It’s estimated that 117 million people watched the Bengals battle the Rams in the Super Bowl this past Sunday night — an all-time record.
Many people who don’t normally watch football go to Super Bowl parties and watch the game for the commercials. The NFL seems to cater to these people with the idea that football fans will watch anyway.
As a football fan, I watched mostly due to inertia. This game was far from “The Greatest Show on Turf” Rams or even the “Who Dey” Bengals of the Icky Shuffle days. Perhaps I’m getting old. You’d think that the LA Rams could cobble together a rap video like the 1985 Bears, but no.
People in the media are even trying to spin the halftime show. They want you to believe the group of past-their-prime gangsta rappers were the best ever. All I saw was Death Row Records turned into a Glee dance number. I imagine Suge Knight is sitting in his jail cell, fists clenched, just ready to kill somebody.
Superbowl Ads
But I digress. This was also the championship of TV advertising. One commercial in particular was pure genius.
In it, a QR code slowly bounced around the TV screen like an old Pong game. The ad was for Coinbase. It ran a full 60 seconds and is estimated to have cost more than $14 million as it was broadcast in the most expensive commercial time slot on the U.S. calendar.
People who scanned the QR code were taken to Coinbase, where they were asked to sign up and receive $15 in free bitcoin in addition to the opportunity to win $3 million in prizes.
The problem was that so many people downloaded the QR info that it crashed the site. How internet is that?
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Coinbase’s Chief Product Officer Surojit Chatterjee tweeted that the company had to “throttle traffic for a few minutes.”
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks such things, users ran into problems for over an hour starting at 7:20 p.m. However, Coinbase announced on its main Twitter account that it was back up and running at 8:23 p.m.
Once again, the old saying that there is no bad news in advertising rings true. Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) stock jumped 4% on Monday morning. That move equates to more than $1 billion in market cap — not bad for a $14 million bit of advertising.
Crypto Super Bowl
But it wasn’t just Coinbase pumping the crypto trade. It seemed like there were more crypto broker ads than there were ads for beer and pickup trucks. Along with Coinbase there were also ads for FTX, Crypto.com, and eToro.
These companies pushed crypto into retail speculators’ grills. As a result, token prices rose across the board. Bitcoin was up 1.11%, and Ethereum was up 2.62%. The big movers were among the up-and-comers, with Internet Computer up 5.57% and Terra up 5.05%.
Bitcoin has been down since December when the idea of the Fed hiking rates put a damper on all speculative assets. Since then, crypto has managed to claw its way back. Bitcoin fell from a high of $68,789 to a low of $36,276 in mid-January.
Since then, it has broken its downtrend and put in a series of lower lows and higher highs. That’s the definition of a bull market. Bitcoin is now trading at $42,428 and trending higher.
But to be honest, I don’t care about Bitcoin. There are a number of better coins that do more, cost less, and have powerful backers. These are niche tokens that are out there solving actual problems in the marketplace.
I’ve discovered six of them you should buy today. Check out my free report.
All the best,
Christian DeHaemer Christian is the founder of Bull and Bust Report and an editor at Energy and Capital. For more on Christian, see his editor’s page.
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