Will a crypto-scented perfume get more women interested in Bitcoin?
And your merger press releases don't need to be boring
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? This isn’t marketing-related, but if you have 40 minutes and you subscribe to Disney+, you should watch The Last Repair Shop, the winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. It’s about the people who repair instruments for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, but that doesn’t really do it justice. It’s great.
Today we’ll be talking about:
How do you turn a boring company announcement into something that’s more on-brand?
The Hulk Hogan sex tape of customer reviews.
Crypto for girls.
This newsletter exists only because I like telling stories about marketing. The more people who read it, the more self-worth I’ll have (pathetic, right?). Anyway, please share this with people - it’ll make them think you’re smart. And funny. Also attractive.
THIS Is How You Announce an Agency Merger
Maybe you’ve worked at some company where that company bought another company.
And that company you bought was pretty small, and while it made strategic sense to buy that company, it’s not an earth-shattering event.
Yet, you work in marketing so the CEO comes to you and says something like, “Hey, we need to put out a press release to announce this purchase.”
So you write up a draft, and you read it and you think to yourself, “this should probably be punchier, but I hate when people say, ‘this should be punchier,’ so screw those people I’m going to leave it EXACTLY this punchy.”
You show it to the CEO (assuming you’re working at the type of company where the CEO reads press releases), and the CEO says, “That’s fine, but I feel like it should be…I don’t know exactly what the right word is, but I guess, ‘punchier?’”
You go back to your desk and you (assuming you’re working at the type of company where you have to write the press releases) and you punch the bejeezus out of it, and it sounds something like this actual press release:
"Combining the expertise of these teams into one collective will give brands access to an incredible wealth of knowledge around impactful consumer engagement," says Jason Gramling, EVP, General Manager of Product Connections. "That expertise spans from strategic creative solutions to executional excellence in face-to-face and digital interactions. As the consumer landscape is changing every day, this team is uniquely poised to solve how best to interact with consumers or shoppers, wherever they are."
I don’t even blame whoever wrote that. That’s how you write one of these merger announcements.
Unless you’re Kansas City-based agencies Barkley and OKRP, which recently merged and announced it with this really, really clever video, featuring a man-on-the-street interviewing passersby about the merger, and none of them care.
The final shot of the video sums it up:
Even the most rote, boring marketing tactics (like a merger press release!) are an opportunity for branding.
(Thanks to longtime Gobbledy subscriber and KC resident Tim K. for sharing that amazing piece of work. I can’t believe Kansas City got Taylor and that video in the same year.)
Customer Reviews Are Important - Eggplant Emoji Edition
There’s a new company called R!B2B that purports to tell you who is visiting your website. Not that someone from a specific company is visiting your website. They say that if you install their code on your site, that they will instantly send you a Slack message with the LinkedIn profile of the visitor.
If you’re a marketer or a salesperson you are very likely equally:
Disgusted
Intrigued
This sounds like a horrible invasion of privacy and also an incredible tool and I’m revolted and also fascinated. It’s how I felt a few years back when I learned there was a sex tape of Hulk Hogan with his friend’s* wife. That sounded awful and also, what, I’m not supposed to want to see that?
(*Possibly the best part of that entire saga is that Hogan’s friend goes by the nom-de-radio of Bubba the Love Sponge.)
If you’ve created a product that your buyer will definitely consider sketchy but could also definitely be valuable, you can imagine a couple of ways of handling this scenario.
You could lean into the benefits and perhaps use celebrities, influencers, or partnerships to try to reduce the stench of sketch and add a patina of mainstream acceptance. This was the route crypto exchanges took (before many of them imploded). Also, see: gambling apps.
Or you can lean into the sketchiness of it. Suggest that it’s a product for rogues and misfits, but rogues and misfits who want to sell a lot of software.
The fine people at R!B2B somehow used a little bit of both when they included this product testimonial on their website. Keep in mind - they put this on their website because they thought that “Eggplant, eggplant, eggplant, eggplant, splash, splash” would sell more of their product:
(Thanks to the person who posted this in a Slack group who may or may not be a Gobbledy subscriber.)
