Fox has announced that it has sold out the last remaining spots in today’s Super Bowl. Of all the commercials, this year the crypto category will account for zero of them. (If you do see one, it’s someone who bought a local avail on a local TV station.)
Last year, fans will remember, there were spots, sometimes multiple, from FTX, Coinbase, eToro Group, and Crypto.com, leading some wags to name last year’s contest as ‘The Crypto Bowl’, reminiscent of the 1999 contest, surnamed ‘The Dot Com Bowl’. (In 2000 there were no dot com advertisers, as well.)
I thought to go back to 2021, where Steve Kalifowitz, Chief Marketing Office of Crypto.com said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, ‘There’s a lot of people saying crypto is a fad, just the way they said the internet was a fad; Crypto is really the basis of the next version of the internet.’
It appears he was right, just not in the way he thought. Of course there’s lots of dot coms around, and there will likely be lots of crypto around, it’ll just be normalized, different, and not live up to the hype that it would replace everything.
FWIW: Most, maybe all of the big dot com advertisers of 1999 don’t exist anymore in any significant business form (Computer.com, AutoTrader.com, Epidemic.com, Lifeminders.com, Pets.com, Netpliance) In that respect, perhaps FTX was just leading the way.