- During Super Bowl LVI, Coinbase launched an ad with a QR code that led directly to its website.
- This code gave $15 dollars in Bitcoin to new users and for those who were already registered they entered a raffle for 3 million dollars.
- This announcement led to more than 20 million visits to the exchange’s portal in just one minute, which led to its page crashing.
The Super Bowl is the most watched event in the United States, and one of the most popular in the world. For this reason, the 30 seconds of advertising are a huge showcase for different brands to show their products, and just this space, which has a cost between 6 and 7 million dollars, was used by different crypto firms to make themselves known and approach to more people.
One of these firms was coinbasewhich bought two advertising spaces.
The exchange strategy centralized was to simulate the screen saver displayed by DVD players with a QR code. This took you directly to the Coinbase home page and gave away $15 in Bitcoin to new users.
For those who will already operate with the exchange launched in 2012, entered a draw for 3 million dollars. How did it go? They received more than 20 million views in just one minute. What Coinbase did was so good that it partly went wrong for them, so many revenues made the page collapse.
Coinbase crashes
This, which started as a rumor on social networks, was confirmed by the director of marketing, Kate Rouch. The 20 million entries at the same time were “six times higher than any previous charge Coinbase has ever dealt with”.
“Our engineering teams performed load tests on our site to handle millions of simultaneous hits. The volume we experienced was staggering compared to our projections”, explained Rouch, while adding that the traffic was “historic and unprecedented”.
Not everyone was happy with the way Coinbase used its one minute of advertising. Some did highlight the simplicity and effectiveness of the strategy, while Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, criticized those in charge of support.
“Coinbase spent $16,000,000 on a Super Bowl ad to drive people to their website and $0 to make sure the website doesn’t crash 10 seconds after the ad starts is very internet”, he published in a tweet that went viral.
Less talk and more Bitcoin
The ad, which was produced by Accenture Interactive, won the Clio Awards “Super Clio” for best Super Bowl ad, the site noted. Decrypt.co. The panel of judges that decided had two important actors within the crypto ecosystem such as Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and renowned investor of the Shark Tank series, and Gary Vaynerchuk, chosen four times as the best-selling author by The New York Times. ,.
The name that the Clio Awards gave to the advertisement was “Less talk and more Bitcoin”. While, Coinbase decided to call it WAGMI, Very popular acronym within the crypto community. WAGMI means “We are gonna make it“, which translates to Spanish as “All together we will achieve it”.
Other crypto announcements in the Super Bowl
As we discussed in a previous article, Coinbase was not the only one that bet on the most important show in the United States. FTX, Crypto.com and eToro decided to invest in order to also appear and gain popularity in the US market.
In addition, companies that are not exchanges did it, as was the case with Budweiser and Turbotas. The beer company advertised its NFT collection of Noun DAOs and the US tax return preparation software package asked the question: “What if…I don’t know how to freelance, but…I want to invest in cryptocurrencies from my hometown?
For those who believe that digital assets are exclusively a very small niche, the Super Bowl made it clear that the enthusiasm to continue attracting investors continues. The popularity of the crypto world is just beginning.
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