Brand at the Brink
What Coinbase and Cluely got wrong about attention
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Suddenly, it seems, everyone understands the value of comms, or marketing, or brand, or storytelling. Whatever it is that we’re calling it, the gist is this: Everyone suddenly understands that making a great thing isn’t enough; you also have to get that thing into the hands of users. This insight is why LinkedIn and X are full of people saying things like Attention is the new oil and Distribution is the only moat.1
There’s a kernel of truth here. Yes, getting attention is important. Yes, it’s harder than ever to cut through in a cacophonous media environment, one saturated by AI slop and fast-fashion hauls and startup launch videos and GRWMs and political hot takes and hot takes about how everyone should just stop talking about politics already.
But the glorification of attention also misses a fundamental point: The goal is not merely to get attention but to harness it for some actual purpose.
Maybe this seems like a trivial distinction, but I think it’s actually central to a few recent communications failures.
Cluely
Last summer, Cluely hard-launched with a confetti bomb of controversy. The startup’s marketing leaned into cheating as a core use case—think: virtual coding interviews—and cofounder and CEO Roy Lee was summarily suspended from Columbia, where he’d been studying computer science as an undergraduate.
A16z quickly invested, making the bet that Cluely’s “strength in distribution” would translate from consumer hype to enterprise value.
That was in June 2025. By November, Cluely was floundering.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, in a marked shift from his v1 persona as an id-driven, just-ship-it provocateur, Lee had become noticeably more circumspect. “I can’t say if it’s a mistake, but maybe we launched too early,” he said. “The whole idea [was] let’s launch something that barely works, and if we can get enough initial users, they will find out the use cases for us.”
Later, demurring on the question of revenue, Lee added: “It’s not the fastest-growing company of all time.”
Looking at Cluely, one might reasonably conclude that attention is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful startup. The logic here is something like: Companies need attention, but they fail if they don’t have the product credibility to back it up. I don’t think this is the whole story.
Attention, as measured by the volume of coverage or impressions or engagements, only loosely correlates with the kind of attention that matters, which is attention from the people you care about. For most businesses, these are customers, candidates, and investors. And while some of those audiences might’ve been attracted to Cluely’s original antics, the ones who mattered most—the enterprise buyers Cluely’s now trying to attract—instead grew wary.
The Lesson: Not all attention is made equal. Attention is only worthwhile from the right people. And attention from the wrong people, or for the wrong reasons, might actually turn off your audiences.
Coinbase
This Sunday was the AI Olympics—sorry, I mean the Super Bowl. One of the more attention-grabbing ads was Coinbase’s “Everybody Coinbase,” a 60-second karaoke singalong set to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” (You know the one: Everybooooooooody. Yeah. Yeah.)
In addition to the Super Bowl spot, Coinbase also bought out the Las Vegas Sphere. The idea was to get 125 million people singing along.
The ad was fun. It was, as the Coinbase CMO put it, a vibe.2
And, for 53 of the spot’s 60 seconds, the ad told you absolutely nothing about Coinbase.
Then, with seven seconds left, the Coinbase logo appeared. End of ad.
This is in contrast to Coinbase’s iconic 2022 Super Bowl ad, which featured a floating QR code on a black screen. That ad, too, was unconventional and stripped of typical ad fare (like, you know, having much of anything at all onscreen). But it drove 20 million landing page visits in sixty seconds and enough downloads to take the app from #186 in the app store all the way to number two.
That ad worked because the QR code compelled action.
The karaoke ad didn’t compel much of anything at. (Or, at the Super Bowl party I was at, comprising a relatively tech-savvy group of Brooklynites, it compelled a bunch of huhs and where’s the queso?s)
To be clear, I like the idea! I am not mad, I am just disappointed! The ad would’ve been perfect for a brand about whom the song said literally anything at all.
Take Yahoo! Yahoo!’s social team has spent the last year leaning hard into exactly this kind of retro nostalgia with throwback UI posts and self-deprecating jokes about people still using their 1998 email. (Check out Rachel Karten’s great deep dive here.) A Backstreet Boys karaoke singalong with PowerPoint-era transitions would have reinforced something Yahoo! is already building: the idea that they’re the internet’s lovable elder statesman, still here, still fun, not trying too hard. The retro aesthetic would have been part of the story.
For Coinbase, the retro aesthetic is just an aesthetic. It doesn’t connect to anything true about the brand. Coinbase’s actual story—that crypto has gone mainstream, that 52 million Americans have used it—is a forward-looking claim, and wrapping it in ‘90s nostalgia creates a tonal mismatch.
Coinbase got our attention. But they didn’t use it, because they didn’t get our attention in a meaningful way, that is, a way that drove any action.
The Lesson: Your attention-grabbing hook needs to compel action. If you haven’t compelled anyone to take an action (like, say, download your app), you have failed. The best way to do that is to relate the content of the ad to your company (though this isn’t strictly necessary, as their contentless QR code ad proved).
Cluely got attention from the wrong people. Coinbase got the right people’s attention and wasted it. Both are failures of narrative, not distribution.
Attention is not enough. You have to harness it — first into belief, then into action.
If narrative is capital, or at least a means to it (which, ahem, is rather the point of this newsletter), my philosophy is closer to Warren Buffett’s value investing than to r/wallstreetbets. Yes, there are frothy narrative waves you can ride to short-term revenue, just as you can make a quick buck on Fartcoin. But this short-termist approach is more akin to gambling than value creation—and building a great, enduring company is fundamentally an act of value creation. Only through these means—often boring, often slogging and slow—can you actually cultivate lore.
But MY theory — that lore is the only moat — is TOTALLY different.
As a side note, I didn’t know we were doing press releases for Super Bowl ads, but you do you, COIN.