Crypto…Just for the Ladies
Maybe it’s just true that marketing is hard. Maybe that’s just it.
Maybe there’s no right answer for how to approach some marketing problems.
Here’s one that’s like a solid 9 out of 10 level of difficulty:
You’ve been hired to lead marketing (congrats!) at one of the largest companies in your industry. Maybe the largest. Congrats again.
I should mention here that the job is working for a crypto firm. Don’t worry, it’s not FTX (whew!).
That’s amazing - you’re riding a wave! (As I’m writing this, Bitcoin is over $70,000, though maybe when you’re reading this it’s at $38,000. Or $275,000. I have no idea). It’s the kind of role those of us in marketing all dream about.
You’ve got a pretty well known (though somehow also incredibly secretive) CEO. Your biggest competitor is both out of business and its CEO (whom your CEO hates) is now in prison.
But then.
Then the CEO of your firm, Binance, is fined $4.3 billion by the US Justice Department for skirting money laundering rules (oops!) and he has to step down (though on his way out the door, in an offer that’s gotta be difficult to refuse, he says that he is “available to the team to consult as needed.”)
After that, the US business collapses, losing 75% of its trading volume and laying off 2/3rds of its employees in the US.
On the plus side, the international arm of your business is doing quite well.
So, you’re the head of marketing at Binance. Your US business is in the tank, your international business is growing, but you note that 50% of earth’s population (specifically, women) tend to avoid crypto trading. Perhaps the marketing opportunity is to get some of those women to starting trading crypto.
That seems fair enough. But women have avoided crypto - Boston Consulting Group found that only 7% of Web3 founders are women, for example.
And if you’ve dabbled in the crypto world online, you can see perhaps why women would be put off by the bro-heavy, bullshit-filled nonsense that’s spewed online about the topic. Given that, there’s probably a way you can speak to women about crypto while avoiding some of the off-putting crypto stereotypes.
That would be one way to approach this marketing problem - strip out the bro-speak and just be straight with women.
The OTHER way would be to create a fake fragrance called CRYPTO and then use that to try to get women interested in trading Bitcoin. Of course, that’s what they did.
There’s a video that you can watch (but, I mean, why?):
I thought it was worth pointing out that the video starts with two title cards that read:
"Women are still not investing in crypto as much as men…”
“So we set up a stand for a new fragrance… ‘CRYPTO’ to spark conversation.”
Because women like perfume! But crypto is hard, like the woman says in the video, [buying crypto] “isn’t just as simple as buying things.” (Even I can admit that buying non-things is definitely harder than buying things.)
About 25 years ago Saturday Night Live put out this fake (??) commercial for Chess for Girls (“Chess is a classic game of strategy and wits…and bubbles!”) that’s basically the same as this, only Chess for Girls was meant to be a joke.
Binance’s CMO defended the ad:
“I think the goal of this is to be irreverent, to be fun, to try to push boundaries…While there’s always some people that will be upset, we’re confident this is opening up the discussion in the right way.”
Just a quick word of advice - if you’re considering launching a campaign, and you think to yourself, “there’s always some people who will be upset” by that campaign, maybe - maybe! - you should try a different idea. Just a thought.
As always, thanks for reading to the end.
I really, really enjoy chatting with readers, which is why I include a link to sign up for a 25 minute chat: Here’s my Calendly link. We can talk about Hulk Hogan’s non-sexual escapades. Or Kansas City. Or press releases. Whatever you’d like. Or I can go over your website - it can be about work, really!
And lastly, I’ve been doing a bunch of 1-day workshops around messaging, and the outcome is that your homepage will be SO much clearer. If you want your homepage to be clearer, we should chat. You can reply to this newsletter, use that Calendly link, or email me at jared@sagelett.com.
The best part of that weird fake-Crypto-perfume marketing video is when the woman says she has no interest in smelling Crypto.
Thanks for the documentary recommendation--I like to watch documentaries and even more like to recommend them...