Some companies reportedly spent more than $13 million to buy 60 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl. Most of those companies spent millions more making the ads to fill them. I mean, to make a Super Bowl spot memorable, you need celebrities and quippy writing and maybe some killer special effects, right?
Unless, that is, you’re Coinbase. The online outlet for cryptocurrency looks like it spent maybe 35 bucks on its 60-second bouncing QR code (which sent you to the site and promised “$15 in free Bitcoin for signing up,” in case you were curious). But the spot worked so well that Coinbase’s own site crashed.
The ad was just one of several featuring cryptocurrency investing that hit the Big Game. Crypto.com enlisted LeBron James to push viewers to its site. And eToro, which champions “social investing” and includes cryptocurrency, featured a flock of flying people—which gives me a little vertigo just writing about it. The Canadian-based Bitbuy bought a bit of an ad, too, and both Meta (aka Facebook) and TurboTax namedropped crypto in their own spots.
But it wasn’t just cryptocurrency that made a big impression. Overall, the ads we saw were focused a lot on technology of all sorts—and they used plenty of celebs to make their point. Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost told us that it’s probably a good thing that Amazon can’t read our minds. (I concur.) Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus encouraged us to “think about the phones,” especially T-Mobile 5G phones. Zendaya used shells to shill for Squarespace. Seemed like electric cars were featured in every other commercial—with the (ahem) charge being led by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Salma Hayek as retiring Greek gods. Shocking.
And in an ad that felt pretty timely for those of us at Plugged In, Facebook encouraged us to check out their new Horizon Worlds meta environment. (You can check out our blog on Horizon Worlds tomorrow.)
If some would argue that cryptocurrency is a bit of a gamble, the Super Bowl featured loads of ads pushing traditional sports gambling as well. The NFL has partnered with seven online sports books, and at least two of them bought ad time for the Super Bowl—an event expected to draw bets from 18.2 million people.
Plugged In has some thoughts on sports betting, by the way, which we’ll share with you on The Plugged In Show in an episode that releases this Thursday.
In short, the Super Bowl ads offered all that we expected from them—pitches to bet more, buy more, earn more, travel more. The Super Bowl showcases the United States at its most commercial—and most heavily commercialed.
And yet, for many of us, it’s a time when we’re also given a chance to remember what we really value, too. I’d wager that a lot of us watched the Big Game with family or friends, after all. We laughed at the ads and marveled at the plays and, probably, ate a few too many chips. Because even as its advertisements push us to get so much stuff we don’t have, the event itself—if we squint just a bit—reminds us of what we do.
But enough of me. Have a favorite Super Bowl commercial? Let us know below.
2 Responses
-I never pay attention to Superbowl ads, but for the first time in six years I actually watched the halftime show this year thanks to Eminem being a part of it and while I wish he had done more than just one song it was still an awesome show and really cool to see Snoop and Dre back together again. Kendrick stunk like always and Mary didn’t add much, but Dre Snoop and Em more than made up for it.
-Well have to say at last they didn’t push other unwanted typical modern immoral lewd and unbibical agenda. (Unlike the new Agatha Christie Poirot which was excited to watch until heard had of course anti bibical homo agenda and of course vast and very different changes to the original story which sadly seems to be an welcome change to what was a classic story…) I mean although todays liberal amoral celebs honestly could do without at least they were better then past superbowl ads- now only if i could say the same for rest of media….