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“Why did you invest in gold? Are you living in the past?”
So begins a new national television advertisement that urges investors to dump gold and invest in bitcoin instead. “You see where things are going,” the voiceover declares. “Digital currencies like bitcoin are the future.”
The ad comes from Grayscale Investments, the crypto investment firm behind the publicly traded Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), up 66% this year. Grayscale has $1 billion in assets under management and offers similar investment vehicles tied to bitcoin cash, litecoin, ethereum, Zcash, and others.
Grayscale’s parent company is Digital Currency Group, the biggest crypto venture capital fund in the world. DCG owns Grayscale, Genesis Trading, and the bitcoin news site CoinDesk, and has invested in more than 145 cryptocurrency startups, including Coinbase, Ripple, Coinlist, Circle, and Protocol Labs. Barry Silbert, who founded trading platform SecondMarket and sold it to Nasdaq in 2015, is the founder and CEO of both DCG and Grayscale.
Even though the TV ad ends by advertising the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Silbert says, “We do not see this as a Grayscale commercial. For us, #DropGold is our ‘Got Milk.’ This campaign is first and foremost focused on starting a conversation about bitcoin vs gold. If the ad makes people want to get into bitcoin, we’re completely indifferent about how they go about doing it.”
Silbert sees the campaign as something everyone in the cryptocurrency industry should rally behind, a form of “rising tide lifts all boats” thinking. Still, the ad ends with the narrator saying, “Go digital. Go Grayscale.”
The ad will begin airing nationally on linear cable and business news networks in the next week, plus on OTT streaming video platforms like Hulu.
Why frame it as bitcoin vs. gold?
Grayscale’s ad may leave viewers wondering, Why pitch bitcoin as a gold alternative? Gold is a physical commodity with hundreds of years of history; bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 that few Americans understand.
Silbert says it’s a response to long-entrenched framing of gold as an investment class. “There has been a very strong marketing push from the gold industry that gold is the only and the best store of value in periods of economic uncertainty,” he says. “That may be true. But now you have bitcoin, which, in our opinion, provides all the same attributes as gold—it’s fungible and scarce and you can’t counterfeit it—but the big difference is that bitcoin actually has utility. Gold doesn’t have much utility beyond jewelry. And gold doesn’t have the accessibility. Anyone with internet can access bitcoin. So what bitcoin may lack in history, it more than makes up with utility and accessibility.”