[00:00:00] Donny Dvorin: The world is waking up to the power of crypto. And we are seeing this with new NFT and token launches every day, all using blockchain technologies. We’re also seeing huge marketing spends by crypto exchanges and platforms. And so this season we are speaking to the marketing leaders of those crypto companies hosted by brave software in me, Dani

[00:00:27] You’re listening to a new episode of the brave marketer podcast. And this one features Brad Michaelson. Brad’s the head of us marketing at Etro. And a prior episode, we had Shiran who is from Israel and does more of the global advertising. what’s nice about this episode is that we just talk about what’s going on in the U S for Etro.

[00:00:47] And we talk about at the beginning that each row is a social trading platform. Really that’s their difference, their USP, and they have 27 million global users. Brad is actually a digital marketer with over 10 years of [00:01:00] experience in FinTech and e-commerce brands. And he also worked as the director of marketing, a block fi, which is another brave average.

[00:01:08] And additionally, I think we’re going to like this episode, because we do talk about how each arrow is different and then the ways they use digital marketing with everything from Twitter and what they’re doing with Giphy to increase the performance of their ads. And then Brad’s thoughts on the biggest challenges with crypto marketing and the strategies for overcoming them.

[00:01:26] But before we get into today’s episode, we want to highlight our brave pick of the week. As you know, every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with brave. And this week we’re going to choose. Venmo is an app for fast, safe social payments between friends. I personally use Venmo all the time to exchange money after you know, anything for concert tickets or babysitters or whatever it is.

[00:01:50] And they ran a sponsored image with brave to tell our users about their crypto wallet and how users can purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum, light coin, or Bitcoin cash, and just a fuse [00:02:00] taps. We love having brands like Venmo on our platform. As we collectively grow the crypto. Go system. And now for this week’s episode of the brave marketer,

[00:02:17] Brad welcome to the brave marketer podcast. How you doing

[00:02:19] Brad Michelson: today? Doing great. Thanks for having

[00:02:21] Donny Dvorin: me. So I think a lot of our audience know about HARO and Tara runs a lot with brave. So if you’re a brave user, you probably see their sponsored images and their push notifications all the time. But for the audience that does not know of Vitara is not a current customer of Vitaro.

[00:02:36] Would you mind giving a brief overview of what each of those.

[00:02:39] Brad Michelson: Sure. Yeah. So each Toro is a social investing platform. What that means is any of our users can come on our platform and, you know, chat with other users using our social feeds. any of our 28 million users will hop on. Talk trading strategy, market sentiment, trade tips on their investment strategies and just [00:03:00] generally, help each other learn about investing.

[00:03:02] so we’re a multi-asset brokerage. We’ve got crypto, we’ve got a number of different crypto assets, but then we also offer, uh, stocks and equities, on the

[00:03:10] Donny Dvorin: platform. Yeah. And you know what I really like is the copy trader functionality. So if there is a trader that you may know, because you’re really into trading and you’re following them on Twitter, Reddit, And you see that they have good results.

[00:03:23] You can actually follow their trades and executes on each arm, executes the trades their behalf, right?

[00:03:30] Brad Michelson: Yeah. Basically. So every user on the platform has a profile. I can go to yours, you can go to mine, you can see, my whole portfolio of the assets I’ve gotten in there. You can see all the trades I’ve ever made, whether I’m in the green or in the red, on those trades.

[00:03:43] And if you think I’m a good trader a crypto. and I’m in the popular investor program. You can copy my trades for a minimum of 200 bucks, and then every trade I make going forward, you’ll make the exact same trade in proportion to your investment automatically. That’s

[00:03:58] Donny Dvorin: cool. Do you have to have a minimum [00:04:00] amount in your account for that to happen?

[00:04:02] It’s just a minimum investment of 200. so it doesn’t match, the exact portfolio just opens up new trades. So like, let’s say there’s a portfolio and the guy has, you can do both. You can actually match the. Entire portfolio and then have the option to do new trades as well.

[00:04:15] That’s

[00:04:15] Brad Michelson: right. So when you’re opening a copy, it gives you the option to either just do trades going forward, or it can help rebalance your portfolio based on the person you’re copying his portfolio and also copy all the trades that happen going forward.

