Do Super Bowl ads predict a bubble? Dot-coms, crypto and now AI
Advertisements for the Super Bowl — the championship game of American football — are some of the most watched and most expensive.
The game on Sunday boasted some 127 million viewers, making it the most-viewed sporting match of the year in the US, as well as the most-watched Super Bowl of all time.
Advertisers pay a premium for the limited number of commercial spots. Some companies shelled out as much as $4 million for a 30-second slot. The high sticker price, as well as the massive audience, drives companies to make their advertisements unique.
But tech industry observers have noted one particular trend in Super Bowl ads: If there’s novel tech all over the ad space, a bubble will soon pop.
Super Bowl ads and bubbles, from dot-coms to crypto
In January 2000, the dot-com boom was in full swing due to the widespread adoption of the internet. At the Super Bowl that year, which became dubbed “the dot-com bowl,” 17 different ads were about the world wide web.
One from trading platform e-Trade featured a 20-second clip of a dancing chimpanzee, followed by a screen that read, “Well, we just wasted 2 million dollars. What are you doing with your money?”
Two months later, the dot-com bubble began a steep decline that lasted until October 2002.
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The same happened with the “crypto bowl” in 2022. At Super Bowl LVI, four different crypto companies aired ads: Coinbase, Crypto.com, eToro and FTX.
The now-defunct FTX aired an ad with “Seinfeld” showrunner Larry David, encouraging investors not to “miss out” on crypto. Crypto companies spent an estimated $6.5 million each per 30-second slot that year.
Just months later, the crypto market unraveled. Terra’s stablecoin ecosystem imploded in May. FTX, Celsius, Voyager Digital and BlockFi were insolvent by the year’s end. Genesis followed in January 2023.
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The following Super Bowl, only one crypto-related ad appeared: a non-fungible token promotion related to the video game Limit Break. There were none in 2024 and 2025.
Coinbase’s sole crypto ad at Super Bowl LX missed the mark
After a two-year hiatus, one major crypto company has returned to the Super Bowl. Coinbase ran an ad in the form of a karaoke sing-along to the Backstreet Boys, which was also screened on the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Not everyone was thrilled. For many, crypto’s image has not improved since the FTX days. Political streamer Jordan Uhl posted, “From crypto to AI to Trump accounts, every Super Bowl has its own scam ad theme.”
Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management publishes formal ratings of Super Bowl ads and puts them in two categories: touchdowns (successful/good advertisements) or fumbles (ineffective/poor advertisements).
The Kellogg survey found that Coinbase’s 2026 ad “failed to establish a clear connection to the brand or its value proposition.” It received an “F.”
But the crypto industry now has some serious legislative victories under its belt. Coinbase’s ad may be a signal that the industry will keep promoting its brands on the largest single night for advertising in the US.
Related: Crypto PACs secure massive war chests ahead of US midterms
Do Super Bowl ads signal an end to the AI bubble?
While Crypto.com didn’t make any crypto-related advertisements, it did announce its new AI platform, imaginatively named AI.com.
A total of 10 ads at this year’s Super Bowl were about AI. Anthropic boasted its ad-free AI model, Claude. Meta showed off its AI-enabled Oakley smart glasses, and Google’s commercial featured a mother and son furnishing their home with Nano Banana Pro, the company’s AI-enabled image generator.
Amazon debuted its new Alexa+ in an ad with actor Chris Hemsworth, in which he imagines that AI is out to get him, either by closing the garage door on his head or attempting to drown him in the pool.
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Svedka Vodka’s 2026 ad revived its “fembot” character that was made primarily with AI. Source: YouTube
The rapid proliferation of AI tech has coincided with eye-watering company valuations and doubt about whether firms like OpenAI will turn a profit. Now, some observers are wondering if the “AI bowl” was a harbinger of an impending bubble burst.
Gary Smith, an economics professor at Pomona College, and Jeffrey Funk, an independent consultant with Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Sunday:
“In this AI bubble, the prices of AI-dependent stocks have become untethered from realistic projections of future profits. LLM-dependent companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are losing enormous amounts of money yet are given valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars as if they were real companies making real profits.”
Ads focus on onboarding new users to the technology. Smith and Funk said, “In the absence of profits, the tech bros increasingly emphasize an old metric that was popular during the dot-com bubble: the number of users, with a new flavor.”
Ahead of the Super Bowl, software developer and researcher Carl Brown said, “I don’t know exactly how many AI commercials are going to be in the game this weekend. I already know there will be a lot more than it seems like there ought to be.”
E-Trade may have “wasted” $2 million in 2000, but it was still around to gloat about surviving the dot-com bust the next year. FTX and other smaller crypto platforms went under in 2022, but Coinbase and the Backstreet Boys were playing on the Vegas Sphere this time around.
The AI bubble could burst, but if past patterns point to anything, a few companies will survive — and maybe make a commercial about it.
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