This year’s Super Bowl commercials will be crypto-free

Super Bowl LVI was only a year ago, but when you look at some of the ads we saw then, it feels like a much different time: one where the future of the internet was all about cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the metaverse. Companies that hadn’t even existed 10 or even three years earlier were spending big money promoting themselves as major Web3 players, and older, established companies were trying to bet on the same world. That world would not last long.

In the past year, Web3 has fumbled, Big Tech stocks have faltered, and AI is currently charging down the field as the hottest thing in a Silicon Valley that otherwise doesn’t have much to cheer about. The big splashy Super Bowl ads from 2022 are almost laughable in retrospect. Unless you’re one of the celebrities now facing a lawsuit for promoting crypto exchanges. Or one of the millions of people who lost money on crypto investments, at least in part thanks to the large-scale fraud that permeated the industry. Or some of the thousands of technology workers who were made redundant in recent months.

There will be no crypto ads in this year’s broadcast. A Fox Sports executive vice president of ad sales told the Associated Press that four crypto companies had actually booked or were close to booking ads this year, even amid crypto’s falling prices, but they all bowed out after FTX’s collapse.

It’s a complete reversal from what we saw during Super Bowl LVI. There were so many ads from so many crypto exchanges that some called last year’s big game The Crypto Bowl. Coinbase spent $14 million for a minute-long ad spot that was just a QR code bouncing around on the screen. Crypto.com ran an ad with Matt Damon telling us that “fortune favors the brave”, eToro promoted the “power of social investing”, and a small company called FTX paid Larry David to urge us not to miss crypto. . So was Binance, which had an anti-Super Bowl ad campaign.

Well, the Matt Damon ad is no longer available on YouTube, although that hasn’t stopped it from being a recurring source of ridicule for the actor. Coinbase laid off 20 percent of its workforce — twice. eToro also had a round of layoffs and abandoned plans to go public via a SPAC. And FTX, of course, became the poster child for the implosion of a fraudulent and under-regulated industry. Larry David was sued for appearing in their ads. The price of Bitcoin is down almost 50 percent from where it was during Super Bowl LVI.

Crypto, which remains volatile and barely regulated, isn’t the only industry to fall from grace last year. Seemingly less risky initiatives by big tech companies also got Super Bowl advertising in 2022. Amazon’s Alexa commercial, starring married couple Scarlet Johansson and Colin Jost, cracked us up when Alexa’s mind-reading abilities caused marital difficulties and awkward dinner parties. Of the thousands of employees Amazon has laid off by the end of 2022, many worked on Alexa, which Amazon is reportedly scaling back because the project is losing billions of dollars a year.

And then there was Meta, which tried to sell both the Quest 2 VR headsets and its vision for the metaverse in a Super Bowl ad. It featured a creepy animatronic dog who loses his Chuck E. Cheese-like music 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 headsets have shrunk in the past year, and Meta’s stock price plummeted in 2022. The company ended the year with the largest round of layoffs in its history.

The NFL itself even offered Super Bowl NFTs last year in partnership with Ticketmaster, a company that has since attracted the ire of every single Taylor Swift fan and also much of Congress over its ticketing monopoly.

This year’s ads will still feature some glimpses of the (possible) future alongside the standard Super Bowl commercial fare. There will be food, alcohol and cars – including electric cars again, which are now easier to find in stock and also eligible for tax credits. Apple, the only Big Tech company with no layoffs so far, is sponsoring the halftime show. Netflix partnered with GM and Michelob for ads. Google will announce its Pixel phones and its image editing tools, which use AI.

Speaking of AI, we almost got an ad incorporating the hottest generative AI tool these days: ChatGPT. Avocados From Mexico, a Mexican avocado advocacy organization, had planned to advertise these avocados with ChatGPT. The plan was to insert a QR code into the ad that took users to a landing page where they could use ChatGPT to “engage with the brand and share the results of that engagement through their networks,” Avocados From Mexico vice president of marketing and innovation Ivonne Kinser told The Drum (she called this “avocado intelligence”). But the Avocados couldn’t get the ChatGPT feature together in time and it was pulled.

It’s always Super Bowl LVIII. If the frenzy over generative AI continues throughout the year, next year’s big games could be decorated with ads from all the tech companies showing off their new generative AI-enhanced services in flashy ads featuring the biggest stars in the entire country—or maybe just AI-generated versions of them. Maybe we call it the AI ​​Bowl.

As for Web3, it hasn’t completely disappeared. A gaming company will give away NFTs to promote their games in an ad bought way back in the rosy days of October. The NFL announced that there will be a Super Bowl concert on the metaverse-like platform Roblox on Friday, which will be played every hour on the hour leading up to Super Bowl Sunday. The league said there will be a “collection of digital artifacts” for sale in conjunction with the concert as well. On February 4, the NFL also launched a Roblox game called NFL Super Tycoon, which “simulates an authentic business experience,” including managing payroll and taxes — surely the same things people look for in a football 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.

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!