Don’t expect many crypto ads during the 2022 NFL and college football seasons

During Super Bowl LVI, Matt Damon told America that “fortune favors the brave” in a sparkling commercial for Crypto.com. It was just one of a number of cryptocurrency ads that took over the airwaves between football games that night.

In the months following the Super Bowl, crypto firms and exchanges have reduced spending while the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has fallen. As such, it is quite reasonable to assume that you will be spared the onslaught of crypto ads during the 2022 NFL and college football seasons.

According to Bloomberg, paid media spending by major crypto firms was just $36,000 in July 2022, per ISpot. That’s a pittance compared to the $84.5 million they spent in February around the Super Bowl. That’s on top of massive sponsorship deals like the one Crypto.com paid to be the presenting sponsor of Fox’s postgame college football studio show.

We probably don’t need to tell you why this consumption figure is so low. Because while fortune may indeed favor the brave, it certainly hasn’t favored cryptocurrency owners in the months since Mr. Damon’s proclamation.

If you bought $1,000 in bitcoin the day Matt Damon’s “Fortune favors the brave!” commercial came out, it would now be worth $375 pic.twitter.com/rp5IdjBD3m

— ? John? Schwarz? (@schwarz) 13 June 2022

“After amassing a record value of over $3 trillion in November 2021, the cryptocurrency market had its worst first half ever – falling more than 70% through July,” writes Jonathan Ponciano in Forbes. “The market has since climbed around 33%, but is still down more than 60% from its high, according to CoinGecko.”

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Terra’s luna token, once worth more than $40 billion, lost almost all of its value in one week in May. Meanwhile, Bitcoin plunged 70% and Ethereum 75% from their highs as massive layoffs rocked the once-booming financial market.

All of this translates directly to the world of paid media. Bloomberg notes that Coinbase, the only U.S.-listed crypto exchange, recently told shareholders it would drastically reduce its paid media buys after second-quarter revenue fell 64%.

“Ad sellers should not expect growth in this vertical for the rest of the year due to the crash in cryptocurrencies and new allegations of fraud among companies in the crypto market,” Eric Haggstrom, director of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions, told Bloomberg. “Crypto has been an industry with industry since its inception, and advertising budgets will follow the same trajectory.”

Bloomberg notes that the networks that benefited the most from crypto’s surge in ad buys in 2021 and early 2022 were ESPN, ABC, Fox and NBC, but it’s hard to imagine we’ll see the same kind of spending, especially with so many crypto firms in the midst in layoffs, restructuring and cost reductions.

It turns out, as usual, that Larry David was right.

The “good” news for NFL and college football fans is that they will still be presented with plenty of ways to lose their money in the form of gambling ads.