I watched the game on Sunday at a friend's place off Alberta, and somewhere in the second quarter someone said out loud what half the room had been thinking. Where did all the crypto ads go.
Last February you could not escape them. Larry David refusing every invention in human history for FTX. Matt Damon telling us fortune favors the brave from inside a green screen coliseum. Coinbase floating a bouncing QR code across a black screen for a full minute and crashing its own app. That broadcast got nicknamed the crypto bowl and it earned the name.
This year, nothing. Not a reduced presence. Not a chastened change in tone. An absence.
FTX filed for bankruptcy in November. Coinbase has been cutting staff. The money that bought those slots did not move to a smarter media plan, it evaporated, and the category went with it.
Most people I know in this business are reading that as a story about crypto. It is not. It is a story about what a Super Bowl buy actually does, and the answer is less flattering than the invoice suggests.
That seven million dollars was never buying a brand. It was buying the appearance of being a company that could afford seven million dollars.
Look at what those spots communicated. Almost none of them explained a product. They could not, really. What they said was: we are in the same commercial break as Budweiser and Doritos, therefore we are a normal institution, therefore you may safely hand us your savings. The medium was the entire message. Legitimacy, rented by the second.
Rented legitimacy has a specific failure mode. It does not degrade, it disappears, because it was never built on anything the brand owned. Nobody trusted Coinbase more in March than in February. People had simply heard of it.
Rented legitimacy has a specific failure mode. It does not degrade, it disappears, because it was never built on anything the brand owned.
Compare that to the brands that buy the same slot every year without needing it. Budweiser has been telling the same story about horses and small towns for decades. The ad is not doing the work by itself. It restates a position that already exists in shelves, in distribution, in fifty years of accumulated meaning. The buy amplifies something. It does not manufacture it.
So the useful question for anyone weighing a big media moment this year is not how many people will see it. It is what will be true about us on Monday that was not true on Friday.
If the honest answer is more people have heard of us, that is fine. Call it awareness and price it accordingly. Do not call it a brand.
Rihanna was great. The wings were better. It rained the entire drive home, which in Portland in February is not worth mentioning.