With the Super Bowl less than a week away, there are only a few certainties. The game will be Sunday. The Eagles will play the Chiefs. And this year, there will be no crypto ads.
People like to watch the Super Bowl for the game, of course, but also for the elaborate, multimillion-dollar commercials. Crypto dominated last year’s crop with ads featuring celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg and Larry David. Companies like Coinbase, eToro, Crypto.com, and FTX all purchased spots, less than three months after bitcoin hit record highs.
They didn’t age well. The price of bitcoin has plummeted by about 45 percent since last year’s game. FTX collapsed and founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged with money laundering, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud. And buzzy crypto products like NFTs have fallen out of favor and investors have pulled back from the industry.
This year’s spate of ads — which are selling for up to $7 million for just 30 seconds of airtime — does not include any promoting crypto companies. That makes sense given the industry’s rough year, a veteran crypto communications professional with more than 30 clients told Grid.
“In this sense, massive expenditures on things like Super Bowl commercials are premature or misguided marketing efforts at best, and at worst, the equivalent of promoting an unregulated casino to unsuspecting and uninformed viewers,” said the communications professional, who Grid agreed not to name so they could speak freely about the industry. “It’s difficult for crypto companies and projects to separate themselves from the pack, but history indicates that shelling out millions of dollars on advertising slots is not necessarily an ideal marketing strategy. And if a crypto company secures a Super Bowl ad slot or similar, this should not be misperceived as a sign of legitimacy or expected future success.”
The appeal of the Super Bowl
The Super Bowl obviously is an appealing place to buy ads. The NFL estimated that around 208 million people in the United States watched the Super Bowl last year, or almost two-thirds of the population.
While crypto will be absent from the big game this year, industry insiders see sports fans as a good match for their products.
“The sports fan demographic is often young, male, and increasingly connected to sports betting apps where they build an appetite for financial risk,” said another communications professional with around 15 crypto clients.
Like sports and sports betting, crypto has an element of risk. A person willing to bet on a game may be more likely than an average person to bet on a crypto token and see its potential upside. And as crypto investing apps get more user-friendly and build in elements of gamification, they’ll become even more appealing to young, tech-savvy sports fans.
This rationale is also in part why FTX and Crypto.com bought the naming rights to NBA arenas (although the Miami Heat severed ties with FTX soon after the exchange collapsed).
Silvia Lacayo, head of marketing at Bitstamp USA, a cryptocurrency exchange, said Super Bowl ads and stadium naming rights are not bad marketing choices per se, but questioned whether they are the best choice for the now-struggling crypto industry.
“I think our industry can add better value by driving meaningful education to help people increase their knowledge of and comfort with cryptocurrencies,” she said. “On top of education, crypto firms should focus on investing in better user experiences, products, and customer service. These core fundamentals are what drive more customers to our platform and keep existing customers engaged.”
Quantifying results
And sometimes, it’s hard to tell if expensive Super Bowl ads and other sponsorship campaigns actually pay off.
Ryan Gorman, principal at Gorman Strategies, a branding, media, and reputation management consultancy, said that he’s worked on several projects involving sports sponsorships with NASCAR teams, soccer teams, and other sports organizations, but quantifying the return on investment for these things is difficult.
“They’re more prestige-type sponsorships and more prestige-type activities, and they’re meant to be able to help provide activations for clients or investors and it gives off the impression of being bigger than you might necessarily be,” he said.
As for Super Bowl ads, Gorman said there were rumblings leading up to the game last year that there would be several crypto ads — to the point where some re-christened the game the “Crypto Bowl” — but that’s obviously not the case this year. And while the big-budget, highly produced ads from last year may have brought quite a few people into the market, they also made it really easy to poke fun at the industry when it started to correct and turn downward.
“I think that there’s a reticence among many people in the industry to put themselves back out there again, in such a public way, because a lot of people that are in digital assets and blockchain, they’re engineers or developers, not public relations or marketing specialists and they’re not used to that type of criticism,” said Gorman.
Another communications professional though, put it differently.
“The biggest reason why it wouldn’t be a good idea [to advertise at the Super Bowl this year], from a communications point of view, is that just puts you in the headlights of the feds,” said the professional. “And it’s ethically not a great idea to just be shilling crypto through snappy advertising when millions of viewers could be leave that [ad] misinformed and get phished or scammed or something awful.”
Thanks to Dave Tepps for copy editing this article.
