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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

I watched my first-ever Super Bowl last night, and I have to say, I enjoyed it.

I’ve never been a fan of American Football — NBA has always been my American sport of choice, but I was thoroughly entertained by the game yesterday.

I was also entertained by most of the advertisements and the half time show. Emphasis on ‘most’, because there were certainly some terrible ones.

Last year, we saw a plethora of crypto ads during the Super Bowl, so much so it was dubbed the ‘Crypto Bowl’. Not this year, though, as crypto companies on the whole are saving their marketing dollars or have been priced out by the $7m ad slots.

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This Week’s Deep Dive: The Crypto Bowl is Dead. Long Live the NFT Bowl.

Last year, Coinbase had marketers purring when they spent their 30 second allocated slot during the Super Bowl with a simple floating QR code which redirected a reported 60 million people to their platform.

That’s pretty good cost-per-click and marketers worldwide were pointing to it as an incredibly simple but effective campaign.

This year, unsurprisingly, we saw very few crypto ads during the Super Bowl. The market is down and crypto companies are protecting runway.

We did however see a couple of things that piqued my interest for different reasons.

Let’s start with the headline maker; DigiDaigaku. Or to be more specific, the NFT project’s creators; Limit Break.

They decided, like Coinbase, to use a QR code to drive people to a specific location.

The Context

Limit Break came out with an NFT project last year called ‘DigiDaigaku’, an anime-style NFT collection that did spectacularly well. Its genesis collection is currently still trading in excess of $10,000+ and their follow-up drops are all also doing fairly well. They have a cult following and a highly engaged community of collectors.

In August 2022, Limit Break raised $200m — a gargantuan amount — to accelerate their growth. Talk about striking while the iron is hot.

The Advert and Execution

Before continuing, take 30 seconds out of your day to watch the advert Limit Break paid $6-7m to host during the Super Bowl.

The advert, stylistically, resembles something that you’d find in the free-to-play mobile gaming market, and to some, it felt like a casino or gambling advert.

It pushed millions of people to get a collectible with very little supply (10,000 NFTs) — which doesn’t really make sense for the scale of activation intended and marketing budget spent.

It also didn't have any branding until the final 0.5 seconds of the advert, and no explanation of what you were actually getting. Perhaps that was intentional, to add a sense of mystery and excitement. For $7m though, I’d be getting to the point.

There were some hitches with the execution, as well. Rather than being redirected to get the digital collectible, many who scanned the QR code were redirected to the founder of Limit Break’s Twitter account, Gabriel Leydon.

I don’t think $6m is well spent on gaining some Twitter followers…

This was, and is at the time of writing, his pinned tweet.

Now, a lot of what I’m about to write is subjective — but I really think this is a bad look for the entire industry and for Limit Break themselves.

I get tagged daily in tweets that look *very* similar to the one Gabriel has pinned by bots and scammers. They are, unfortunately, synonymous with scams in the NFT world.

There is nothing wrong with giveaways, of course. They are a staple in pretty much every marketer’s arsenal of growth weapons. But in crypto, they really are scammy at worst and spammy at best.

The introduction and brand exposure for Limit Break founder Gabriel and the conversation surrounding the marketing efforts did nothing to change the lens through which people view digital collectibles. It was all to drive FOMO, hype and demand for a speculative limited collection that is trading at ~$700 on secondary markets.

Better Activations did Happen…

Limit Break’s $7m advert has been seen by many as a flop, but there was one NFT activation I really liked centred around the Super Bowl.I’ve written about Reddit’s NFT Avatars so many times at this point, but I can’t help but do it again.

To summarise - Reddit have allowed users to personalise their profiles with avatars. These avatars are NFTs, that can be traded and swapped on secondary markets.

Almost 10 million have been minted to date, and their latest partnership with the NFL for the Super Bowl was a resounding success.

The experience to mint these was absolutely seamless and completely free. I didn’t need a crypto wallet, instead, I simply used my Reddit account and ‘vault’ to mint the avatar.

I truly believe what Reddit have done here is to NFTs, what Fortnite has done with in-game skins to the gaming industry.

Instead of a game, Reddit is a social platform.

Instead of skins, they’re digital collectibles that are owned by the user.

1.3 million people minted the NFL Reddit Avatars.

~6.6 million unique wallets now hold almost 10 million Reddit, including~500,000 new wallets which were created this week amid the Super Bowl promo.

Simple, easy and clean.

Reddit built an amazing base use-case that found product-market fit with their Reddit collectibles — and are now extending that to broader audiences via brand partnerships.

This is the way to do it, whether you’re a traditional brand or a Web3 native one like Limit Break.

Final Thoughts

We saw two great examples during this year’s Super Bowl:

1. How to engage a large-scale audience using a tried and tested proposition (Reddit)

2. How to waste $7m on a Super Bowl ad by redirected many of your consumers to broken links or your CEO’s Twitter page, and driving millions to an NFT drop with an extremely limited supply.

2023 will be a year where many projects go bang - in good ways and bad. It will be a year where many brands engage millions of their audience with creative NFT propositions, like Reddit.

What’s is definitely for sure, however, is that there will be spectacular failures amongst a handful of awesome ideas.

More Sports & Crypto stories & things to put on your radar

• The Metaverse of course made an appearance in some way or form during the Super Bowl

• Morecambe FC, a football club in England’s 3rd tier have reportedly been taken over by a 20-year-old, who allegedly made his wealth via a plethora of crypto scams / shitcoins. 

• PUMA have an NFT collection coming up called ‘Super Puma’ in collaboration with 10KTF, who were recently acquired by Yuga Labs. 

• FLOW is still the king of Blockchains for Sports NFTs. 

• Great thread here by the folks over at READY

• Discovery Sports has launched an NFT loyalty program on Immutable X

• The First Mint launched an episode called ‘The State of NFT Sports’ on their podcast feed

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’ that could impact you

• FWB, one of the most successful DAOs/digital social clubs in the space have launched a social network app

• VISA have been testing large settlement payments in USDC on Ethereum. 

Thank you!

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