The reframing of Coinbase with Gareth Kay, Cat Ferdon and Joe Staples

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0:52Joe Staples: You can learn more about his course and register at learning.lions.co. That's learning.lions.co. Now back to the show. So we have a conversation today with our show's great friend, Gareth Kaye. Many of you may remember Gareth Kaye from various positions, being a chief strategy officer, being a really great leading thinker in strategic planning. So I'm always thrilled to have Gareth on. Gareth is with Coinbase. And as many of you already know, Coinbase went through a very difficult... Well, let me reframe that. Crypto and Bitcoin went through a very difficult period in 2022. There were scandals around FTX.

1:38Joe Staples: There was issues around interest rates and the value of crypto. And there was a collapse in crypto and therefore as a result of collapse in confidence. So for those people who were thinking that, okay, crypto is just a fad, that was certainly fuel for them. For those who were considering crypto, it certainly made them skeptical of it. And so when Gareth came into Coinbase, along with Kat and Joe, who we're talking with today, there was a significant challenge on the table that they needed to address. They had built, if you look at Jeffrey Moore's adoption curve, they had built along with others in the category, the sort of the early adopters.

2:14Joe Staples: But they were now needed to get the next large segment of the population that might be considered early sort of majority of people. And if you know from tech and tech adoption, the attitudes and the desires and the behaviors and the assurances that people want at different stages, those different populations that are coming into a market, they're very different at very different times. So I think Coinbase had to make a decision. How do they go to market when crypto has a reputation problem and you're trying to get that next wave of customers to come in? So Gareth and the team looked at the idea of instead of trying to make excuses and trying to convince people to buy into crypto, it was the idea of almost reframing Coinbase as being more than a currency and more like a system, a financial system, an alternative to the traditional banking system.

3:12Joe Staples: and many brands have tried to do this in the past and have done it i think uh some of them have done a really good job but many and most have failed at doing it the ones that i think are great examples of it in terms of this idea of reframing maybe the the best examples are charles charles schwab from maybe 20 years ago when they went up against the brokerage houses i think they did some really great early work i'm not talking about the the new work uh with the guy with the coffee mug walking around. I'm talking about the 20 years ago was really good. Also, a more recent example is Ally Bank. Some of the early work of Ally Bank was going after the same frustrations that Coinbase is trying to go after, but they took a very different tone.

3:59Joe Staples: But they did some brilliant work. Here's an example of where, and I think it fields into that human truth is, as people in the financial services system that feel they get treated terribly. They would never allow their kids to be treated that way, but they allow themselves to be treated that way. And I think Ally built off of that with a great campaign. And this is an example called Pony. Check this one out. Would you like a pony?

4:28Cat Ferdon: Yeah.

4:31Joe Staples: Would you like a pony?

4:32Cat Ferdon: Yeah.

4:36Joe Staples: Here you go. This is for you.

4:38Cat Ferdon: Wow. Oh, that's fine. Yeah. Well, you didn't say I could have a real one.

4:43Joe Staples: Well, you didn't ask.

4:47Cat Ferdon: Even kids know it's wrong to hold out on somebody. Why don't banks? We're Ally, a new bank that alerts you when your money can be working harder and earning more. It's just the right thing to do.

4:56Joe Staples: Now, if you're on YouTube, you'll see in that spot, and this may be a little bit clearer. But they did a great job of representing Ally as being an alternative to the big banks. So the question becomes, when you're targeting the next wave of potential customers for something like crypto, is appearing to be different reassuring? Is that an advantage or does it work against you? So as many of you know, from 2026's Super Bowl, Coinbase came out with the karaoke spot, which sounds like this. This is the Backstreet Boys. You may be familiar with it.

5:49Joe Staples: They also then came out with a spot called Your Way Out, which was the idea of this sort of video game concept representing consumers as being very conformist, following banking rules, and the idea of breaking free from that, which was this very heavily creatively awarded spot called Your Way Out from Isle of Annie. I gotta be free I just gotta be free Daring to try to do it or die I gotta be free So a lot of really interesting, high-concept creative work coming out of Coinbase. So we're going to be talking today about their strategic choices, about the work and the thinking behind it, with Kat Ferndon is CMO at Coinbase, Joe Staple is VP Creative, and Gareth Kaye is VP Brand.

