FTX, Celebrity Endorsements, and the Day Influencer Marketing Hit Rock Bottom
In November 2022, FTX — once the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, valued at $32 billion as recently as January 2022 — collapsed. Within days, it emerged that customer funds had allegedly been misused, billions of dollars in deposits were inaccessible, and Sam Bankman-Fried was on his way to becoming one of the most consequential fraud defendants in financial history.
And in the wreckage were dozens of celebrities and athletes who had taken significant sums to promote FTX to their audiences: Tom Brady, Gisele Bündchen, Stephen Curry, Larry David, Shaquille O’Neal, Kevin O’Leary, and many others.
As a marketing professional, I want to be precise about what this situation reveals — because I think the conversation tends to collapse into either “celebrities are bad” or “they didn’t know.” Both framings miss the real issue.
The Due Diligence Problem
The standard defense from celebrities caught in endorsement scandals is: I believed in the product. I didn’t know. I was a victim too.
Here’s the problem with that defense in the context of FTX: your audience doesn’t hold you to the same standard as a random Twitter user who shared a crypto meme. Your audience trusted you specifically because of who you are — your success, your credibility, your reputation. When you took money to promote a financial product to people who trusted your judgment, you implicitly represented that your judgment was applied.
The question isn’t whether Tom Brady knew FTX was fraudulent. Of course he didn’t. The question is: what due diligence did he and his representatives perform before endorsing a financial services company to millions of people? Because if the answer is “we checked that the check cleared,” then that’s a profound failure of the implicit responsibility that comes with influence at that scale.
What This Means for Brands and Influencers
Every brand and every influencer who does paid endorsements needs to internalize this: the FTC requires disclosure because endorsements have real influence over real decisions. When those decisions involve financial products, health products, or anything with significant downside risk, the moral stakes of endorsement are not the same as promoting a pair of sneakers.
The influencer marketing industry grew so fast that the ethics never caught up. Agencies optimized for reach and deal value without building adequate frameworks for product vetting. Celebrities signed deals without asking hard questions. And audiences — many of whom were young, financially inexperienced, and trusting — made real financial decisions based on those endorsements.
The long-term impact of FTX on endorsement culture should be a genuine maturation of the industry’s ethical standards. Particularly in high-stakes categories — finance, health, legal services — the bar for endorsement due diligence needs to be dramatically higher. Because the Fyre Festival taught us one version of this lesson. FTX just taught us a much more expensive one.
Your audience doesn’t trust you because you’re famous. They trust you because they believe your judgment is good. When you rent that trust to the highest bidder without doing the work to earn it, you’re not just risking your reputation. You’re risking theirs.
Steve Wolf
Steve Wolf is a marketing speaker and C-suite marketing executive. He serves as CMO of Pinnacle Global Network and CEO of Aquaphant.
