not.

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(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

I am fascinated with misattributed quotations. What is it about human beings that makes us feel such a desperate need to attach a free-floating catchy phrase, a small piece of independent wisdom, to some hero or villain of history?

Whatever the reasons, there are some great misattributed quotations out there, and one of the most repeated is that Albert Einstein said something along the lines of compound interest being “the most powerful force in the universe.” There’s no evidence that Einstein said any such thing, and claims that he did only arose a few decades after his death when stories about high interest rates were popular in the news. This likely false quote had a lot more sticking power then than it would have had during Einstein’s lifetime.

Today, with interest rates having been historically low for historically long, I’m going to humbly propose an update to Einstein’s fake quote. Let’s replace “compound interest” with “marketing,” given the times we’re in, and try that on for a fit.

I know, it’s not as catchy, and it takes a little thinking — never the marker of a good sticky quotation. But marketing does not get its due as the powerful force in our lives that it really is.

Don’t believe me? There are a million examples of sales pitches taking hold so fundamentally that we’ve long-since forgotten that good marketing was the origin of some perceived need in the first place. Getting people to buy into something — a product, an idea, a way of life even — is an art form.

Why do you have to spend a few thousand bucks (at least) when you get married for a tiny stone that even a chairman of the De Beers diamond conglomerate called “intrinsically worthless”? That’s right: nearly a century of marketing. Well-kept lawns, as something desirable rather than the labor and resource-wasting environmental travesties they actually are? You’ve been marketed to (lawns were originally supposed to show your neighbors you’re better din ‘em because you don’t need to grow wheat or pasture sheep right up to the front door, and hey, lawns kind of still serve a similar nonfunction today).

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Remember that at the end of the day all social media platforms, and all the problems they cause with misinformation and radicalization, are ultimately a function of how many ads they can get in front of our eyeballs. Heck, even the great American dream is a bit of truth swathed in a big fuzzy robe of marketing — there are plenty of other places emigrants could seek to go with longer life expectancies, better medical care, less income inequality, and more happiness than the good old U.S. of A., but all those stories of starting from nothing and making it big in America have really taken root over the last couple centuries.

Marketing is indeed a powerful force. Like any powerful force, it can be applied to good or ill effect. Which worries me a little when it comes to Matt Damon’s cryptocurrency ad recently making the rounds on social media.

That’s right, The Martian himself took to screens everywhere to plug crypto.com by, among other things, comparing investing in cryptocurrencies to summiting Mount Everest and space exploration. “Fortune favors the brave,” intones Damon, in a tagline reminiscent of so many Marlboro Man advertisements of decades past.

Buying cryptocurrency, of course, doesn’t require any particular bravery, and it seems most of the investing community eschewed Damon’s ad. The advertising spot has been widely panned online.

But I bet plenty of the marketing pitches that have sunk in so deeply so as to become indistinguishable from the culture itself started out sounding silly. Just because a surely well-paid Matt Damon seems like a remarkably bad source of investment advice to us in this moment does not mean his message will fail to ultimately grasp a foothold.

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Like a lot of observers of the financial world, I don’t quite know what to make of cryptocurrency yet in the larger historical context. Maybe it will become an integral part of our society someday. Maybe it will become a flop of historical proportions à la the Dutch Tulip Mania. But whatever the potential organic future of crypto, I sure hope cryptocurrency doesn’t become just another functionless, or even harmful, American ubiquity, born not of utility but of decades of marketing. That would sure be a shame.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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