Bitbuy was one advertiser among a wave of crypto-related brands that dominated ad space during last year’s Super Bowl, leading many to dub the event the “Crypto Bowl.”

This year, Bitbuy is the only crypto exchange to advertise during the event in the U.S. or Canada. It is the only one to buy a spot during the Canadian broadcast, while none are slated to air in the U.S. – a Fox executive told the Associated Press that four brands had been preparing spots, but the deals fell apart after the collapse of the FTX exchange in November.

It’s something of a repeat of the Dot Com boom at the start of the millennium, when 17 of 51 advertisers during Super Bowl XXXIV were Internet companies, but only one – E*Trade – repeated the following year.

According to Binu Koshy, Bitbuy’s branding and communications director, the strategy here is deliberate.

“Last year, we felt it was a calculated risk that if we bought a 30-second commercial, we’d be the only ones advertising there in terms of the Canadian broadcast. Little did we know that U.S.-based and other international exchanges were buying all kinds of placements on the U.S. broadcast,” he tells strategy, though being a part of that wave did earn it inclusion in media coverage of the game’s crypto-related commercials.

“This year, we felt we might be the only crypto player to advertise, if only because the international exchanges – even if they were able to advertise in Canada – just weren’t,” Koshy adds. “We figured this was our chance to be one of the only crypto players doing something.”

A 60-second spot running before kickoff will feature Toronto Raptor Scottie Barnes showing up to provide a personal touch to a user’s Bitbuy transactions in the form of a hug – despite it not necessarily being the appropriate time.

Last year, the brand ran a spot featuring Kyle Lowry immediately after the halftime show. Koshy said it moved to pre-kickoff, as the post-halftime slot was too costly.

Last year’s Kyle Lowry ad was the first in a three-spot series, and Bitbuy will once again be using the Super Bowl to start a content series that will be rolling out across a wide array of channels throughout the year.

“We have evolved our strategy,” Koshy says. “We have a year of experience under our belt when it comes to leveraging a spokesperson, and so this year, when we wrote the terms of the contract, we wanted it to be more content-oriented. Over a weekend with Scottie Barnes, we shot so much content that we now can release it throughout the year.”

Those releases, for the most part, will roll out across digital and social formats in 5- or 10-second clips, “because that is how many people consume media these days.” But, obviously, the brand still sees value in TV spots – including the one for the Super Bowl – and there are two other 30-second spots that are likely to be deployed during the year. Koshy notes that even in those spots, however, the brand stuck to a very specific strategy.

“We live in an age where people use TV commercial breaks to look down at their phones and skip pre-roll ads within the first few seconds. To counter this, we felt it was extremely important to show Scottie right from the very beginning of the spot,” Koshy elaborates. “To further grab our audience’s attention, we had Jared shout Scottie’s name, a carry-over to what we did in our Kyle Lowry commercials from last year.”

Also new this year is the message, which is a direct response to growing distrust in the crypto market by investors who might have been burned by international exchanges in the past year. Bitbuy is trying to communicate that, as a regulated Canadian exchange with guidelines it has to follow, it is more trustworthy than other players in the space. It uses the notion of a “confirmation hug” – a gesture that immediately conveys connection and trust – from the Raptors’ so-called “resident hugger,” Barnes, as a means of getting that message through.

“Our number one goal is to communicate that trust. We could create a boring, 30-second ad – and we have those videos – but we wanted to communicate trust in a personal and funny way and that’s what we did with the Scottie Barnes content,” Koshy says. “It’s not a direct marketing case where we’re hoping to get a bunch of sign-ups from it. It’s more about saying you can trust us, and we’re credible, but in a fun way.”