Decoding Crypto Advertising: How Teenagers Interpret Digital Cryptocurrency Promotions on Social Media

Vollständiger Abstract

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This paper investigates how cryptocurrency advertising and social media ecosystems shape Indian teenagers’ perceptions of risk, trust and opportunity in digital assets. Against a backdrop of low youth financial literacy and rising Gen Z participation in crypto investing globally, understanding how young people interpret persuasive financial content is increasingly relevant. The study addresses a gap in existing work, which largely focuses on adult retail investors in developed markets and text-heavy platforms, by examining how Indian adolescents and young adults (13–25) encounter and evaluate highly visual, youth-facing crypto promotions. A qualitative-dominant mixed-methods design is employed. Visual content analysis of nine high-visibility crypto campaigns on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram is combined with a short online survey of 27 Indian respondents aged 13–25. The ad coding captures colour, emotional framing, FOMO and “easy money” language, celebrity presence and the visibility of risk disclaimers, while the survey records perceived trustworthiness, risk, confusion, sources of information and self-reported confidence in understanding crypto. Findings show that the analysed campaigns systematically amplify reward cues, normalise speculative trading as simple and aspirational, and relegate risk warnings to low-salience text, often using bank-like or game-like framing that exploits conceptual gaps around regulation and product safety. Survey responses suggest that many teenagers recognise hype and misleading tropes yet still rely heavily on influencers and peers, report FOMO and express limited confidence in their own financial knowledge. The paper argues for stronger youth-oriented media-literacy interventions, stricter enforcement of advertising standards, and platform-level tools that foreground risk and sponsorship in crypto content aimed at or easily accessed by young audiences.