6:54Joe Staples: Enjoy. Let's start off, Gareth, with a little background on what crypto is. Just give us an overview of what we're talking about here when we talk about crypto and how it can be used. Crypto, I think, is quite misunderstood out there in the world because I think down to its foundational years, most people say that basically crypto equals Bitcoin.

7:18Cat Ferdon: And if you're a little bit more nuanced than that, you might start talking about some other types of assets, different types of coins, most of which are quite speculative in nature, I think you could argue. And I think that kind of initial launch of crypto, because Bitcoin was the coin, and it was a way to think about a new type of currency that did address a lot of the systemic problems people were feeling. and frankly gave people some sense of control of money. I think that the power of that overshadowed its real impact on the world. I think Bill Gates normally gets attributed to this quote, but lots of people have laid claim to it.

8:02Cat Ferdon: It's that whole thing around, often we overestimate the short-term impact of a technology and underestimate its long-term impact. And I think the really interesting thing about crypto as a broad technology goes back to what it's built on, which is a blockchain. And I think its ability to go and offer transparency, to offer a defederated form of finance, to be able to actually have a technology that can change the rails that the financial system runs on. Those to me are much more exciting, fundamental shifts that crypto enables. So that's kind of what got me excited.

8:39Joe Staples: And then what is Coinbase?

8:41Cat Ferdon: Coinbase. Coinbase started off as being the first kind of Bitcoin exchange, so a place to go buy, trade, sell crypto. Obviously, back in the day, the technology was very nascent. So a lot of these nascent technologies, particularly something that was kind of quite decentralized, it was quite a hard thing to go and do. Also, there's just a sense as well of all these new things, particularly when it comes to money. There's a sense amongst people of, you know, this feels a bit risky. am I actually going to go and have something at the end of this transaction? Or am I just literally, you know, going to get scammed?

9:17Cat Ferdon: So Coinbase was, you know, pretty much the first Bitcoin exchange out there. Certainly one of the first. And most importantly, you know, over time, it became the most well-known, the most trusted, and held, you know, huge amounts of, you know, assets under management. Obviously, and we'll talk about this probably a bit more as we go along on the story today, Fergus. You know, the business has evolved. So, you know, we've got this great marketing challenge right now, which is how do you reprogram people's minds that we're not just simply Bitcoin or crypto, we're actually an alternative to the financial system as a whole.

9:54Cat Ferdon: And we're offering stocks, derivatives, perpetuals. We're also offering, you know, frankly, quite bank-like services. So I put some of my paycheck every month into Coinbase's USDC, and I earn really good rewards based on that, much more so than I would do at my bank that I use. So it's an evolved story, but the beginning, its root was a place that made it simpler, easier, and was trusted for you to go and buy, trade, and sell Bitcoin.

10:25Joe Staples: You're relatively new to Coinbase, the three of you. so I think where sort of Coinbase got on most people's radars was back in the Super Bowl which was I think it was 2022 that was the dancing QR code that drove everybody crazy and got you guys noticed and talked about which was the goal but then I understand that things crashed what crashed and then what was the implication for marketing

10:57Cat Ferdon: it was a huge implication because we had to think literally from ground zero again fergus you had that moment as you say where you know it's 2022 i think it was super bowl 56 people talked about the ad we definitely kind of achieved our goal of you know being talked about the most talked out of the night uh the app crashed which is always a good sign but literally you know that moment was so fleeting when you felt they were on top of the world because the crypto industry as a whole fell back to earth so within months of that so you know we should remember 2022 but why why did it why did it literally just after that kind of you know uh pandemic period and we saw a much harsher interest rate environment and that brought the market down to earth and you probably see there's some fairly uh common and reliable correlations between interest rates bitcoin coin prices, crypto and behavior.

11:51Cat Ferdon: And it just kind of put a lot of pressure on the industry as a whole, not just ours, but almost all industries. And as a result, leveraged traders, so they were essentially borrowing to trade more. They got their margin called on them. And that creates a liquidity crunch. And that exposed really catastrophic gaps in reserves in one of the biggest competitors of Coinbase. And what was discovered quickly was the largest financial fraud since Enron. So as a result, there's a bad actor of significant size. The market collapses. And although we did nothing wrong, our stock lost 90 % of its value since going public.

