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What you’re looking at is an ad that cost $14 million.

Yes, Coinbase paid nearly $15M for a QR code to bounce around the screen at the Super Bowl.

Why was it so great?

Was it worth it?

That’s what you’re about to find out!

Company Overview

Market Cap: 49.541B (Source)

2021 Revenue: $8+ Billion (Source)

Coinbase is an American company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform.

That just so happens to be THE biggest crypto exchange in the US.

They have 73 million verified users, 10,000 institutions, and 185,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries.

There is an average of $5 billion traded on the platform every day!

They are the real deal and they certainly know how to disrupt.

So, when they got the opportunity to showcase the company on the biggest stage possible, what did they do?

Disrupt.

Breaking Down The Strategy

Super Bowl ads are the holy grail of advertising.

It’s every marketer and advertiser’s dream to create a Super Bowl ad.

They are precious and they are expensive.

So, when a company is advertising at the event you often see Oscar-worthy visuals.

Coinbase was having none of it.

They are disrupters.

So they disrupted the Super Bowl.

They created an ad that was so different to any other ad ever shown at the Super Bowl.

No Coinbase logo.

No messaging.

No images.

No high-end production.

It didn’t have anything a Super Bowl ad “should” have.

Traditional advertisers would certainly not have thought it would perform well…

Boy, would they be wrong.

The ad led to 20M+ landing page hits IN ONE MINUTE!

That’s the most traffic Coinbase has EVER encountered.

To say the ad performed well would be an understatement…

- 500k+ organic searches (not including QR code scans)

- Coinbase app went from 186th place to 2nd on the App Store

- Only Super Bowl ad to trend on Google

It also went viral all over socials…

Not to mention the ad also landed Coinbase in all the top publications: CNN, USA Today, Adweek, The Verge, Business Insider and so many more.

The ad couldn’t have performed any better: it drove website traffic, had a huge social presence, plus landed Coinbase in all the big publications.

$14 million sounds expensive for a simple ad. However, it would’ve cost a LOT more than $14 million to get those results using other methods.

Now we know that the ad was a HUGE success, but what made it so great?

I identified 3 main factors:

• Simple - When it comes to advertising it’s easy to complicate things and distract the viewers. Coinbase kept it simple. A flashing, colour changing QR code bouncing around the screen. There’s only one thing to look at, one thing to focus on. As the saying goes “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, that's creativity.”

• Curiosity - The ad clearly stood out. It was a huge contrast to the other amazing productions alongside it. People were instantly shocked when the ad came up. Then the curiosity kicked it… what is it? Is it a glitch? What will happen if you scan it? Coinbase left people with so many questions. As always, we humans just have to get answers. So everyone picked up their phone and scanned the code.

• Easy Action - With ads you have an action that you want viewers to take post seeing the ad. For Coinbase they wanted to drive viewers to their website. So they made it as easy as possible for people to go from the ad to the website. You didn’t need to go to search on Google, you didn’t even have to type one word. You just pick up your phone and scan.

This ad was not a fluke.

It was a genius and beautifully disruptive ad put together by the team at Coinbase.

If you want to stand out, you have to break the mould.

You have to do things differently.

Super Bowl ads are always high-end productions.

So Coinbase did the exact opposite.

Everyone else complicates things.

Coinbase kept it simple.

The LA Rams won the trophy.

But Coinbase won the Super Bowl!

How To Implement It

Spending $14 million on an ad certainly isn’t a realistic option for most businesses.

That doesn’t mean you can’t utilise the methods Coinbase used with your marketing.

Here are 2 questions you can ask yourself to make an ad like Coinbase’s:

1. What’s the easiest way you can get someone to perform your desired action?

The attention span of a human is estimated to be 8 seconds. (Source) So, if they can’t perform your desired action within that time you’ve lost them. Whatever you want them to do, make it as simple and as quick as possible for someone to do so.

1. How can we grab the users attention instantly?

When we scroll down our social media feeds we have thousands of stimuli. If you want to grab their attention you have to stand out. So think, what do you not see on your social media feed? What will stop that deadly scroll?

Nail those two questions and you’ll gave a killer ad campaign!

This has been a breakdown of Coinbase’s Super Bowl marketing strategy. I hope you have learned something and can implement a similar strategy into your business!

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I’ll see you next Sunday!