In December of 2021, Meta opened the door for crypto companies to advertise on its platforms, announcing that written pre-approval was no longer required so long as a company has at least one of the 27 listed regulatory licenses.
This was huge news in the advertising world.
Before this announcement, Meta had banned these companies from promoting themselves at all, placing them in the same category as firearms and pornography. This severely limited the advertising options for crypto companies. While they had a surplus of money for marketing, they were relegated to organic Twitter posts, Reddit AMAs, billboards, one-off influencer deals, community building on Discord, and sporting event sponsorships.
Since the announcement, there's been a flood of interest from hundreds of new and well-capitalized crypto companies that didn't have a path to social advertising until now. Advertising crypto on Meta's Facebook or Instagram is much more effective than the options above because of the platforms' world-class audience targeting capabilities, conversion optimization, attribution, and consumer reach.
Starting now, crypto and web3 brands can measure reach, clicks, and conversions, as well as test their ad creative in a meaningful way. This means they’ll be able to build a clearer picture of whom they should target and how for maximum impact.
This move to open advertising to crypto and web3 brands is also emblematic of a larger, oncoming trend — Meta says yes to it today, Google says yes to it tomorrow, and so on. The floodgates have been opened, and crypto brands have both money to burn and nowhere to go but up.
Although they’re raring to capitalize on this new opportunity, crypto companies find themselves with two huge hurdles they’ll need to immediately overcome.
Because crypto companies never needed digital marketing as a core capability until now, most of them aren't properly staffed to build the digital assets needed to stand up a social media presence, let alone create and scale digital ad campaigns. It’s very possible we’ll see a number of them acquiring agencies to quickly bring this competency on board.
As with any new advertiser entering the space, best practices for crypto ads have yet to be defined. We don't yet know what kinds of images, messaging, and calls to action will cause people to engage with crypto ads because they've never been tested in the wild. This is where things will get very interesting and exciting. A focus on ad creative, more so than target audience, is a must. Those that iterate fastest and test everything will emerge as early winners clearly differentiated from the laggards in the industry.
Multivariate testing with Marpipe is the shortest path to success. Marpipe's new offering for crypto companies makes it possible to rapidly discover which combinations of audiences, copy, and creative variables will be the highest performers. Those crypto brands that discover their top-performing ads first will be the ones to define crypto advertising best practices — while everyone else will simply try to imitate.