12:30Cat Ferdon: I think, unfortunately, 2 ,000 employees, maybe more, were laid off across about a six-month period. And crypto, I think most importantly for marketers, not to kind of belittle the other things, but for marketers, crypto just became toxic as a category, as an industry. So no one wanted to hear from us. So the question became a very different question from a marketing standpoint, which is, you know, how do you get people to care about root for crypto when the entire industry has basically just been set on fire? So what we knew was that the worst thing I think we could do as a strategy was to go out there and try and eke out differentiation versus our competitors.

13:12Cat Ferdon: The second worst strategy I think would be to go out there and try and defend crypto. I don't think this is something you could explain your way out of because people are viscerally feeling either their own financial loss or hearing about it from friends or seeing it in the news. So you kind of realize that explanation, and we fall into this trap so often, I think, in marketing. Explanation is not persuasion. It doesn't move people. And at the end of the day, the loudest voices in the room, you just have to go and pick up the newspaper, turn on the news, go onto crypto Twitter. It was all saying the same thing, that crypto is dead.

13:46Cat Ferdon: So it struck us that to get people to root for crypto, you had to find a bigger enemy and you had to fight for something bigger than ourselves. And this goes back to your comment right perhaps at the beginning of the podcast, Fergus, which is we found one really hiding in plain sight. We found this piece of quantitative data from some research we were doing that said that 87 % of Americans agree with the financial system needing an update. So not most Americans, not a slim majority, not a small plurality. It's 87 % of Americans, almost everyone. So just think about that. We didn't then have to convince people that the system was broken.

14:27Cat Ferdon: They already knew that. And, you know, as Kat said, you think about some of those pain points, they're pretty kind of pervasive and common every day. If you ever tried to send money abroad, you know how broken it is. It's expensive. It's slow. It's kind of annoying. Banking hours, nine to four, I think, in most banks. Monday through Friday, if you're lucky, you might get a Saturday morning. Trading hours for most assets are even shorter. Billions of people outside the US and around the world have got no access to banking at all. And every single transaction you or I make has got middlemen along the journey taking a slice of your money.

15:07Joe Staples: And did Archaic System and Pizza and those spots, did they come after 2022?

15:14Cat Ferdon: They did, yeah.

15:15Joe Staples: They came after 2022.

15:16Cat Ferdon: So that was really the reboot.

15:16Joe Staples: And they came while you were, Gareth, you were working with Coinbase. Yeah. But Kat hadn't yet joined, right?

15:23Cat Ferdon: That's right. Yeah. Kat and Joe hadn't joined. I've been consulting with Coinbase, so working with the prior marketing leadership, who we all know and love. but this is kind of like the first part of the platform beginning to change the company and to get our mojo back and frankly actually become I think a company that really served people better because we're about going out and solving really persistent pervasive problems I mean Joe you were on the outside I think a mother at the time what was your take when the work came out I was intrigued to hear just like you know there's another person in the industry and that work began to come out what did you make of it?

16:00Cat Ferdon: I was wildly, there were clearly very smart people doing it. I remember seeing the crypto isn't for you until it is work. And at the time at Mother, Charlie McKittrick had kicked off a research project called Heartland. Because he was so annoyed at brands talking about flyover states. And I thought that there was something wildly impressive strategically and creatively that Coinbase were doing, which was new ways to be honest. And I think they were in such a predicament, they have to find new ways to be honest. So externally, three or four times a year, they would come out with great work. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly impressive.

16:47Joe Staples: And is this different than Break the Cycle and Archaic System, Joe?

16:51Cat Ferdon: was that different work that you're referring to it was uh the work i work i'm talking about came out just after that so i think that at that moment they started something that we harken back to now which is to just talk about the absurdities of the things we all do day to day um it's a lifelong obsession of mine since when i was 14 a friend of mine's dad gave me a book called how things don't work by Victor Papanek and it basically just takes you around a house and shows you why sinks are stupid showers are stupid it kind of goes through the whole thing that's great my kind of ADHD dyslexic mind grabbed onto it it was the way I saw the world and somebody had articulated it for me and I think at the time one of the things I was most impressed with was um how they just pulled the curtain back i spent most of like 15 years of my career at whiteley kennedy and one of the one of the things you get shown there you basically get you know it's not real but you kind of get taken into a room and sat down and they bring a book out that you're now allowed to read and you're not allowed to leave the room and the book is called phil knight hates advertising phil knight being the founder of nike and it's the story of phil and dan meeting and this is a real book that they bring out or is this okay yeah it's real yeah yeah yeah um it sounds like i'm doing the science orgy thing right now but this is it's real um and and it's it starts it's about a conversation between dan and phil and phil knight said to dan what do you do and he said i am dan widened one again it's a tiny little agency and he goes what do you do there and he goes make advertising he goes i hate advertising and he goes that's great i do too and dan talks about uh revealing one one's voice about it not being about invention that it's about discovery and from the outside certainly that work they were doing was saying this is absurd and the conversations that cat and gareth and i have had uh have been about the absurdity of banking 180 kind of global currencies all built on moving paper rectangles and metal circles around we joke about the world's father logo literally being a stagecoach because whatever you build on this system is built on absurdity so just garyfella mentioned it sending money overseas