[00:04:30] Donny Dvorin: That’s great. How many other, exchanges or trading platforms have this type of function?

[00:04:35] Where are the only one it’s amazing. All right. So let’s get into you, Brad. Let’s talk about, what you’re working on and your role. So you had U S marketing at each Toro. Why don’t we start with just telling you audience about like the most exciting thing you’re working on right now?

[00:04:49] Like what’s on your plate.

[00:04:50] Brad Michelson: Sure. Yeah. Uh, I think that the most timely thing to mention is that we did a Superbowl ad. so I know it’s been a little bit over a month, but I’m still a running on the high of that [00:05:00] excitement. So, yeah, we, were part of the quote unquote, crypto. we had an ad that ran in the third quarter and we had a big campaign that ran right around it.

[00:05:09] So obviously the ad itself, we had a big social activation. We bought some print ads in the winning and losing teams, papers for the day after. So in LA we ran on the back of the sports section of. Congrats LA with, some marketing copy and, you know, just cheering on the team. And then, in Cincinnati we ran more ofan ad that focuses on the campaign, that we launched with the super bowl.

[00:05:33] Donny Dvorin: Right. So in the Subaru we had Coinbase do the QR code. We had FTX and they had Larry David. we had crypto.com and I dunno if they were using their Matt Damon or what they used, but can you tell us a little bit about your ad? Sure. Yeah.

[00:05:49] Brad Michelson: So our ad was, really focused on the idea of social investing.

[00:05:53] That’s really our key USP. That refers to our social feeds that refers to, the [00:06:00] conversations, our users have on the platform the value of social investing as an education tool for a lot of people, investing is intimidating.

[00:06:10] It’s confusing to some people, and we see the social features of our platform as a way for them to get more comfortable. Investing. So that was really the thesis of the ad in the campaign.

[00:06:22] Donny Dvorin: So this whole podcast is about brave marketing moments. Is there something, you know, that really stands out for you when you exhibited bravery? I think a fun

[00:06:33] Brad Michelson: one from my early days of the Torah was, what we did with, gift search engine optimization early days, two and a half years ago, or so at each Toro, we were just working to get it on the map. Like we are very large brand in Europe. For example, you go into a pub in London, you talk.

[00:06:51] Commission-free stocks or crypto trading, like we’re likely to be one of the names to come up there.

[00:06:55] Donny Dvorin: It’s like the way each grade was, you know, 10 years ago here in the U S totally.

[00:06:59] Brad Michelson: [00:07:00] So in the U S we’re just, putting a foothold in place. And one of the ways that we were talking about doing that is trying to figure out how we insert ourselves on social media.

[00:07:10] How do we. a presence on social media. So aside from, you know, the typical Twitter content that you might do as a brand to get engagement on crypto Twitter, this was really like the peak of gift usage. I would say on Twitter as like someone tweets something and the replies are all just people with topical gifts.

[00:07:30] Right? So what we did is we took that as our. We created, a number of different, GIF assets based on the crypto assets on our platform that were tradable. And we did some light SEO research and applied keyword tagging to, all the assets on our Giphy account. And quickly what we realized is that our assets were not only.

[00:07:51] indexing within Giphy, but they were also jumping to the top of the search results. So we were the number one ad for the search term Bitcoin for the [00:08:00] longest time on Giphy. So whenever you’re on Twitter and you hit the gift button and you search Bitcoin, it was our gift. That was like the top two or three spots.

[00:08:08] and you know, that was a couple of years ago and we’ve gotten hundreds of millions of. Views on our ads

[00:08:14] Donny Dvorin: since then, tell us about your funnel. you’re doing a lot of marketing out there. how do you follow and make sure that they open up an account and fund it? It’s a great

[00:08:22] Brad Michelson: question. Yeah. tracking’s number one.

[00:08:24] Right? So we have a tracking system, that sets up tracking for every little individual campaign and platform and channel that we do. So, before you start anything, you gotta make sure that you’re tracking. we’re a full funnel. we are over a number of different channels where paid search, paid social display, programmatic, mobile affiliate, all of it.

