Brand Takeaways from the 2022 Super Bowl Ads

The big game spots this years revealed a lot about where we are with the crypto movement, online sports betting, and the metaverse

Every February, the Super Bowl telecast, still the highest-rated TV event in the U.S., provides a fascinating microcosm that reflects the ongoing trends that brands either want to catch up on or accelerate. During the 2020 Super Bowl, brands were trying to reach cord-cutters, push voice assistants, and lean hard into nostalgia blissfully oblivious to the hard times ahead. Last year, digital-native brands and 5G commercials stood out as nearly all brands sensibly chose to keep things light and apolitical.

This year, the overall mood of keeping things light was largely unchanged, but the topics have. The digital brands takeover that started in 2020 continued apace, with new categories like cryptocurrency and metaverse making their Super Bowl debuts. Sports-betting platforms hit the gas pedal on local ads in markets where online betting had recently been legalized. Sustainability continued to be a common value that marketers rallied around, with new brands angling to join the conversation.

Overall, the Super Bowl ads on Sunday once again served as both cultural weathervanes and expensive accelerants of developing trends in the market today. Here’s what brand marketers can learn from the top trends reflected in the big game spots.

As the first crypto company to air its spot after kickoff, Coinbase took a bold gambit and aired an unorthodox commercial that featured nothing but a color-changing QR code that bounced around the screen in an imitation of a classic DVD screensaver. When scanned, viewers were redirected to a Coinbase webpage that enticed them to sign up for an account in exchange for getting $15 in bitcoin for free.

Another memorable crypto ad came via courtesy of FTX. The company hired Hollywood’s resident skeptic and curmudgeon Larry David to ironically convey the coolness and hip-ness of cryptocurrencies with a spot that essentially equates crypto trading to some of the greatest ideas throughout history.

Overall, the crypto ads at this Super Bowl shared one common theme: FOMO. Instead of selling consumers on the investment value or the utility in owning Bitcoin or Ethereum, all the crypto ads ended up pushing the narrative that not getting on board with crypto now would mean missing out on the next big thing — It is now or never; don’t be like an old man like Larry David.

Building upon its humble Super Bowl debut last year with two 15-second-long, made-in-house spots, DraftKing, one of the three exclusive sports betting partners of the NFL (along with FanDuel and Caesars Sportsbook), doubled down with a 30-second spot full of CGI stunts.

Titled “Fortune: Life’s a Gamble,” this spot tried to hammer home the idea that risk-taking is an inherent part of everyday life, so, uhm, why not take a gamble on the outcome of sports games? The clumsy logic was backed up by the “free bets” on the Super Bowl results that DraftKing gave away to over 10,000 customers; up to five people would even receive a $1 million free bet each, should they grab their phones and sign up before the game was over.

Whether this wave of legalization is followed by additional support for the social and personal consequences of vices is still to be seen. But at the very least, unlike many crypto-based investments, most sports betting platforms have been upfront and honest about the inherent risks involved in participation.

Closing out the trifecta of innovation buzzwords of early 2022, metaverse predictably followed crypto and web3 into the Super Bowl ads this year, primarily thanks to a baffling spot courtesy of Meta’s Oculus division.

Interestingly, this negative sentiment metaverse was briefly echoed by the Salesforce ad aired during the second quarter of the game. Titled “#TeamEarth,” the company’s sustainability-themed Super Bowl spot featured actor Matthew McConaughey floating over San Francisco while musing “While the others look to the metaverse and Mars, let’s stay here and restore ours.”

The dueling narratives around metaverse are a reflection of not only how public opinion towards metaverse has been dragged down by Facebook’s ongoing reputational crisis, but also of how the widely accepted understanding of metaverse as a concept has been hijacked by Facebook’s Meta rebranding. To many, the metaverse is now synonymous with VR and Oculus headsets, when in reality, it is still a very early-stage development coming primarily out of the gaming space, and one with many valid entry points for adventurous brands to experiment with.

As we enter this decade of entropy, our cultural conversation will continue to shift and accelerate. And only the marketers that keep their fingers on the pulse of culture can effectively future-proof their brands.

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