Don’t be like Larry, don’t miss out on the next big thing - Nick Freer

Last weekend’s Super Bowl at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles has been coined the first ‘crypto bowl’ by commentators, with a number of cryptocurrency-related ads featuring among the more traditional adverts for beer, potato chips, movies and cars.

Nick Freer Picture by Stewart Attwood

A common theme in the cryptocurrency ads was around crypto being the future, as the industry’s main players try to tempt a more mainstream demographic into becoming users of the digital payment system that is integral to the next generation of the web, widely termed Web3.

Los Angeles Lakers superstar basketball player LeBron James starred in Crypto.com’s ad, revisiting his younger self in the year 2003, with a young LeBron finding it hard to believe that there will be cordless headphones, that people will be able to “watch movies through their phones” or, as he puts it, that “y’all will be driving electric cars”.

The crypto ad that got the most laughs was FTX’s one minute long advert, where Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame is seen turning down or balking at some of the world’s greatest inventions and advancements at their advent - including the wheel, Thomas Edison’s lightbulb (“Edison, can I be honest with you, it stinks”), the moon landing, and portable music.

The commercial, with a production that included over 100 actors, seven stage sets at a Hollywood studio, and is thought to have cost something in the region of $7 million in airtime alone, ends with David rejecting cryptocurrency exchange FTX, before the ad closes with: “Don’t be like Larry, don’t miss out on the next big thing.”

As a New York Times columnist wrote this week, “because Larry David doesn’t get crypto, that makes him the perfect pitchman”. At a time when there are still virtual currency detractors and skeptics aplenty, FTX may have played a masterstroke with one of the most talked about Super Bowl ads in 2022.

Being in the marketing team at FTX must be full on, but fun. The virtual currency exchange only launched in 2019, is already valued at over $30 billion and, with an eye on the sporting arena and popular culture, has launched multi-million dollar campaigns in recent months with iconic figures like Tom Brady and uber cool music festival Coachella.

In January, the Bahamas-based exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried established a venture capital arm, FTX Ventures, with $2 billion to invest in startups working in the social, gaming, fintech, software, and healthcare sectors.

Closer to home, FTX was one of the lead investors backing Scotland-headquartered BetDEX in November, with the $21 million raise, the largest ever seed investment round secured by a UK startup, backing BetDEX’s mission to create the world’s first decentralised global sports betting protocol.

Commenting on the investment on the occasion of the announcement, Bankman-Fried said: “We are thrilled to be backing a team with deep industry expertise to transform the sports betting experience, and are excited to partner with BetDEX to bring this vision to reality.”

Currently hiring people from a base in Scotland, BetDEX is set to be a standard-bearer for blockchain and Web3 in the Scottish context.

Nick Freer is the founding director of strategic corporate communications agency the Freer Consultancy