[00:08:47] so you have to set up your individual strategies and tracking for all of those things, making sure that you’re optimizing assets across those. Then once you bring them to the site, it’s just a matter of getting them through registration first and foremost. [00:09:00] You know, visits the first step and then beyond that you get them to the registration phase.

[00:09:05] So that’s, the biggest hurdle off the bat, then going down the line here, you have your whole account set up. every platform is slightly different. The number of steps that are involved, this is something that’s constantly being tested. But, you know, in the U S you’re going to enter like a KYC phase, right?

[00:09:22] So we take the customer through that experience. a very significant number of them, get approved nearly instantly, uh, with digital verification and beyond that, we do tests between moving, customers straight into the product so they can check it out. They can scroll through the feeds, whatever it is, check out people’s profiles, and then other segments of, the user base, just go straight to funding and we, you know, test for conversion rate.

[00:09:49] There is, are we more likely to. Get what we call FTDs first-time depositers if we send them to the product first, or if we send them straight to funding and, [00:10:00] those results changed depending on market conditions and the time of year and the way that we’re doing it. and then, you know, we’ve captured them at that point, right?

[00:10:07] And then you enter the life cycle, retention funnel, that’s a whole other.

[00:10:12] Donny Dvorin: Got it. Cool. You mentioned a lot of different tactics. You mentioned programmatic and social. you had a whole list. What performs best in what doesn’t perform nowadays? I think

[00:10:23] Brad Michelson: about it is there’s not necessarily like a best in worst, right?

[00:10:27] Like if you’re just looking pure numbers, last click attribution. Yeah. You’re going to say. This one drives the most accounts, right. But really we’re living in, multi click attribution, reality. we might see that Facebook is an expensive platform for us for direct attribution for last click attribution.

[00:10:47] But you know, that Facebook is very likely to be a first touch point, right? Someone might see your ad. Someone might click on your ad and abandon or see your ad and just keep scrolling. But that’s a first touch point. Then [00:11:00] they might see you again on a native ad that we bought on CoinDesk, for example, then they might see us again through a retargeting.

[00:11:08] on like an app that they’re using or something like that, and then convert through there. So I hesitate to say there’s like a best channel, because I think that acquisition marketing these days is multi-touch.

[00:11:18] Donny Dvorin: Are you using any type of MTA, like a multi-touch attribution to understand where all those clicks and views and conversions are coming from?

[00:11:26] Brad Michelson: we have our own systems that we use to interpret different flows of data that you’re kind of referring to there. Isn’t. MTA system in particular that we’re using, or a lot of our systems we’ve built our. but we have ways of which analyzing the data that help

[00:11:42] Donny Dvorin: inform that. One of the issues.

[00:11:44] I think that with brave is that, you know, we don’t have any type of tracking at all. We don’t allow MTAs because we’re privacy browser, but in our benefit, we have this unreachable audience like our audience, may not be on. Facebook and [00:12:00] Instagram, and they’re not using Chrome, they’re obviously using brave.

[00:12:03] So they’re not seeing any of the programmatic ads. They’re not seeing any of the YouTube ads because we blocked the YouTube ads. and so the only place to reach them is within the Bree browser, unless you’re talking about offline, right. The TV commercials, billboards, or whatever it is. So when that, MTA comes up in our conversations, it’s like, yeah, it’s less relevant.

[00:12:23] and with you guys know. Use your own tracking code, and you can see that the click goes to your website and then it’s a funded account and you can see how many funded accounts are happening every month. And I think that’s why you’ve guys have been a customer of ours for the past two

[00:12:38] Brad Michelson: years. Yeah. I think what you’ll hear from all crypto marketers is that reaching this audience.

[00:12:45] Difficult. Right. Um, they’re picky about what platforms they use. the places that they spend, their time online shift periodically, like, you know, it used to be YouTube back in the day and read it. And then it was Twitter. And now [00:13:00] no one really uses Reddit for crypto as much anymore. And then it was telegram all the time.

[00:13:04] And there were a lot of people investing in telegram and now we’re on discord. So people are jumping around the time. The strategies. I think one of the benefits of working with brave is that, you know, that it’s a lower funnel audience before. Yeah.

[00:13:19] Donny Dvorin: And the thing about a browser, which is nice is that like, once you decide that, Hey, prep’s going to be my primary browser.

