America’s biggest sports event of the year, Super Bowl, will not feature any crypto ads – and FTX is (partly) to blame.
Fox declared this Monday that in-game ads for Super Bowl have been sold. Per Associated Press, Mark Evans, executive vice president of ad sales for Fox Sports, said that some ads went for more than $7 million for a 30-second spot, while most sold between $6 million and $7 million.
Super Bowl LVII will be played on Sunday, February 12, 2023. And every year, this event presents a massive stage for advertisers to present their shows to more than 100 million people – with some 43% of people in 2021 tuning in to watch the commercials.
Well unlike last year when crypto companies shared this stage in droves, resulting in the event being dubbed ‘Crypto Bowl’, 2023 will not see any of them.
Evans was quoted as saying that,
“There’s zero representation in that category on the day at all.”
Notably, there were two crypto advertisers that had commercials “booked and done,” while two others were ”on the one-yard line,” Evans said. However, the collapse of the FTX exchange ended that. The deals were not completed.
There was another notable effect of the events in the crypto space. While the majority of the Super Bowl ads sold much earlier than usual, said Evans, with more than 90% of them gone by the end of the summer, the remaining spots sold slower. Established advertisers bought prime positions, and the rest was partly impacted by “the implosion of the crypto space, as well as general advertiser concerns about the global economy.”
To go into more detail, per Sports Business Journal, Evans gave three reasons why certain Super Bowl ad sales (such as spots left in its pre-kick show and spots for overtime that may not occur) came slower than in previous years. And the first, as expected, is the collapse of FTX and other crypto companies, which had bought several spots early, but had since backed out.
“FTX, in fact, had committed to a 60-second spot,” it said.
The other two reasons include advertisers backing out because of supply chain issues that affected some of the products they had planned to advertise, and that some companies were “jittery about the economy,” said the report.
As reported, last year’s Super Bowl featured ads by major companies, including Coinbase, Crypto.com, eToro, and yes – FTX. Also, major beer brand Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light, which earlier in the year partnered with Nouns DAO, a non-fungible token (NFT) project that generates avatars based on nouns, featured the “Noun glasses” NFTs in its Super Bowl ad.
“Now just because Fox Sports didn’t sell any crypto ads this year doesn’t mean you won’t see any if you’re watching,” The Verge noted, adding that ads can be bought locally for a lot lower price.
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Learn more:
– Super Bowl Crypto Ads, Which One Was the Most Interesting?
– Brian Armstrong Reveals Behind the Scenes of Coinbase’s Super Bowl Ad
– Crypto.com’s Super Bowl
– Crypto Hits the Super Bowl: Next Mass Adoption?