19:34Joe Staples: it makes no sense so kat for you when you come in what's the state of the brand and what's when you look at the work that's been in market what are you thinking as you see it yeah i mean

19:46Gareth Kay: i was very compelled to come here because of the incredible work that i saw it was just sort of like it was very very impressive to me uh as an outsider as someone who was a fan of crypto to sort of see the work and the leadership basically that was happening across Coinbase. I thought it was incredible. And I was really, really compelled to just sort of come here and try to do something a little bit different, right? Like my thing is really allowing a brand to speak to the people who didn't already know that they should be listening. and you can say this about like virtually any product but there's this huge category of people who you know one don't engage with the product uh two don't have an opinion about the brand three but they're gonna love it when they get here right and i think finding like a way to unlock that group of people is really really important and where i've been trying to put a ton of energy and i think joe and gareth as well right um and so that's that's sort of like the the stage that I think we're at at this point.

20:51Joe Staples: And so what was the wish, what was the ask of you, Kat, when you came in? Why did they hire you? What did they want you to do?

20:59Gareth Kay: Well, I think a lot of this has to do just sort of like about different waves of adoption, right? Like right now, I think there is sort of like this sort of like general idea that our entire mission is around economic freedom. And I think for the past few years, they've been trying to increase brand maturity and mass adoption. And I think that's why one of the things we've done is our corporate narrative is the future of finances on Coinbase. And I think really trying to loop you back on this closed loop of making a scary or complicated concept approachable to the masses is something that I was super interested to work on as just a really tough challenge and an interesting problem.

21:46Gareth Kay: And I think in general, like, that's what we're trying to do here. But there's something to be learned for everyone around that idea. And like, who better to talk about that than generally just like the folks who have done this with other brands in the past. And I was really excited to learn from people like Gareth and Joe, who just have such a strong track record in this space.

22:08Joe Staples: If you're coming in and you're disrupting a category, if you're asking somebody to adopt a behavior that they're not used to or that they feel has sort of a fragile case to it or it's just not familiar, how do you begin to peel away those layers? you mentioned this idea you're moving from one audience to another trying to get now like sort of the early majority audience is there a strategic approach to that where you have to be sure that you do certain things and you don't do others yeah it's interesting i mean i think like

22:46Gareth Kay: we have the responsibility of being crypto's biggest brand really right like coinbase is the leader in our industry. And there has been a long line of companies that have come and gone over the years that have had like a bit of a flash in the pan syndrome in this industry. And Coinbase really brings like the maturity as the adults in the room and like the most trusted platform, the most secure. And I think like that has been a huge basic path to Coinbase's growth thus far. And I think there's been a number of players that it's not obvious to me are necessarily very serious companies, but Coinbase is really the counter to a lot of that noise, right?

23:28Gareth Kay: And I think what we found, and luckily I've been able to work with Joe and Gareth and the rest of the team on this, but being the adults in the room doesn't necessarily mean being boring. It means like being responsible enough to build the future of finance on Coinbase, but also creative enough to make more people want to be a part of that. And I'd say we're really quite focused on translating the kind of complex into the useful and definitely meeting customers where they are. And I think you see that a lot with some of the campaigns that we bring to market.

24:02Cat Ferdon: I mean, Fergus, one of the things that keeps me on my toes every day is Joe, because he has more geometric shape charts than most strategists have built in their lifetime. So he's got, you know, diamonds, he's got inverted diamonds, he's got triangles, but his master stroke is the Venn diagram. And Joe, let me just talk a bit about that thing you drew. I remember like the first time we kind of like, we got together, maybe almost before we started and just kind of went, what about this? Just talk a bit about that kind of, you know, that Venn diagram. You know the one. I do know the one. I think, I'm going to try and answer Ferguson's and Gareth's process.

