General Motors has brought back the cast of “Austin Powers” to promote electric vehicles during Super Bowl LVI.
General Motors
Many football fans are making bets on whether the Cincinnati Bengals or the Los Angeles Rams will win Super Bowl VLI, but advertisers are spending millions on another big gamble: Whether viewers are ready for their vision of the future.
The annual NFL championship is always an advertising blitz for beer, snacks and cars, but this year’s match features some of the year’s buzziest industries. Cryptocurrency companies, electric vehicle manufacturers and a range of other industries are spending millions of dollars to capture the attention of football fans during the rare occasion when people actually care about the ads. Meanwhile, the medical startup Hologic and e-commerce platform Rakuten were among the many brands to make their Super Bowl debut and return advertisers such as Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile again pushed promises of 5G.
According to broadcaster NBCUniversal, more than 30 new brands bought ads during Super Bowl LVI with new advertisers accounting for 40% of all the ads that’ll be shown—the majority of the newcomers being either tech, travel and auto brands. Several 30-second slots of air time even sold for a record $7 million. The question now, as always, will be which ads will resonate, which will be remembered, and which will actually move the needle after being seen by the more than 100 million people expected to watch tonight’s game?
Although cryptocurrency companies have spent massive amounts of money this past year sponsoring on a variety of sports teams and stadiums, this is the first time the emerging asset class will appear during the biggest TV moment of the year. FTX, Crypto.com and eToro all teased out plans to buy airtime ahead of the game, but a surprise came in the first quarter when Coinbase aired a previously unannounced ad featuring a QR code bouncing around like a the old-school DVD screen saver that when scanned linked to the exchange platform’s website for a crypto giveaway.
“At Coinbase we have a goal of introducing a billion people to the cryptoeconomy,” Coinbase CMO Kate Rouch said in a statement after the ad debuted. “Crypto is about access for everyone, not old models of winner takes all, stoking fear or ‘FOMO’. We believe the best way to learn about crypto is to actually try it. That’s why we’re launching our biggest giveaway ever, whereby all new customers will start their crypto journey with some Bitcoin in their account to get started. In other words: less talk, more Bitcoin.”
Later in the game, FTX’s commercial starring …….