[00:13:25] And you said, as a default, you’re going to stick around unless we do something wrong, to those other channels, you know, you’re obsessed with Twitter, then you’re at it. Then here, telegram, then your discord now your signal, you know, it’s like, I haven’t even researched too.

[00:13:38] All of those platforms have advertising opportunity.

[00:13:41] Brad Michelson: No, but there are strategies that you can put into, I’m trying to think back to like three or four years ago where everyone was investing in like telegram bots. Right? So that’s something that still exists today. Like, I don’t really use telegram as much anymore.

[00:13:54] It’s all shifted to other platforms for the most part now. Uh, I use signal. I [00:14:00] use discord. Sometimes Twitter is like a big one, still. Like, it’s hard to get off that one for me. I know that the DMS experience isn’t great, but it’s still like a really easy way. All in one place for me to communicate with other people.

[00:14:13] I prefer it.

[00:14:15] Donny Dvorin: Why’d you shift from telegram and moron discord. I’ve

[00:14:19] Brad Michelson: never been a fan of a telegram, to be honest, I, something about the UI that bugs me in the spam. It’s like never ending, which is actually an issue that with discord as well, but for some reason, it’s not as.

[00:14:30] Donny Dvorin: See, I have like a different experience where I actually liked the UI of telegram and I’d like telegram a lot.

[00:14:36] I just started using signal and it’s very simple and easy. And I like it when I’ve gone into discord. especially for like, I got invited to some of these channels where I was like the high yield ones where you were making like 10000% in a year or whatever it was. It just felt like a mess. There was just like channels and then groups and conversations with it.

[00:14:58] I didn’t even know where to [00:15:00] go. It felt so like, ah, to

[00:15:02] Brad Michelson: me, yeah, it’s pretty overwhelming. Cause you know, people abuse it once there’s something available. Marketers are going to find a way, whether they’re white hat or red hat or gray hat are gonna find a way to, you know, elevate whatever they’re working on there.

[00:15:14] So that definitely happens. But I think curating your communities is, is really the key.

[00:15:21] Donny Dvorin: So I’m sure there’s a lot of challenges that come up with crypto marketing. What are some of the hardest things, about marketing exchange? Yeah,

[00:15:29] Brad Michelson: so, I guess just starting from the, beginning is difficult, right?

[00:15:32] Growing up brand is really hard in crypto, more than traditional FinTech, more than other brands or, uh, verticals, even growing trust is the hardest part because everyone starts from the stage of being skeptical. Uh, pessimistic about new entrance into the space, right? People don’t know if you’re trustworthy or if you’re a scam or if you’re even like worthy of putting your, their value onto your platform.

[00:15:58] Right. So figuring out [00:16:00] how to, endear your brand, with consumers is major, you know, beyond that early days, most companies start out with very razor, thin budget. So figuring out what channel. Worked for you. You can only invest in brands so far because you know, yeah. Social media is quote unquote free, but you still need to hire people to create content or to be on Twitter all day and you have to find the right people.

[00:16:26] so those are difficult things. And then once you get to the. Where you’re at scale, like we are, new challenges emerge, right? Like how do you own the, like your piece of the pie of the conversation? How are you becoming ever present? How are you retaining your customers for the long-term? and that’s the thing that every brand struggles with, you know, and that’s our job as marketers to figure out how to solve for that.

[00:16:50] How much

[00:16:50] Donny Dvorin: do you rely on agencies versus doing it?

[00:16:53] Brad Michelson: The vast majority of what we do is in-house, including our creative, which is really fun experience.

[00:16:58] Donny Dvorin: And so how big of a [00:17:00] team do you have managing, let’s say social media

[00:17:02] Brad Michelson: channels. So in the U S I’ve got a one person who’s full-time on social and a bunch of people sort of collapsed.

[00:17:10] On things, whether it’s, you know, graphical assets or videos or, data that we might be putting on our social feeds, everything is like symbiotic on our team. So every channel talks with other channels, all the teams, talk with other teams. So there isn’t sort of like one person doing everything.

[00:17:28] We try to make it so that everyone has a, at least a toe in all the other things that are going. What do

[00:17:34] Donny Dvorin: you think, it takes to be a bold market or right now I think

[00:17:37] Brad Michelson: that taking risks are, is an obvious place to start with that. but there are certain lines that are really difficult as a marketer, right?