24:37Cat Ferdon: the same time is that um we want people to question their answers so we want you to think about the assumptions you have coming into something and the assumptions can be about us they can be about our competitive set they can be about road signs they can be about the name how people name products we just want you to question um what you kind of let through uh and in the i think it was like gareth and i had lunch in la to talk about we're going to do this thing we're gonna like we're gonna do this thing and we sat around and we talked about banking systems i think i told you mine chase bank passwords because there's a story behind it but what we talked about was we have two groups of competitors i do love venn diagrams one group of competitors is kind of in the minds of people quite old quite stodgy and 87 of people are not into it and their banks and everywhere you see a a bank location you should question whose money is paying the mortgage on that and every time you go to the bank after your work ends and the bank's closed you should question that so we have but we trust them we might not like them but we trust them so yeah one side we have trust on the other side you have some of the competitors cap mentioned some have come and gone they're rebellious they're new they're energetic and our take was that we're the only brand in the middle of this venn diagram so on the one hand you get trusted but stodgy and on the other hand you get gas station boat appeals they're rebellious but they're a bit fucking crazy and when you meet brian he has the combination not of gas stations but of the desire to change something the desire to be a rebel but very very grounded and he says it a lot it's never as bad as it seems it's never as good as it seems so you have this guy that truly wants to change how the world works mildly rebellious but not in a caffeinated crazy uh day-to-day he wants to change the future of the world.

26:56Joe Staples: So Kat, when you come in and you see work like Archaic System, these are spots for those listening in, Break the Cycle, Pizza. When you see those, are you, because you came in after they'd been in market, right?

27:12Gareth Kay: I had come up after Update the System and the pizza campaign was incredible. So yeah, these were some compelling campaigns that really caught my eye because I was working in fintech. And I remember, you know, sending all these campaigns around my own company and saying like, oh my God, Coinbase is putting out incredible creative. They were really, really good. They were really good.

27:31Joe Staples: Yeah. And I'm curious though, did you look at them or did this team look at them and think, we need to leave that behind? And was there a specific reason why you went in a different direction, which is very, totally very different. Execution is very different.

27:47Gareth Kay: There was no sort of discussion on that. I think generally one of our longstanding principles has just been breakthrough creativity in marketing, right? And that means really embedding in your culture one that encourages and rewards risk-taking. And in fact, that's actually very in line with the ethos of crypto and decentralization. And so there is a certain rebellious spirit that I think gets imbued throughout all of our product development, everything that the company builds, but also all of our marketing and how we show up. Basically, making space for breakthrough creativity means constantly looking ahead and reinventing the way that we do that.

28:29Gareth Kay: So while there's been incredible work that came before us before we joined the company, we really use that more as inspiration and not necessarily like emulation right so just sort of questioning the playbook and never following suit and just not always doing the new things because um or doing the new things because you're not going to to fall into the status quo of marketing right and i think that there's a true experimentation culture at coinbase that i really, really cherish. We're trying new things in new mediums. We're willing to place bets and steer into the things that look like they're working, but you have to be willing to be bold.

29:09Gareth Kay: And to Joe's point earlier, our CEO and founder constantly tells us to be bigger, go bolder, and really just try things and know that some of those things might not land. And that can be hard to explain internally if they don't pan out the way that you intended. But I think it is always worth trying to invent something new because that in fact is the only way that you stand out and I think that's the common theme throughout every era of Coinbase's marketing even long before I started I think if I can just build on that as well I think

29:41Cat Ferdon: the reality of the time had changed the business was beginning to change Fergus so we were moving from being very much a quote-unquote crypto company we were you know 14 years ago at a place to buy Bitcoin. Now you can go and buy other types of cryptocurrency. We were evolving into a company where you can try and basically run and power your entire financial life through Coinbase. So you can now trade stocks, commodities, crypto obviously still. You can trade contracts on prediction markets. We've got a credit card where you can get really great rewards. We've got direct deposits where, again, you can get really good rewards on your money.

