Katie Perry, chief marketing officer at Zerohash, joins J.D. Durkin to discuss retail investor sentiment near record market highs, Super Bowl advertising trends, and what upcoming earnings from crypto platforms could signal for digital asset adoption.
Get the latest news and updates on FINTECH.TV
J.D.: Now let's bring in our good friend Katie Perry, CMO at Zerohash, to kick things off. Thank you for being here, as always.
Katie: Thank you for having me again.
J.D.: We're fresh off Dow 50,000 for the most part. Still right about at, or at least very close, to all time highs doesn't feel that way given all the wild days of volatility we have. What are you following across the broader markets, Katie?
Katie: Well I missed all the fun Friday but nice to see we're still up above 50K! A lot of exciting earnings this week, I'm really going to pay attention to Robinhood, to Coinbase. We also have McDonald's and Coca-Cola. But those first two are really interesting to me to see the state of retail investors and how these companies are sort of faring the balance of their businesses amid some of the wobbly ness that we're seeing in crypto.
J.D.: Are there particular names or sectors you are uniquely seeing retail investors gravitate to a bit more now than they have in the past? Are you still kind of seeing the typical rotation? They like tech. They like a lot of big, splashy names.
Katie: Yeah, I mean it definitely feels risk-off at the moment, but we'll see. I mean, it'll be interesting to see with Robinhood and Coinbase their deposits, how many people are adding money into the stock market as things are a little wobbly, are also new account openings. How much has crypto fully infiltrated the retail investors, and is there more room to grow for those companies?
J.D.: Today's also our Super Bowl Hangover edition of the show. They always say this is the day most Americans take off from work, but you and I are definitely here to do the work. Talk to me about Super Bowl ads. We had a lot of big, splashy business companies and corporations. They wanted that valuable air space to reach.
Katie: So many interesting things happen with the ads. I mean, you're talking about $10 million for 30s. Avalanche, which is a crypto ecosystem, actually bought a one second ad and they tweeted that it was 300K and it was a flash, which I thought was a pretty clever use of funds, I guess you can say. But the big things were auto dealers were largely sitting it out. They were 40% of the ad airtime in 2012, only 7% this year, then you're seeing things like OpenAI and Anthropic, and I feel like those two are almost the new Coke versus Pepsi in the support of battle for consumer AI attention. So a lot of really fascinating things happened with the ads. But overall, it's interesting to see how everyday Americans are reacting to some of these bigger names in AI and tech versus people like us who are who are, you know, down around it and more often.
J.D.: How about the Bad bunny economic impact for people, many of whom, of course, very excited to watch that halftime show.
Katie: I enjoyed the halftime show because I like fun, but just reading up on Bad Bunny and what he's built is amazing. I mean, he brought his tour back to Puerto Rico. That was $700 million economic impact. If you look at the Google Trends chart, even if just searches for Puerto Rico tourism, there's clear trends there that he's definitely creating. And I also learned that he is a big owner of his own music. So he 90% of the royalties of his music, he gets himself in some record labels that could be as low as 15% to 20%. So BB stands for Big Business and Bad Bunny and I, you know, power to him.
J.D.: Yeah. Very nice. There's always a money story right? There's always a business story even for something as amazing as the Super Bowl halftime show. Before we let you go, what is your take? What are you following on the performance of the crypto majors? That's been a wild story. Bitcoin trying to find its footing around $70,000 right now.
Katie: It's interesting because you have a couple narratives going on. You have the kind of the volatility and the trading of the assets. But then you have the ongoing sustained momentum with institutions really adopting crypto. So one thing in the Coinbase earnings I'm going to look for is their stablecoin revenue. Stablecoin was of course one of the biggest words we heard out of Davos. And we saw Zerohash stablecoin account funding for sports betting for live markets platforms during the Super Bowl was huge last year. People were funding their accounts to stablecoins in less than 0.1 seconds. So a lot of speed there. That's going over time. But of course it's existing in the day to day of people watching their portfolio.
J.D.: Yeah. And it sets up an amazing week of earnings. We got a ton of great names in the S&P. Three down names will be reporting quarterly results in a few next few days as well including, like you mentioned, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, a handful of others. The great Katie Perry, very good friend of ours here at Taking Stock. Come back anytime.