{"id":2452,"date":"2022-02-24T01:41:05","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T06:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/2022\/02\/24\/the-coinbase-qr-ad-doesnt-add-up\/"},"modified":"2022-02-24T01:41:05","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T06:41:05","slug":"the-coinbase-qr-ad-doesnt-add-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/news\/the-coinbase-qr-ad-doesnt-add-up\/2452\/","title":{"rendered":"The Coinbase QR Ad Doesn\u2019t\u2026 Add Up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Phillip Jackson, Co-Founder of <\/em>Future Commerce<\/em><\/a> and Leo Strupczewski, VP of Revenue at <\/em>Repeat<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Bill Parcells, a two-time Super Bowl winning coach with the New York Giants once quipped that \u201cif you have two quarterbacks, you have none.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This framework of focus, it seems, is fairly uncontroversial in football (unless you\u2019re Steve Spurrier), yet seems to be missed when talking about the big game\u2019s biggest ad this year. Specifically, we\u2019re referencing Coinbase and its QR code play. Is it a direct response ad with a branding fallback? A brand ad with a direct response cover?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The answer doesn\u2019t matter so much as Parcell\u2019s wisdom. If you have two, you have none.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

While Coinbase gets points for doing something bold and unconventional, the spot falls short when viewed through either a direct response or brand building lens. The key question: was the ad a success?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Based on the two traditional routes to successful advertising: direct response and brand awareness, the Coinbase QR Code Super Bowl ad is a spectacular flop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

The Ad Fails To Deliver on Coinbase Brand Recognition<\/strong><\/h2>\n

While the twittersphere lathers Coinbase in effusive praise, they do so praising the medium of the ad: a QR code bouncing around like a DVD screen saver. Clothed in anemoia, a form of faux-nostalgia experienced by those too young to have a lived experience, the ad is relevant to people of a generation who binged The Office reruns on repeat, rather than those who grew up with DVD players. At that intersection are younger millennials, 50% of whom are already amenable to the idea<\/a> of investing in crypto. Missing from the conversation was the subject of the distinct asset in which Coinbase deals: the currencies themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

As an unintended consequence, competitors FTX and Crypto.com are receiving as much attention post-Super Bowl as Coinbase, because crypto itself has had a cultural moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This could have been Coinbase\u2019s moment, to distinguish itself from the rest of the marketplace by providing an \u201cah ha\u201d moment and one that it squandered on an ad that was inaccessible to visually impaired viewers and those lacking the technology to pause, timeshift, or otherwise scan the QR code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Coinbase chose to double down on an audience that was already paying attention, rather than welcoming the rest of a curious public into the huddle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Next, Coinbase was not prepared for its own success. By some estimates the landing page for the ad saw nearly 20 million hits within minutes of the debut. For a few minutes the site stalled as the servers scaled out to keep up with the increase in traffic. While Coinbase itself praises the resilience of its team to handle the increase and its own brilliance to drive such demand that they were overwhelmed, this is a failure of capacity planning at the highest level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The failure to capture long-tail interest, though, is Coinbase\u2019s biggest failing. The ad creative is easily copied and a quick search of YouTube or Google fails to return their ad. In a space that is rife with grifters, charlatans, and \u201crug-pulls,\u201d it isn\u2019t a stretch to imagine an opportunist using a lookalike ad to pose as Coinbase to guide an unwitting online search to a false landing page, potentially putting a consumer at-risk. For a company whose core business is based on trustless systems, Coinbase asks us to trust them an awful lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Finally, the ad medium \u2014 video \u2014 means that the QR code they have created must live on in perpetuity. They cannot alter the QR code in the future. They do not give a text-based URL with a human-readable online link. The landing page campaign must be maintained ad-infinitum for future generations to make sense of the brand and the offer. This could be powerful if in the future Coinbase may want to change the direction of the business to focus more on broad finance and less on crypto; but hyperlinks are not durable. One study found that 72% of links from 1998 were dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

As a monocultural moment, a Super Bowl ad should at the very least be able to be appreciated by future generations or provide enough brand recognition to recontextualize the message of the ad in a new era. This ad provides neither.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

As a Direct Response Campaign the Numbers Don’t Add Up<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The counter argument to a flop on the brand awareness side is that the ad was hyper-targeted to a segment of the audience that is most likely to buy crypto, given the technology gate of a QR code. This would, then, mean the ad was intended to be direct response in nature: Get an audience to take a desired action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

While some may dismiss the above critiques as subjective, a direct response ad can, by its nature, only be viewed objectively. The success is binary: It either hit a desired return or it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Given known data points and some industry benchmarks around unknown data points, it\u2019s hard to make the math work such that you could call the ad a success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s run the math.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In order to install the app, a viewer would need to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n