Crypto companies are continuing to pour billions of dollars into sports advertising.
Key details
Despite the downturn in cryptocurrencies, major athletes move forward with sports promotional deals.
Sports advertising continues to be a major promotional strategy for major exchanges that are eager to put their names into the mainstream.
West London’s Chelsea Football Club is one of the most recent sponsorships, having taken a £20 million (US$23 million) per year deal to display crypto platform WhaleFin’s logo.
“You’re seeing spending even now in the past couple of months. There are new deals with English Premiere teams like Everton and Manchester City… Everything has slowed down but it doesn’t appear to be stopping,” says Bloomberg Crypto.
“Crypto companies have committed $2.4 billion on sports marketing over the past 18 months. There are all kinds of crypto or blockchain-related companies all across global sports. It’s been an avalanche of spending that’s entered all sorts of sports leagues. This is new money for them, all additive to existing sponsorships.”
Why it’s news
The push would suggest that crypto evangelists haven’t been discouraged by the recent downturns as much as outsiders might expect. Bitcoin has lost 69.7% of its value since November 2021, and a substantial crash in May further had analysts proclaiming the possible “death of crypto.”
This doesn’t seem to be stopping the crypto exchange’s momentum and hopes. As we previously reported, crypto is eager to continue spending more to put its name out there.
Tom Brady recently starred in an FTX Crypto ad, Matt Damon starred in a Super Bowl advertisement for Crypto.com, and Staples Arena in Los Angeles recently became the Crypto.com Arena.
The downturn has somewhat reduced the capacity for exchanges to push promotions in the meantime but may signal the potential for future growth.
“As long as there is something interesting to endorse and they have the money to spend, and they’re willing to spend marketing dollars on sports, we’re going to keep seeing these deals. What we saw over the past month was TV spending on crypto sports ads dips super far almost to nothing. Ads… all just got taken off the air, at least for now,” says Bloomberg Crypto.
