Will Crypto's Super Bowl Debut Fare Better Than 2000's Dot-Com Boom (and Bust)?

Sometimes a Super Bowl ad doesn’t have as much to do with raising awareness as it does establishing legitimacy. A brand’s ability to spend up to $7 million for 30 seconds of national airtime means it must be doing something right. Right? "It shows investors and consumers that a company is in a position to spend and it's going to survive," says Linli Xu, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. At present, 86% of U.S. adults have heard of cryptocurrency, yet only 16% have ever bought it, sold it or used it, according to the Pew Research Center. Part of what's holding back mass adoption is a matter of trust. And the skepticism is not unwarranted: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission notes the amount of money consumers reported lost due to cryptocurrency investment scams between October 2020 and March 2021 jumped nearly 1,000% compared to the prior year. Even mainstream cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen their values drop 20% or more in the first month of 2022. In a sense, crypto’s debut in the Super Bowl this month is a lot like the unforgettable Dot-Com Super Bowl of 2000, which featured ads from 14 web startups and a handful of other emerging tech players. Everyone knew about the internet, but was it safe to give your credit card information to a company without any physical stores? Would these brands even last long enough to ship your product? “The fear around your finances is a parallel,” says Scott Duchon, who helped make the memorable Pets.com Super Bowl ad in 2000 as a senior copywriter at TBWA\Chiat\Day San Francisco. Much like dot-coms in 2000, crypto companies are using big-budget marketing to "build credibility and legitimacy, and reduce fear and anxiety," adds Duchon, now chief creative officer at 215 McCann. As for doing what a Super Bowl ad is supposed to do, Pets.com's spot theoretically did it. The 30-second commercial featuring a singing sock puppet dog was the fifth most popular ad of the game, according to the USA Today Ad Meter. "Things couldn't have seemed any better for them on the surface," says Duchon. But Pets.com, like many other Dot-Com Super Bowl advertisers, didn't last. By the end of the year, despite growing popularity, the early ecommerce site was liquidated after it consistently lost money with each sale. (That doesn't mean the business model was inherently flawed. The URL now sends shoppers to PetSmart, which acquired another online pet retailer, Chewy, in 2017 for $3.35 billion. Chewy is now a public company worth more than $18 billion.) The 2022 Super Bowl comes as the cryptocurrency industry has been investing heavily in educating consumers to make them feel more comfortable trading dollars for lines of code. In 2021, cryptocurrency companies spent an estimated $90 million on advertising in the U.S., up from $16.9 million in 2020, according to ad intelligence platform MediaRadar. Some of the biggest spenders include cryptocurrency exchanges FTX and Crypto.com, both of which are betting on the Super Bowl to get more people onboard. The Feb. 13 game marks the first time a cryptocurrency brand has entered the country’s most famous sporting event, which attracted 96.4 million viewers across all platforms last year. When the crypto brands arrive in the Big Game, they'll face something that no brand had to worry about in 2000: social media response. A vocal portion of Twitter didn’t respond well to Crypto.com’s recent campaign starring Matt Damon, who told viewers to be like astronauts and ancient explorers by investing in crypto because “fortune favors the brave.” The percentage of cryptocurrency-related tweets expressing a negative sentiment doubled from 8% to 16% in the two months after Crypto.com's ad came out in late October compared to the two months prior, according to social media analytics company Sprout Social. https://twitter.com/ShadowTodd/status/1475428006919290884 In this moment of consumer uncertainty, it's crucial for crypto companies to keep the faith in their services alive. Without enough believers, the dream dies. So what should they do if the online response doesn't go the way they'd hoped? Silence is always an option. "If a response isn’t going to add to the conversation, create a relationship with a consumer or allow a brand’s voice to be heard, then brands should remain patient," says Ryan Oliver, senior director of Twitter Next, the social network's in-house team of strategists and marketers who work with brands on the platform. Sometimes, Oliver adds, the immediate negative chatter collides and morphs into viral memes that tip over into enjoyable content. Whether crypto ends up being a bubble rather than a permanent game changer comes down to far more than a single Super Bowl ad buy can cover—from oncoming government regulation to early adopters getting bored and moving onto the next new thing. And unlike the early dot-com brands, crypto's value remains tied to speculation rather than any concrete business logistics, such as the high cost of shipping large bags of cheap dog food. There's not much a Super Bowl commercial can do about that. For all the latest Super Bowl advertising news—who’s in, who’s out, teasers, full ads and more—check out Adweek’s Super Bowl 2022 Ad Tracker and the rest of our stories about the Big Game. And join us on the evening of Feb. 13 for the best in-game coverage of the commercials anywhere.