Coinbase Visited 20M Times in 1 Minute After Its $14M Super Bowl Ad

While for most companies Super Bowl is considered as one of the best opportunities to showcase the best of their companies, Coinbase decided to take the other way to showcase nothing but a classic meme with a slight twist to it.

Coinbase at the LVI

In its efforts to draw attention and potentially more users towards its platform, Coinbase ran an advertisement that did not highlight the platform’s capabilities or milestones, or crypto.

But instead for 1 minute straight the crypto exchange bounced around a QR code with a black background changing colors every time it hit a wall.

Using the throwback to the famous DVD logo, Coinbase had over 100 million people anticipated for the QR code to hit the corner.

After bouncing around for 59 seconds, it finally did hit at the 1-minute mark post which Coinbase logo appeared with the landing page of the QR code.

The landing page which was basically a giveaway/contest managed to rack in 20 million visits in the span of just 1 minute.

The giveaway included $15 to new users who sign up and a $3 million reward for users that already have an account blew up significantly.

As described by the Chief Product Officer of Coinbase, Surojit Chatterjee,

@coinbase just saw more traffic than we've ever encountered, but our teams pulled together and only had to throttle traffic for a few minutes. We are now back and ready for you at https://t.co/ZUJqRlnZPH. Humbled to have been witness to this. #WAGMI

— Surojit (@surojit) February 14, 2022

Not only this he went on to state that the engagement witnessed in response to the Super Bowl ad was 6 times higher than their previous benchmarks.

An Expensive Joke

Call it smart marketing or sheer luck that led to the advertisement receiving such a humungous response, because Coinbase was playing a very risky game with their advertisement.

Super Bowl ads are not only difficult to grab but are also highly expensive. Thus choosing to bounce around a QR code for a 1 minute was a bold move on Coinbase’s end.

This year Super Bowl ads cost about $7 million for every 30 seconds which is a 25% increase compared to the $5.6 million of 2019.

This means that to run their advertisement Coinbase shelled out $14 million in addition to its $15 sign-up reward for new users, details of which have not been revealed yet.

All in all, Coinbase managed to turn around the convention of how Super Bowl ads play out by bouncing around a simple QR code.