Still thinking about that Coinbase ad from Sunday. You know the one — sixty seconds of a QR code bouncing around a black screen like the old DVD logo screensaver, no voiceover, no logo until the very end, just a floating square doing its thing while everybody's dog barked at the TV because the room went quiet for once during a Super Bowl commercial break. Rams beat the Bengals, which is its own story, but the ad is what my group chat was actually talking about by the fourth quarter.
Here's the thing nobody's mentioning enough: it broke. Not the ad itself, the app. So many people scanned that code at once that Coinbase's site and app started throwing errors, and the promo (new users got $15 in free bitcoin, existing users got a match, I think the minimum was something like a $100 buy to unlock it, don't quote me exactly on the numbers) basically got trampled by its own success for a good twenty minutes. I scanned it myself, sitting on my friend Dave's couch with three tacos and a beer, and got a spinning wheel and then a 500 error. Waited, tried again a few minutes later, got in fine. So did everyone else eventually. But there's something almost poetic about an ad whose entire premise is "look how frictionless crypto is" causing enough friction to take down the infrastructure.
I don't think this is really a crypto story though. I think it's a QR code story, and I have a complaint that's been building since about 2020: I am so tired of QR codes. Restaurants shoved them at us for two years as a pandemic health measure and now half of them never brought the paper menus back, so you sit down starving and have to dig your phone out, open the camera, wait for the little yellow brackets to lock on, then squint at a PDF that wasn't optimized for a six-inch screen. It's not faster. It's not more frictionless. It's just a different kind of annoying that got rebranded as innovation because it happened during a crisis. So when I see one bouncing around during the most expensive ad slot of the year, treated as this clever, minimalist, ohhh-so-cool piece of marketing, my first reaction wasn't "wow" it was "oh no, now every agency in the country is going to copy this for the next eighteen months." Somebody's going to do it for a car insurance company by June. Mark my words.
That said, credit where it's due, as a pure attention-getter it worked. A plain black screen with a bouncing square is the opposite of everything Super Bowl advertising usually is, which is loud, celebrity-stuffed, and desperate. Coinbase wasn't the only crypto company throwing money around this year either. There was the Larry David one for FTX, the eToro spot, Crypto.com had LeBron in it. The whole thing felt like the dot-com bubble Super Bowl of 2000 except with different acronyms, and I say that as someone who was seven years old during the actual dot-com Super Bowl and only knows about it from documentaries. The airtime alone for a 30-second slot this year was reportedly north of six million dollars, and Coinbase's was a full minute, so do that math yourself.
What I keep coming back to is how the crash undercuts the message a little. If your whole pitch is "this is the easy, modern way to buy and hold an asset," and the demo version of that pitch face-plants under normal Sunday-evening traffic from people mostly just curious enough to point a phone at their TV, that's not nothing. Production infrastructure for a lot of these apps still buckles under spikes that a company like, I don't know, Ticketmaster deals with every time a big tour goes on sale (badly, sure, but it deals with it). Crypto exchanges have had this problem before too. Remember Robinhood and GameStop last year? Different company, I know, but same flavor of "everybody showed up at once and the servers said no."
Anyway. My bitcoin balance is now $15 richer, which at today's prices is something like a third of a coin's worth of rounding error, and I've already forgotten the app is on my phone. Dave says he's going to actually use his. We'll see.