Even by the usual standards of derangement that apply, the advertisements on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022 were clearly working through some stuff. The Goddess of Fortune was enlisted to encourage people to gamble on their phones, while Facebook advertised its Metaverse technology through the story of a decommissioned animatronic character rescued from a junkyard that reunites with its friends (?) by way of a VR headset. The solutions on offer in these ads weren’t appealing, exactly, but the concerns they were addressing — wanting to place a bet on a regular-season NBA game without talking to anyone; sensing that the world of the future did not really want you — were clear enough.
The cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s big ad was entitled “Don’t Miss Out” and featured Larry David brushing off various civilization-altering innovations throughout history before doing it again with crypto. The tagline was “Don’t Be Like Larry.” It was selling “a safe and easy way to get into crypto,” but the rube-running don’t-miss-out stuff was unmistakably both the style and the substance of the ad. Do you really want to miss out on this, whatever it is? Can you afford to?
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