[00:17:45] When. FinTech, but in particular crypto, there is a lot of compliance concerns. You have to keep in mind. There’s a lot of legal concerns you have to keep in mind. So figuring out how to color within the lines of that is [00:18:00] an ever, ever growing strip, not ever growing, but like ever present struggle for marketers.

[00:18:05] So that’s one thing. And then. The next is, you know, with risk-taking just from a PR and messaging perspective, there is good risk taking and bad risk taking. And I think that in crypto, phrase, all press is good. Press is not necessarily true. Um, I think that there are plenty of examples of our industry, of, companies, you know, doing something that their customers or the wider community didn’t necessarily agree with or go against the key tenants.

[00:18:33] what the majority of crypto people feels important, to this ecosystem. So risk taking can go both ways. It’s a high risk, but also high reward there.

[00:18:43] Donny Dvorin: So Brad, you have a lot of. Competitors out there, but you know, we were talking about how they’re not necessarily competitors and you’re trying to grow the whole ecosystem. Can you talk about that?

[00:18:55] Brad Michelson: Yeah. So the way that I think about it is like, yes, we’re all fighting [00:19:00] for a piece of the pie, right? There’s only so many people in the world that are interested in, in investing in cryptocurrency or investing in stocks or whatever else it is.

[00:19:10] But every time. We run a Facebook ad or a Twitter ad going out to wider audiences. You know, we’re all really contributing to growing the overall pie, growing the number of people that are interested in this asset class or, growing their, you know, wealth for the future investing for, you know, buying a home or retirement or whatever it is.

[00:19:29] So I think, you know, obviously we have competitors, but at the same time, We all like really like cheering each other on for our work, in how we grow that it’s true.

[00:19:39] Donny Dvorin: Like, I see a lot of dead helds posts and every day he’s talking about something about Bitcoin or inflation or something about our monetary policy and how Bitcoin’s better.

[00:19:48] And, um, obviously he wants people to use crack in, but I think that those messages also. Bring more people to buy Bitcoin. And if they’re already are [00:20:00] as an example, as a cryptocurrency, but if they’re already at each our user, you know, they’re going to do it there. So it, it does help you. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:20:06] Brad Michelson: totally.

[00:20:07] And I think you’d agree that when people come into crypto or investing in. They don’t just have one platform that they do that on. Right? Like they start on one and then they test another and maybe they’ve got another is another backup or, you know, they only trade these assets on this one. They jumped to the other one.

[00:20:23] So we’re really growing the pie for everyone by. Messaging out to a broader audience.

[00:20:29] Donny Dvorin: Would there ever be a day where you would do some type of, co-marketing with maybe someone that’s not directly competitive, like a Michelle at tax bed or something

[00:20:36] Brad Michelson: like that? Yeah, totally. in the past, we’ve done campaigns exactly like that.

[00:20:40] Where during tax season, we’d partner with some of the top crypto tax providers, and we would do like a CPA style deal where, you know, if someone comes. from them and trades this a certain amount of deposits, a certain amount on . They would get, you know, one of the tax provider packages for free [00:21:00] and we, you know, would pay a CPA to that partner.

[00:21:03] just, you know, provide them. 360 service, not only for our users, but for theirs as well. at the end of the day, we’re all crypto marketers, right? Like everyone who is in the crypto ecosystem, um, one way or another, we’re talking about it with friends. We’re talking about it with family.

[00:21:20] We’re posting about it on social media. yeah, the louder you are, the more eyeballs we get and let’s grow this pie,

[00:21:28] Donny Dvorin: rising tide lifts, all boats, right. Brad. Well, thank you so much. Thanks again for listening to the brave marketer podcast, to stay up to date on all things brave, sign up to the brave ads inside a newsletter@brave.com forward slash add news.

[00:21:44] Do get tips for advertising and the cookie. This world exclusive content industry. Best practices for consumer privacy and more. If you’d like to get started on your brave ads campaign or speak to someone from the team email ad sales@brave.com. That’s [00:22:00] 80 sales air, brave.com. And finally musical credit goes to my older brother.

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