We Swapped the Bitcoin Logo With Gary Gensler's Face; Here's What Happened Next

Have you ever come across situational marketing cases like this? Share it with me in the comments or on LinkedIn or Twitter—I love hearing about them!

Heads up, I’ll be brief and let the story do the talking.

The situation

On January 11, 2024, the approval of the Bitcoin ETF was a landmark event in cryptocurrency history. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler voted to approve Bitcoin ETFs, and Crypto Twitter went wild. For those not in the know, crypto enthusiasts often joke about SEC activities on Twitter 👿

The marketing

So, at CoinStats, we swapped the Bitcoin logo on our app and web platforms with Gary’s photo.

<ad> For those who might not know, CoinStats is the top crypto portfolio tracker, trusted by over 1 million people worldwide 👑. </ad>

Btw, only some of the user generated comments are included in this article, but the good news is that the screenshots are clickable if you want to dive into all the juicy user-generated content.

After that, we sent out a notification to our app users. It looked like a transactional notification, but was intentionally incomplete.

To measure the success of any situational marketing case, user-generated comments are essential—stats alone don’t capture the full picture. I believe UGC (user generated content) will convey the story better than I can. For those interested, the stats, including data from Google Search Console, App Store search, and social media analytics, are at the end. 😉

“I will never cancel my subscription”

One CoinStats user said they’d never cancel their paid subscription because of situational marketing (check the screenshot below**)**. Who was asking what situational marketing is for?! Is it boosting brand love? 🧡

“…almost made coffee come out of my nose”

Who engaged?

In crypto, big accounts do not often engage with brands without an incentive. This time, we saw users with large followings engaging. Here are some of them below.

So, the app crashed…

The situational marketing activity and the push notification did too well, and the app crashed. Back then, we had a technical issue; our infrastructure wasn’t scaling with the increasing user volume. Imagine we’re in the middle of it, and the app crashes. Fortunately, we got it back up quickly.

I imagine my face looked something like this at that moment 👇

“Crypto culture and memes” matter

And we saw how a loyal user was advocating for his favorite product because the company understands “crypto culture and memes”… Check out the screenshot below.

“Got to love CoinStats for this, I.Am.Dead”

このせいでアプリ落ちてるの笑う
Merci à celui qui a décider de rajouter Garry
لوگوی بیتکوین در

Just in case you don’t understand the language, the translation is on the screenshot below :)

Even on Telegram and Instagram, people were buzzing!

I can’t include all the screenshots in this article, but if you’re curious, you can check out the main tweets onthis Google Sheet.

Negative feedback 🤗

For full transparency, we received around 5 comments with negative sentiment. Here is one. 👇

Stats (fornerds marketers)

Social media

Here’s a snapshot of the engagement we tracked:

• UGC tweets (comments are not included) – 142+
• UGC total impressions - 41,500
• CGC tweet impressions - 690,000 (organic + sponsored)
• The total number of followers who tweeted – 451,000

CoinStats Twitter timeline engagements 👇

Google search

Organic, branded Google search traffic reached its highest level in the past 16 months.

App Store search

App Store downloads from App Store search hit the highest in the last 12 months.

🔴 It’s worth noting that BTC hit $48k for the first time in two years on the same day. So, we don't know the exact attribution.

Credits:

Arthur Mashinyan- Gary icon design
Narek Vartani- Social media engagement
Tigran B. Mkrtchyan - Idea, execution

It's your turn now

What would you have done differently in this case? Got any comments or suggestions for this article? Drop them in the comments—I’m open to discussion.

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