Advertising Bans Are the Best Thing That's Happened to ICOs

What do you think now that Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have all banned any paid advertising around ICO marketing?

I get this question a lot and personally I think it’s great! I’m not just saying that because I have to. These bans were precipitated by unwanted actions and they are exactly what the ICO marketing world needs.

Users Can Feel More Protected

Unfortunately many people have been fooled by ICO scams and millions of dollars have been lost as a result. Companies and social networks like Facebook and Google are acting in the public’s best interests—indeed, in the best interests of the blockchain industry—by putting in place the bans and other measures that will prevent scams and fishy campaigns from seeing the light of day.

Scams Have Fewer Opportunities to Build Hype

Earlier this year, a startup called Prodeum reached headlines, not for their amazing project, but because, after setting out to raise $6.5 million and successfully winning their audience’s trust, they vanished with their profits and their website content was simply replaced with the word ‘penis’.

Scams like Prodeum will now have a drastically reduced ability to attract a wide pool of ICO contributors thanks to the new advertising bans, and the entire blockchain industry stands to benefit as the dud projects are filtered out.

Effective Advertisements for Swindles Disappear

Advertising works—and this isn’t always a good thing. Being right in the midst of the cryptocurrency and ICO space, I was being targeted everyday with information and advertisements about the next ICO set to disrupt the industry.

I literally saw hundreds of ads, and while I enjoyed seeing these these out of pure business and marketing curiosity, I began to appreciate that you simply could not blame a layman for falling for any of the scams.

Space for Great Projects Opens Up

Just because an ICO reaches your attention, doesn’t mean it’s great or has a real use case. Indeed, it takes a fair amount of effort to find a great ICO project and avoid the scams.

The community was screaming for regulation and I’m glad these bans came in. It has created space for real projects with real use cases and it has invited solid marketing and design thinking to become the differentiator instead of deep advertising budgets.

I hope I’ve now convinced you to support these bans and the work they do to keep users safe. Perhaps you’d now like to know how to market an ICO to your audience with these regulations in effect? Stay tuned for my second instalment where I’ll share my top tips to get around publisher bans.

By Mo Hamdouna