Three things about Coinbase's Super Bowl ad: one minute long, viewed by 20 million people, production cost

The Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL), concluded last Monday with the Los Angeles Rams emerging as the champions. During this event, several cryptocurrency companies spent a significant amount of money on advertising, with Coinbase's ad garnering the most attention and being selected as the best ad of the Super Bowl. Today, its CEO Brian Armstrong shared the story behind this ad on Twitter.

Coinbase Super Bowl Ad

The Coinbase ad is concise, featuring a constantly changing and moving QR code mimicking a DVD player screensaver, with electronic music in the background, and the theme "Less Talk, More Bitcoin." In just one minute, it attracted over 20 million views, even causing website crashes due to congestion.

A Little Story After the Coinbase Ad

With such successful marketing, Coinbase rose to fame. Today, its CEO Brian Armstrong shared the story behind the ad on Twitter.

When Coinbase initially bought the ad, they had no idea what the final product would be. External agencies recommended many "standard" Super Bowl ads full of gimmicks, celebrity cameos, and humor, but none appealed to Brian.

"Why would someone liking a product just because a celebrity got paid to promote it make any sense to me?" Brian stated.

After that, the team brainstormed and came up with many crazy ideas like some crypto-native stuff, Apple's classic 1984 ad, but with only a few weeks left, some would be completed in the future, and putting a QR code at the end of the ad was also one of the ideas at the time.

This inspiration came from Reddit's Super Bowl ad last year, which was only five seconds long, expressing thoughts on the GameStop event. They believed that if something was briefly shown on the screen, people would Google it later. This also helped in converting traffic between TV and phones.

Finally, due to time constraints, the team decided to make the entire ad in the form of a QR code and commissioned Com Truise, whom Brian is a fan of, to create cool electronic music. The approval process for the ad faced much opposition but ultimately passed, and the team completed an amazing task under pressure with production costs of less than $100,000.

When asked what he learned from the process, Brian believes that not limiting the development of imagination is the most important. As a founder, you can empower the team to break marketing rules. Because the purpose of creating this ad was not to amaze peers. However, no ad agency was willing to make such an ad.

"I'm still a novice in marketing, but 'do something that you find interesting or exciting, even if people tell you it won't work' seems like a reasonable piece of advice so far," Brian said.

Ad Myth Quickly Debunked?

After Brian Armstrong's tweet, it sparked a lot of discussion and received much praise. However, a few hours later, Kristen Cavallo, CEO of the advertising agency hired by Coinbase, The Martin Agency, replied:

"The inspiration actually came from our reports shown to your team on 8/18 pages 19-24 and 10/7 pages 11-18, which included Super Bowl ad concepts with floating QR codes on blank screens."

With Kristen Cavallo's statement, the initially positive online sentiment gradually turned negative, with some even expressing a desire to cancel their Coinbase registrations. However, the actual situation remains to be seen and awaits a response from Brian Armstrong.