Why the cringey Matt Damon crypto ad is no laughing matter

Taking the musings of social media seriously was one of last year’s expensive lessons for sophisticated investors.

From GameStop’s epic short squeeze to the boom in cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens and ETFs, retail punters poured money into trending market tips while sharing their highs and lows on Twitter, TikTok and Reddit. US investors shovelled more than $US1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) into equities last year — more than the past two decades combined.

Hedge funds and investment banks have resolved not to be caught out by the crowd, and have developed new tools to glean signals from the social media hive mind. Highly-paid analysts now send out natural language processing-based alerts that read like trading haikus: “crypto, china, stake, btc, eth, dip, hold, ada, long, moon.”

The next test for the social-media scrapers will be figuring out how seriously to take mockery. This week, the online peanut gallery turned against actor Matt Damon’s ad for the trading app crypto.com, on display at screenings of the new Spider Man movie and American football games (presumably a sign of the target demographic).

In the ad, Damon pays homage to history’s explorers, innovators and astronauts, before exhorting regular folks to follow his lead into the volatile world of crypto trading. “Cringe” and “yuck” were among the glowing reviews, as viewers wondered how Dogecoin — described as “pretend computer dog money” — could be compared with climbing Mount Everest.

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The sniping reaction to the cringeworthy crypto commercial could be an interesting signal for sentiment bots for two reasons. The first is that celebrity crypto endorsements, from adopting laser-eye avatars to promoting apps, might be losing their power as drivers of retail-investor enthusiasm. Judging by criticisms of Damon’s wealth, influencers look vulnerable to the same kind of populist backlash that they’ve tried to co-opt. Their reach is also under close scrutiny by governments.

The second reason is that the crypto world’s advertising blitz, from stadium sponsorships to billboards, hasn’t delivered market gains either. Bitcoin’s price in December suffered its worst monthly drop since a 35 per cent rout in May, and Coinbase Global shares have fallen 30 per cent in two months on the back of worse-than-expected quarterly results. Trading app Robinhood Markets Inc, the symbol of meme-stock mania, hit all-time stock-price lows recently.

One ETF explicitly designed to capture meme-stocks, SPACs and “whatever happens to be trending at the time,” dubbed the FOMO ETF, has slumped 12.6 per cent in six months. Idealistic moonshot bets are struggling in a post-Covid, inflationary world, as famed active manager Cathie Wood’s ARK fund attests.