Cryptocurrency seeks the highlight, with Spike Lee’s assist

Written by Tiffany Hsu and Coral Murphy Marcos
Before Spike Lee accepted cryptocurrency, he turned down Crocs.
Years in the past, the filmmaker rejected a proposal to purchase into the Colorado firm that makes perforated foam clogs, a call that precipitated him to overlook out when its inventory soared on the energy of the footwear fad.
“I wish I would’ve given some money back then,” Lee mentioned in a latest interview. “Anytime something is new, you’re going to have people who are going to be skeptical. With some of the best ideas, people thought the inventors were crazy.”
Now he has taken a leap into one other cultural craze, having agreed to direct and star in a tv industrial for Coin Cloud, an organization that makes kiosks for getting and promoting Bitcoin and different digital currencies. Although cryptocurrency shouldn’t be broadly used for transactions, an rising variety of retailers now settle for it as fee.
The industrial, which he shot final month, is considered one of a number of latest advertising and marketing efforts meant to broaden the viewers for a type of forex that may intimidate folks accustomed to money and bank cards.
Lee, outfitted nattily in a straw hat and gold-tipped cane whereas filming a part of the industrial on Wall Street, led a various forged that included his daughter Satchel, “Pose” actress Mj Rodriguez and drag queen Shangela. Other shoot areas included Fort Greene Park and the Chillin’ Bar and Grill in Washington Heights, the place breakfast patrons craned to catch a glimpse of the director as he filmed a Coin Cloud machine on the sidewalk.
“Old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down,” Lee says within the industrial, which portrays the cryptocurrency system as a extra accessible and equitable various to conventional, discriminatory monetary establishments.
“The digital rebellion is here,” he says.
Cryptocurrency has additionally been identified to intimidate traders, with its excessive volatility and the overwhelming variety of digital options, often known as cash. The advertising and marketing of this comparatively new cash has up to now been restricted principally to advertisements on commerce web sites and focused pushes on social media, the place aficionados swap meme-fueled in-jokes about coin values rocketing to the moon.
The trade is more and more betting that celebrities may help demystify cryptocurrency for the uninitiated.
Actor Alec Baldwin provided crisp definitions of cryptocurrency in a collection of on-line advertisements for the crypto buying and selling platform eToro, and National Football League star Tom Brady signed on as a model ambassador for FTX, a crypto trade that additionally has a deal to sponsor Major League Baseball.
Actor Neil Patrick Harris lately appeared in a TV industrial for the digital forex kiosk operator CoinFlip. “Now anyone, anywhere, can turn cash into crypto!” he declares.
EToro and Coinbase, one other trade, collectively spent $22.8 million on promoting final yr, almost double the $12.4 million they shelled out in 2019, in accordance with analysis agency Kantar. In latest months, Coinbase employed the Martin Agency, the promoting firm behind GEICO and DoorDash.
As Madison Avenue fields extra inquiries from cryptocurrency shoppers, company executives are feeling stress to raised talk the funding dangers, moderately than romanticize the trade.
“I get very nervous because I start looking at the way that some of the platforms are specifically targeting younger investors,” mentioned Alex Hesz, the chief technique officer of promoting big DDB Worldwide.
In the face of frenzied cryptocurrency buying and selling, advert businesses ought to push for moderation and diversification, he mentioned.
“Maximizing is what’s being encouraged here — the idea that this is an amazing asset, and as much as you want to put in, come on and jump on in, the Bitcoin’s lovely,” Hesz mentioned. “We would never feel comfortable for an alcohol client, or a high-salt or high-sugar or high-fat client, to encourage that level of unequivocal behavior.”
Some celeb endorsements of cryptocurrencies have run into hassle. In 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission cautioned that some well-known folks had been hyping the digital forex gross sales often known as preliminary coin choices with out disclosing that that they had been paid to advertise them. The fee has since settled expenses in opposition to boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., music producer DJ Khaled and actor Steven Seagal.
Social media influencers and esports stars have additionally been linked to shady cryptocurrency schemes, accused of pumping up cash simply earlier than their worth crashes.
Coin Cloud’s chief advertising and marketing officer, Amondo Redmond, mentioned he hoped Lee’s stature would assist elevate the trade by delivering one thing “more than just cool creative, but that is really at the forefront of digital currency becoming mainstream.”
“It’s more than just adding a celebrity face,” he mentioned.
Lee, who gained an Oscar in 2019 in the very best tailored screenplay class for “BlacKkKlansman,” has labored on advertisements for Capital One, Uber and, most famously, Nike. In the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, he directed and starred in commercials for Air Jordans, taking part in his cinematic alter ego Mars Blackmon reverse Michael Jordan.
“That was lightning in a bottle,” Lee mentioned from a flight certain for the Cannes Film Festival, the place he’s the primary Black particular person to steer the competition jury.
He declined to say how a lot he had been paid for the Coin Cloud industrial, however famous that “if anyone’s known my body of work over the last four decades, you kind of know about the way I see the world, and when they approached me, it fit in line.”
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spotlight monetary disadvantages for folks of shade, Lee hopes to advertise cryptocurrency as impartial to race, gender, age and different figuring out traits.
But he was no knowledgeable earlier than filming started, and needed to take “a crash course” on crypto. He insisted that the industrial embody a line urging viewers to do their very own analysis on digital cash.
Lee mentioned he now deliberate to put money into digital cash. He mentioned he wouldn’t, nonetheless, go anyplace close to the digital possession certificates often known as nonfungible tokens.
“NFTs, I don’t understand that,” he mentioned, laughing. “I’m old school, so sometimes my children have to turn on the TV — all those remotes and stuff.”
This article initially appeared in The New York Times.