On February 12, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, USA, the NFL’s championship game featured interactive advertising by the Web3-games developer Limit Break. The PR stunt drew criticism from the crypto community.
The studio paid $6.5 million to publish the video, according to VentureBeat. It was intended to attract users to mint 10,000 free non-fungible tokens (NFT) from the DigiDaigaku project.
Twitter users complained that the QR-code-embedded link ultimately led to the Twitter profile of Limit Break co-founder and CEO Gabriel Leidon.
I dropped everything to watch the Super Bowl for a 30 second ad that was supposed to bring generational wealth from a free mint and all I got was the opportunity to follow a Mfer on Twitter ðŸ˜
— ThreadGuy 👑 (@notthreadguy) February 13, 2023
Other members of the crypto community criticized Leidon for earlier publishing a link on Twitter to the minting of free DigiDaigaku NFTs.
Dude really paid millions on a Super Bowl ad to leak the link on twitter first and rug the mass public of their first NFT experience 💀
This could have been massive if it was a super easy onboarding process with no wallet creation etc.
— Popeye (@PopeyesNFTs) February 13, 2023
Despite the criticism, Limit Break managed to issue at least part of the promised tokens. According to OpenSea, DigiDaigaku trading volume surpassed 16.5 ETH (about $25,000) with an average price around 0.35 ETH (~$527).
In 2023, four crypto companies expressed interest in Super Bowl advertising, but after the FTX collapse these deals were not completed.
The year 2022 was marked by record spending by representatives of the crypto industry. During the Super Bowl, Coinbase, FTX, Crypto.com, eToro and others made their presence felt.