Winter in Crypto is Here, and Crypto Ad Budgets are Negatively affecting

With a bear market crashing around our ears’ and government regulators clamoring about new regulations to hedge against another Terra collapse, many investors and financial advisors are shying away from crypto. But just six short months ago, Matt Damon was shilling for crypto.com during the Superbowl for a couple of a million dollars per minute and everyone thought, as the Immortal Tom Petty once said, “The sky was the limit.”

The irony is two weeks after one of the largest ad buys by crypto in human history during the Superbowl, Bloomberg reported that 1 in 10 Americans didn’t even know what a Bitcoin was.

In these dark fiscal times, the vulgarity of advertising budgets of crypto businesses last winter is playing in stark contrast to the galactic crypto crashes of today

The Current Affairs Times got the chance to sit down with Lumiweatlth CEO Robert Grzesik this week and get the skinny on what’s happening with crypto-adjacent businesses like his in this most recent crypto winter.

Lumiwealth is an educational platform teaching financial pros and at-home crypto kings alike to code and creates bots, algorithms, and other machine-based learning tools to trade in both the crypto world and traditional finance alike.

And with the foul smell of bear breath wafting through the crypto-verse, Grzesik is predictably tightening the belt at Lumiwealth for advertising. He says call traffic is down despite having a business model that could make even hard times fruitful for a smart investor. In lieu of big-budget sports TV buys, he is leaning toward efficiency and laser-targeted ad buys through social media.

“We’re primarily advertising through Facebook right now, and we’re actually ramping up a lot of our influencer marketing,” he said in an interview Friday, “In terms of marketing, things have definitely slowed down. We’re officially in a crypto winter again. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that.”

Grzesik says his call funnel through his YouTube ads has seen a marked drop in traffic since the bear market began for both crypto and traditional stock traders, and his cost per call has doubled in the last two weeks. He says the idea that crypto has died has all but killed his customer interest in his services, but that he’s adapting to the market winds by altering messaging in ad buys to focus on products that work even in a down economy.

He says that this tack toward the promising side of investing and a focus on putting dollars where they matter most will see his ship through this particular crypto winter. “We can build bots that do well in a down market. We’re changing the narrative to use the bear market to our advantage … You don’t have to have a bull market to make money.”

He’s also working on using his ad dollars more efficiently, “(Facebook marketing) is one of the most expensive types of advertising you can do right now, so we’re trying to branch out to other avenues. Instead of paying Facebook, we’re getting a significantly better ROI on influencer marketing. Facebook ads cost a couple of hundred bucks for conversion, whereas influencers can be sub-100- they can be 5 to 10 times more efficient doing influencer advertising.”

Grzesik has positioned Lumaweath to weather the proverbial storm, whereas other crypto businesses, that deal directly with financial management, have taken a bath in recent days.

He points to Voyager as an example of boom and bust crypto-economics. “Voyager was worth a billion dollars. They were holding onto a position for 3ac, the hedge fund, and is on the hook now for $600 Million dollars… we’re not in that space. We don’t get hit that hard when something blows up in crypto. We’re teaching people how to do this and so even if they do lose money, we gave you the tools. What you do with it is up to you.”

Adam Blumberg agrees with Grzesik that there’s life in crypto yet, writing in an OpEd for CoinDesk.com this week, “The growth in value and notoriety of the crypto industry in the past few years created tremendous growth in the infrastructure while building a wall of cash in venture capital funds waiting to be deployed into the decentralized finance ecosystem.

As an advisor, this is a great opportunity for you. The decentralized financial tools of crypto will continue to be used and grow. More money will be poured into the applications, driving even more adoption.”

Grzesik says that while the whipping winds of Crypto winter are smarting, adaptation and the very nature of crypto means you should take a class with Lumiwealth and dive on into crypto now.

“We are mixed up in this crash in the sense that it’s harder to advertise and there is less activity”, says Grzesik, “It’s just a slow-down in the activity that’s getting us more than anything else. If crypto is going to go up, that’s great, but it doesn’t have to. Even if it just goes sideways for years, you can still make money on that. There are still tons of ways to make money even when things are down. You’re going to have to adapt. You either die or adapt.”

Thumbnail and Image Credits: Christopher German and Lumiwealth