Super Bowl commercials will not contain crypto this year

Super Bowl LVI was only a year ago, but when you look at some of the commercials we saw back then, it seems like it was a very different time: a time when the future of the Internet was all about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the metaverse. Companies that didn’t even exist 10 or even three years ago were spending a lot of money promoting themselves as big players in Web3, and older, established companies were trying to stake their positions in the same world. That world would not last long.

Web3 failed last year, big tech stocks flipped, and artificial intelligence now claims to be the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, which is otherwise not much to celebrate. In hindsight, the big flashy ad for the 2022 Super Bowl seems almost laughable. Unless you are one of the celebrities who are now facing a lawsuit for promoting cryptocurrency exchanges. Or one of the millions of people who have lost money on crypto investments, at least in part due to the large-scale fraud that has swept the entire industry. Or any of the thousands of tech workers laid off over the past few months.

There will be no crypto ads on air this year. Fox Sports Executive Vice President of Advertising Sales. told The Associated Press that four crypto companies actually ordered or were close to ordering advertising this year even amid falling prices for cryptocurrencies, but all of them bowed after the FTX crash.

This is the exact opposite of what we saw during Super Bowl LVI. There have been so many ads from so many cryptocurrency exchanges that some people have called last year’s big game The Crypto Bowl. Coinbase spent $14 million on minute ad space it was just a QR code bouncing across the screen. Crypto.com ran ads featuring Matt Damon who told us that “fortune favors the brave”, eToro promotes “the power of social investment”, and a small company called FTX paid Larry David to convince us not to miss out on crypto. . There was also Binance which had ads against the Super Bowl. campaign.

Well, a Matt Damon commercial. no longer available on YouTube, although this did not stop him from becoming repeated source ridicule for an actor. Coinbase laid off 20% of employees. twice. eToro has also gone through a series of layoffs and abandoned plans become public through SPAC. And FTX, of course, has become a model for the collapse of an industry filled with fraud and under-regulation. Larry David sued for appearing in his advertisements. The price of bitcoin has dropped by almost 50 percent from what it was during Super Bowl LVI.

Cryptocurrency, which is still volatile and largely unregulated, is not the only industry that has fallen out of favor in the past year. Seemingly less risky initiatives from big tech companies have also received Super Bowl hype in 2022. An Amazon Alexa commercial starring real-life married couple Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost pissed us off as Alexa’s mind-reading abilities caused family difficulties and awkward dinner parties. Of the thousands of Amazon employees laid off at the end of 2022, many worked on Alexa, which is Amazon. reportedly are shrinking because the project is losing billions of dollars a year.

And then there was Meta, which tried to sell both its Quest 2 VR headsets and its vision of the metaverse in Super Bowl ads. It featured a creepy animatronic dog that loses its Chuck E. Cheese-like musical performance, but with the help of a Meta VR headset, is able to play music again in Meta’s Horizon Worlds. But sales of VR helmets decreased last year, and Meta’s share price plummeted in 2022. The company ended the year with the largest layoff in its history.

Even the NFL itself proposed The Super Bowl NFT last year partnered with Ticketmaster, a company that has since drawn the ire of every Taylor Swift fan, as well as much of Congress, for its ticket monopoly.

This year’s ads will continue to show some glimpses of the (possible) future along with the standard Super Bowl commercial fee. There will food, alcohol and cars – including electric cars that are now easier to find in stock, as well as having a right for tax credits. Apple, the only major tech company that hasn’t had layoffs so far, sponsorship halftime show. Netflix partnered with GM and Michelob for the ad. Google will advertise its Pixel phones and their photo-editing tools that use artificial intelligence.

Speaking of AI, we almost got an ad that used the most popular generative AI tool to date: ChatGPT. Avocados From Mexico, a Mexican avocado rights organization, planned advertise these avocados using ChatGPT. The plan was to include a QR code in their ad that redirected users to a landing page where they could use ChatGPT to “engage with the brand and share the results of that interaction across their networks,” says Avocados From Mexico VP of marketing and innovation. Yvonne Kinzer said Drum (she called it “avocado mind”). But the avocados failed to assemble the ChatGPT function in time, and it was pulled out.

There is always Super Bowl LVIII. If the generative AI hype continues throughout the year, next year’s big game could be adorned with ads from every tech company showcasing their new AI-enhanced generative services in flashy ads featuring the biggest stars in the entire country — or maybe just AI-created versions of them. Maybe we’ll call it the AI ​​Bowl.

As for Web3, it has not disappeared anywhere. The game company will distribute NFT to promote their games in purchased ads the way back in the pink times of October. NFL announced On Friday, the Roblox metaverse platform will host a Super Bowl concert that will play every hour until Super Bowl Sunday. The league stated that a “collection of digital items” would be on sale in connection with the concert. On Feb. 4, the NFL also launched a Roblox game called NFL Super Tycoon, which “simulates an authentic business experience” including payroll and tax management – definitely what people are looking for in a soccer video game.

It doesn’t look like there will be any official Ticketmaster Super Bowl NFTs for LVII, but I wouldn’t rule it out just yet.

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