30:24Cat Ferdon: Your money it keeps working for you. So you can build your wealth, you can send money instantly anywhere around the world. So we're building much more of a richer, complete financial services set of products. And I think the work had to kind of evolve to begin to show that new intent. So it's partly about being really crystal clear around the intent. And I think, you know, your way out of their system and the nervous bot they ran at the Oscars did a really good job at evolving where the kind of promise of the brand was in some of the work you referenced earlier. But I think the other thing we tried to do was quickly get work out there that closes the gap between what the brand promises and showing that there's proof that we actually deliver products that really do offer your way out of their system.

31:12Cat Ferdon: So a lot of the conversations we've been having, both internally in marketing, but also with our colleagues in product, etc., have been around what are the new doorways we want to go and build for the Coinbase house to attract new people, give them a new way in, and which of those doorways we're going to go and put a light above them and turn it on and really help people go, oh, you can do that on Coinbase? That's interesting, and get them into our ecosystems. I think a lot of it was just around the evolution of the business and therefore the need for the brand and its marketing to change a little bit.

31:49Joe Staples: what's interesting to me is um if you're the if you're the the the big brand in the category if you're trying to grow the category there's a point of view that says why look so different if you're trying to bring people in that are looking for some comfort and reassurance why shouldn't the work have stayed a little bit more conventional but it's talking about an unconventional product?

32:17Cat Ferdon: Well, I guess one of the maxims I've always used for strategy and building brands and the work is making sure you are similar enough to be considered but different enough to be chosen. So I think really thinking about what things could we do that provides a sense of comfort. And I think a lot of our work, both in advertising, but frankly, particularly when you get down to growth and product work, is designed to give you that sense of, oh yeah, this feels like something that isn't too foreign to me and too scary, so I can consider it. I think what we wanted to do was just give it a little bit of teeth to get people to go, actually, there is another way.

33:02Cat Ferdon: Because a lot of what we're trying to do is about breaking inertia.

33:06Gareth Kay: It's probably worth mentioning that the industry of 2026 is definitely not the same one that Coinbase was born into, right? So crypto is now a much more highly regulated industry. But I think that, you know, in some ways, like those constraints can sharpen your creativity, right? So as a business, I think Coinbase has spent like the better part of the last 10 years on infrastructure. And now I think that next 10 years is about like really intelligent and intentional growth, right? A lot of new players are coming in like big banks, everyone is coming into crypto. And I think that's something we've actually always wanted.

33:41Gareth Kay: Like, Like, this is exciting. We want more adoption. But we want to make sure that we're not losing sight of the fact that our creative is what really allows us to make crypto and fintech more broadly cool, more exciting, more interesting, more textured, right? And just meeting people and customers where they're at in a participatory way.

34:01Joe Staples: So, Gareth, when you think about who the target audience is, is it somebody who already owns crypto? Is it somebody who's sort of considering owning crypto? So do they look at themselves as being rebellious? Are they angry at the fucking system? I mean, what's the psychology of your target audience?

34:18Cat Ferdon: Well, you start, it's a great question. And Kat, I may say things that you just go, please don't say this. I'll take your lead on this. I think in many ways, part of our job inside the company is to be a counterbalance to a group of founders and executive team who are very early crypto and therefore live their lives on crypto Twitter. So they are with not just crypto owners, but the most OG hardcore crypto people you can find. And that's great. We've got to make sure that we don't do things that offend them because they're vociferous. We have had a very hard-earned relationship with them. But when we look at marketing and the work that we have to do, our job is to bring new people into crypto, first and foremost.

35:02Cat Ferdon: That's kind of the big advertising job. So thinking about what you might call the crypto curious, about 60 million Americans who so far have yet to make the jump into crypto. So lots of people have either currently hold or have held cryptos around about 25 % of Americans. This next way, the next 60 million are people who go, one, I absolutely think the financial system needs to be updated. to I'm interested in what crypto can do, but I either don't quite see how it fits into my life or I'm just a bit concerned that it's a risky thing to go and do, which obviously, given at the moment we've got a cost-of-living crisis, is a challenge.

35:50Cat Ferdon: So this group are younger than the average American, so it's very much to Kat's point earlier, we're looking at Gen Z, a little bit of Gen X. It doesn't really go over there. And I think in many ways, without saying we're going to go and remove this from our market, but it's much harder to get boomers and older folks interested because you're really asking them to change a lot of their muscle memory and behavior and financial relationships. There's a data point that was staggering we saw in a piece of research, which is something like 70 % of people still hold the majority of their crypto assets in the first place they use as a crypto exchange.

