It costs $750k for Post Malone to promote your product

Yes, you read that correctly. If you want Post Malone to promote your product or services, you will need to cough up roughly $750,000 to do it. It does not matter too much in which group of people you are, either those who consider this a bargain or in those that will scream in frustration at this figure. However, it does create an interesting case.

Summary:

• It costs $130,000 per second for Post Malone to advertise your company,
• That is just $50,000 cheaper per second than the Superbowl,
• This translates to a CPM of $107.14 on YouTube,
• Which is 8.24x more expensive than the average CPM on YouTube,
• And with 13.7x fewer viewers than the Superbowl,

I want to precede this article by stating that I am not a fervent believer in influencer marketing. At least not in the way that most companies utilize influencer marketing. The value for influencers from a direct ROI point-of-view is scarcely ever worth it. Yes, there are articles and research that suggest influencer marketing is the hottest digital marketing on the planet. I am not disputing that. However, when examining immediate campaign results (influencers vs. other paid media), you will be hard-pressed to get an immediate positive ROI. 

After all, what you are paying for are eyeballs, impressions, and buzz. So, today, I will dissect with you just how many eyeballs and if, in the end, it is worth it.

Why $750,000 for Post Malone?

Most influencer deals are private, meaning that we cannot determine and merely estimate how much a person gets paid. Thanks to Blockchain technology, however (the blockchain does not lie), we can backtrack and trace transfers though. Talk about irony. 

In the clip brand new clip “One Right Now,” starting at 0:13 into the video, we can see Post Malone loading up an App called Moonpay. In the next few seconds, we can see a “Bored Ape” NFT before he puts the phone down. Now, the total screen time that the App gets in the video is an astonishing 6 seconds. Keep this in the back of your head because this will be important later. 

Now, how did we get to the $750,000? A lot of credit goes to a profession I was only recently exposed to, namely Blockchain detectives. Who can essentially find anything if they have a good starting point. So let’s get into it. 

Getting the numbers

The first point where we get started is the actual NFT I mentioned earlier, the Bored Apes. We then use a website tool, OpenSea, and look for the number in the video, #961. But in the video, though it does not come forward that Post Malone actually finalized this purchase. In the end, though, we can find that what is allegedly Post Malone “BEA020” completed a transaction for a different Bored Ape. 

This is only part one of the investigation. We have to take the wallet address of “BEA020” and go to Etherscan to plug it in. And what do you know, nowadays we can already see that the wallet is indeed attributed to none other than Post Malone. We can see from this that he received 175 ETH about 15 days before the video went live on YouTube. That 175 ETH was when the transactions were made worth just over $4000 per 1ETH, so a quick calculation gets us to the $750,000. 

Okay, so was it worth it?

As it is with all types of digital marketing, it is prevalent to understand whether this deal was worth it financially. A quick traffic analysis of MoonPay shows us that traffic spiked hard in October compared to other months, but… the video only went live in November. Additionally, only about 6.4% of traffic to MoonPay comes from YouTube. Attribution aside - I will have to revisit this next month to check if those numbers have changed.

If we cannot claim traffic to the website, we turn to my least favorite metric, impressions. As I am writing this article, the video is sitting at just over 7 million views. This means that in an ideal world, this “ad” generated well 7 million impressions. Take this with a grain of salt, though. 

Let’s plug the numbers:

• CPM = 1000 * Cost/Impressions
• Impressions = 7,000,000
• Cost = 750,000
• CPM = $107.14

Oof! In comparison, the current CPM rates for YouTube in the United States are sitting at about $13.00. 

To compare this to more traditional media outlets, it costs over $180,000 per second to promote your company during the Superbowl. But, on the other hand, it cost MoonPay over $130,000 per second for the Post Malone ad. And to add insult to injury, the Superbowl was viewed by 96.4 million viewers, yeah… 

So, to answer the ultimate question. Is it worth spending $750k on Post Malone to promote your product? Probably not. 

Final Thoughts on Post Malone’s $750k Ad

To answer the ultimate question. Is it worth spending $750k on Post Malone to promote your product? Probably not. 

A big shoutout to Coffeezilla, who made the initial video that inspired me to write this article tailored to the digital marketing community. 

Disclaimer: I will not go down the route of dissecting Cryptocurrencies/NFTs and Influencers in this article.