By
Teuta Franjkovic
October 18th, 2019
PayPal has asked YouTube to delete a parody of its new commercial to prevent consumer misunderstanding.
The online payments giant has blocked a parody of its new ad showed during the Super Bowl football game. The commercial describes PayPal as “New Money”, if compared to fiat currencies and banks, which are referred to as “Old Money”.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the changed version of the ad was created by Shiloh Silverman, who owns a video production company called Silver Park Studio. The video features images of people using bitcoin and says that the cryptocurrency is the “newer money”.
The parody was uploaded on YouTube soon after the show, but following PayPal’s requests it was deleted. However, it is still available on YouTube, posted by a user who managed to download the video until it was removed.
A spokeswoman for PayPal noted that their notion of “New Money” includes the virtual currency, but they asked to delete the parody in order to avoid misunderstanding. “Our vision of New Money includes Bitcoin, but to avoid customer confusion, we asked them for the video to be removed,” she said in an email to the Wall Street Journal.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I think this demonstrates just how excited customers are about the concept behind PayPal’s ’New Money’ campaign,” she added.
Silverman, meantime, has made a new parody of the PayPal commercial, with a changed soundtrack. “Newer money is decentralized. Older money is fiat,” the new version of the parody says.
“I’m not a bitcoin fanatic, I just love the whole world of it,” he said in an interview to the publication.
Although PayPal is mainly focused on traditional currencies, it is open to technological developments as well. In 2014, it enabled users to make payments in bitcoin following a partnership with payment processor Braintree. The same year it teamed up with three digital currency companies – Coinbase, GoCoin and BitPay.
A few months ago, the company started accepting contactless payments, such as EMV-enabled cards, Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay. The EMV technology is getting more popular around the world and has already been used for more than two years in the UK and Australia. Moreover, Visa and MasterCard have recently informed that merchants who do not use EMV terminals will not receive any compensation in case of POS frauds.
Earlier this month, PayPal announced that it will not process payments for companies offering SmartDNS and VPN services, as they do not comply with the company’s User Policy. The services let people to bypass geographical restrictions and use PayPal, as well as other websites, in countries where it is blocked.