36:29Cat Ferdon: so actually getting people to switch becomes really hard so our job is to go and bring new people into crypto but that comes down from one making a brand that feels more inviting and offers a real alternative to the status quo and secondly showing people there are different doors to the world of crypto because crypto is much bigger than just uh an asset class so that's our job fergus is really convincing this crypto curious audience to come across to coinbase then obviously once we get people to try us it becomes a product marketing job to get them to use more of the products we offer inside our ecosystem and really try and build um i guess the long-term goal which is to become people's primary financial account yeah i always love i don't know if you

37:16Joe Staples: remember this stuff stuff from a while back um joe jim or do you remember that work that audi did as trying to position Mercedes-Benz as the villain. They did this brilliant work where it was like old luxury, new luxury. And it's in essence the spirit of what you guys are trying to do, right? Yes.

37:36Cat Ferdon: Great analog. We talk about, I certainly talk a lot about ideas and solutions to problems, and there are only really being two major problems. One pertains to the way we experience the world, and the other pertains to the way we understand the world. One of the exciting things going forward is we're working on, we've done work that's about how you understand the world, repositioning something, reconsider something. And because we work internally and because all the teams are so creative, we then also get to start having conversations about how products work. That's been one of the big leap forwards for me.

38:14Cat Ferdon: One of the big privileges of this team is having people that have kind of done that before and being able to influence both the understanding of Mercedes and Audi. And then when you get into an Audi, therefore, it should feel like this. And that's really creatively, wildly exciting.

38:33Joe Staples: So Kat, just as we wrap up here, what do you think other marketers can learn from what you guys are doing? I mean, everybody is interested in sort of disrupting or displacing somebody. And it seems like the key to it is segmenting the right sort of target and the attitude that you're going to go after. You guys have obviously made a bold choice. Are there lessons that other marketers and other categories could learn from what you've experienced so far?

39:05Gareth Kay: Yeah, I mean, I think so far it's been really great and empowering to work for a brand that really encourages you to be bold and demands that you take risks in order to reach the customer. I think that can be very liberating. It's certainly liberating creatively. I mean, that's huge.

39:18Joe Staples: Right there, you've referenced it a couple of times. You've got CEOs and leaders in your organization who are pushing you. And then the stories written are like, well, that much of the Super Bowl work even came from an idea of pushing it to be even simpler and stronger and bolder. That's got to be a huge advantage for a CMO.

39:40Gareth Kay: Yeah, I definitely think it is. You know, I think Brian, our CEO and founder, he's like, he really, really demands that we say and he demands that we go big. Like there's so many times where we give him ideas and he's sort of like, he's almost a little bit unfazed. Like, oh yeah, that's good, but like make it bigger. And it's like his appetite for rebellion and just sort of bucking tradition is so deeply embedded that I think it's like woven throughout the entire culture. I'd say like that is one of the things that I've really enjoyed since working here the last year. And then, of course, when you have partners like Joe and Gareth, they kind of help bring that entire thing to life.

40:13Gareth Kay: So that, to me, I think it's a huge advantage for anyone in marketing, anyone in creative. And I'll admit, it actually just provides a ton of air cover, which is kind of great. Yeah, no kidding. Because he is the top brass and he's definitely pushing us to do things that are truly outside the box. and that I think like your average traditional stodgy financial institution would probably get slapped on the wrist for quite a bit. And so it is just a totally different approach. And yeah, I think like finding a way to just like unlock that group of people that you know, like they will love your product if they know about it and they can get access to it.

40:53Gareth Kay: I think it's important. And that's where like, we've just been spending a lot of time. And I I give a lot of credit to Gareth and Joe for helping to push the team in that direction too.

41:02Joe Staples: So it's Kat Ferdin as CMO at Coinbase, Joe Staples, VP, creative, Gareth K, VP, brand. Listen, guys, thanks so much for coming on and talking about this. We'll put all of the work onto our site and we'll drop it into this recording when we get into post. Thanks for your time. Thanks, Fergus.

41:21Gareth Kay: Thank you.

41:22Cat Ferdon: Thank you.

41:22Joe Staples: And we'll see everyone on the next episode.