How Justin Trudeau helped create the latest Yearn Campaign.

Published in

Yearn

3 min readJul 25, 2022

In motorsport, one of the ways drivers will try to gain an advantage is to ‘catch a tow’. Letting the car in front do the hard work of punching a hole in the air while you coast closely behind in the slipstream, benefiting from the lack of air resistance.

Advertising folk (should you ever have the misfortune of meeting one) like to talk about ‘hijacking the cultural conversation’. This is essentially the marketing version of catching a tow. Letting some cultural moment do the hard work, punching through the air of public awareness while your brand tucks into the gap behind and gets carried along.

The problem for most of the world’s biggest brands is how infrequently genuine cultural moments pop up for talking about beer, holidays, sneakers, etc.

This is why beer brands don’t talk about beer, they talk about ‘opening your world’ (sorry Heineken), because then you might get the chance to create a marketing campaign that drifts behind the conflict in the middle east, or prison reform, or any of the other myriad ways that brands like to turn up in odd places. (Remember when Kendall Jenner stopped a riot by giving a policeman a Pepsi, fun.)

DeFi x Global Governments, A Marketing Match Made In Heaven

DeFi does not have this problem. While crypto may one day grow to a size where brand is the magic ingredient used to differentiate increasingly similar protocols and dApps, we are not there yet.

We are communicating a simple value proposition to an audience who is growing increasingly ready to hear it. Every time they open the FT with their morning cup of coffee, or log onto WSJ, or scroll twitter, they are confronted with stories about sanctions, payment restrictions, financial censorship and tanks blocking banks. This is media space that money can’t buy (unless you’re Jeff Bezos), and content that no advertising agency could deliver.

The news is doing the hard work for us. We need to get in that slipstream and take advantage. Our newest campaign seeks to do just this. Leveraging the slew of recent news stories to highlight the simple truth that centralized powers can change the rules anytime for any reason.