🏈🏆 Crypto Bowl LVI Recap
Happy Hump Day everyone!
The Super Bowl was this past Sunday and boy, was it good. The halftime show 🤌, the commercials 🤌, the game itself 🤌🤌🤌. For the purposes of the Hump Days newsletter, the commercials this year were particularly interesting. The Super Bowl, or should we call it the ‘Crypto Bowl’, featured commercials from FTX, Crypto.com, eToro and most notably Coinbase who had a QR code to their website bouncing around a black screen for 60 seconds. Wonder how long it took for them to come up with that one.
It reportedly cost Coinbase up to $14 million for their 60 second ad slot which brings attention to the future of marketing as we know it.
A 30 second advertising spot was going for around $6.5M, up $1M from last year. While the Super Bowl never has issues finding companies to fill these slots, the high price tag could make a marketing team think twice about advertising during the big game; which is exactly what happened with State Farm who announced they were skipping out on the Super Bowl entirely and instead focusing on a TikTok campaign. This could be the first of many companies who choose to skip out on conventional T.V. ads and instead going towards the content route. Big brands know Gen-Z and millennials are on their phones when the commercials come on, so why would they spend big bucks on the big screen?
Alternatively, the success of Coinbase’s commercial means there is still hope for conventional T.V. ads but the Super Bowl (and other major sporting events) may be the only exception for that rule.
This marks the start of 6 months without football so if anyone has any recommendations on how to spend my weekends, let me know :) Hope you enjoy this weeks newsletter! Let’s make it over another Hump!
- Humphrey & Rickie
In the Markets
Weekly News Roundup
Canada’s Trudeau. Invokes Emergency Powers to Address Trucker Protests (WSJ)
The Canadian government invokes measures to limit public gatherings in a bid to end disruptive demonstrations in the capital and along the Canada-U.S. border. Up until Sunday night, demonstrators blocked incoming U.S. vehicles from entering Canada for roughly a week.
RH: This is the first time the Emergencies Act has been used in Canada since Pierre Trudeau, father to Justin Trudeau (current Prime Minister), used it in 1970.
U.S. Inflation Outlook Falls for First Time Since October 2020 (BBG)
In a data analysis by six co-authors including New York Fed President John Williams, U.S. consumers don’t expect red-hot inflation levels to last in the long term. One-year ahead inflation expectations fell for the first time since October 2020 and the outlook over three years dropped even more sharply. Albeit, the one-year ahead expectation is still pretty high at 5.8%.
RH: Fischer Black (economist) has a theory that inflation is determined by inflation expectations. If we think prices will rise, then they will, and vice versa.
HY: Totally agree with the above from Fischer Black, inflation can be sometimes a self-fulling prophecy in all my digging.
Following Coinbase’s viral marketing home run during Super Bowl LVI, the site had to ‘throttle traffic’ for an hour. Coinbase spent as much as $14 million on their 60 second ad featuring a QR code bouncing around a black screen which, when scanned, would take them to their website.
HY: It was bound to crash, if you have that many people going to the website in a short period of time, I don’t know how any server could handle it, lol.