Some folks asked how our Super Bowl ad came to be, here is the quick back story | Hacker News Reader

Some folks asked how our Super Bowl ad came to be, here is the quick back story

twitter.com

44 pointscaaqil59 comments

Strange that he says “No agency would have done this ad.”

Someone from the ad agency that pitched them this idea replied: https://twitter.com/Cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517...

Then after that he tweeted “I’d be remiss not to mention the creative firm we worked with…” and he proceeds to never name them. https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...

The whole thing is bizarre. Just admit the ad agency had the idea, why try to take credit for it yourself?

You don't get to be CEO of a big company like Coinbase by being humble and honest.

Looks like this is the ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zLsUhOCqyU

This came up while googling that: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/13/22932397/coinbases-qr-cod...

This is great for the ad itself, but I want hear what happened directly after they ran it. The site went down for maybe 10-15 minutes and then came right back up. Probably a great war story from the depths of cloud engineering and devops.

Yes, the rest of it is just marketing fluff, where's the beef? Give us some network stats to terrify your average sys admin.

That is part of the marketing angle too. Now there are tons of stories about the site being down.

Given the common reaction that has been expressed... "the site crashed, therefore the ad must have been enormously popular", I'm starting to think Coinbase yanked the plug intentionally

War story: "we didn't like the price action, so we de-auth'd a large portion of our users and didn't let them log back in" seems to be the most common story.

"the production budget was tiny, less then $100k"

My video production skills are pretty basic, but even I could have produced that ad.

I truly don't understand how it costs $100k to produce this particular ad. Can somebody explain? Where does $100k go to for a QR code bouncing?

Well, you got the meetings with the or agencies, that’s going to cost a ton. Then there is licensing of music which is a known and respected artist. Likely a bunch of other additional costs to an ad agency to create the video and deliver to spec to the channel broadcasting the commercial. Lots of these aren’t huge, but when you get into live tv production, there are a ton of costs that seem insanely high, but it’s the business.

I got that part [1]. But from context, it sounded like the $100k was for creating the ad deliverable itself, not deciding what ad should be done, which would included all the meetings with agencies they rejected. (If the $100k budget included such meetings, it would have been mentioned in the context of saving money by cutting of search early and not having to go through more of those.)

In that case, the only unknown would be the licensing rights, but then, that's still not something to brag about: the people he's bragging to don't know how much of the $100k that ate up, so it's unknown how inefficient they were in making the bouncing QR code.

And if you're just going to explain it by generic "high costs" to "play the game" in "the business", I'm not sure what understanding your comment is actually imparting.

[1] Not the parent but made the same point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30418317

He specifically says "and of course the production budget was tiny, less then $100k)" and further down the thread "Although we didn’t work with a traditional ad agency I’d be remiss not to mention the creative firm we worked with who actually created the ad, commissioned the song, got the clearances etc etc. Honestly, felt like we were all one team so I didn’t fully realize it, thank you!" so it sounds as if they paid a creative firm <$100K to create it which isn't hard for me to believe if they couldn't do it in-house.

Once you get an agency involved for just anything, you're almost certainly in the 10Ks of dollars right off the bat. Lots of people to be fed anytime a creative agency gets involved even for something as simple as writing a paper on some topic.

I produced a 65-minute feature [0] for like $100. I salivate at the idea of having $100k to make something. And they're like "we had a tiny budget, only $100k for this screensaver with a QR code"

curls up into a ball and cries

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10232800/

no shit, everyone knows that the big cost is broadcasting it

I thought that included the cost of the ~20 second broadcast cost, but now thinking about it that seems really low.

The last time you could get a 30 second Super Bowl ad for less than $100k was 1973.

As a Com Truise fan myself, I enjoyed learning that Brian commissioned him for the ad. Com’s slow motion funk fit in perfectly with the minimalist DVD screensaver motif.

Ahh! That's why it sounded so familiar! Thank you pointing that out or I might've missed it.

"(standard super bowl ads tend to be gimmicky, celebrity cameo driven, going for a laugh etc)" - interesting that one of their competitors, who happens to be growing much faster at the moment, had one of those "gimmicky, celebrity driven" ads. Said competitor, FTX, also had much more of a positive response to their ad and, as far as I could tell, had far, far more of a response on social media to their ad. (I will admit, a not insignificant part of said response was due to their Twitter giveaway.)

the ftx ad was actually good . I still have no desire to use ftx but the ad was good.

Ftx's ad is, on it's surface, funny. But it was terrible execution and wrong spokesperson. The enduring vision is Larry David shaking his head and saying nope. Adding a tag line "don't be like Larry" is meaningless, images stick with people. Further, the FTX branding is entirely forgettable.

Subconsciously, people agree with "Larry David" the character 99% of the time -- that's the core of his humor, how stupid all these little polite conventions are, how hypocritical people tend to be. Larry just is the guy willing to say it out loud. People watch his show because they DO want to be like Larry.

And if you don't like "Larry David", the real Larry David produced two of the most successful tv shows of all time and is rich beyond belief. Even in the ad he's the one in the big office behind a desk making important decisions, not the dweeb showing him a phone app.

I don't think it's possible to overstate how popular Coinbase is. I used to assume it was Binance that was #1 because they have a slightly more active social media presence, no it's Coinbase by a big margin. Coinbase owns the US adult market, which has much deeper pockets compared to Binance. Also it is why those YouTube livestream scammers so much too, by targeting those deep pocketed Coinbase users.

Interesting that nobody has mentioned the statement "we bought it not knowing what we would do" -- a $14 million ad buy (before production costs) with zero plan.

Not too surprised the stock is dropping fast.

This is the only ad from the superbowl I remember, mostly due to people talking about it, including talking about how it was so successful it brought down coinbase's website.

Good game, coinbase.

that is the objective: getting the media to talk about it

Have you considered the possibility that Coinbase temporarily blocked their own server, to make you and others believe the ad was "so successful?"

That seems unlikely. However:

It's confusing to me how, in 2022, a deca-billion-dollar company can't host a static page reliably.

I have zero interest in crypto, but that was seriously the only ad I even remember. My friends and I talked through most of the ads (and even the game), but when that came on we all patiently watched it, waiting for the floating QR code to hit the corner. Pretty smart.

The only "flaw" was that I didn't scan it because I don't trust random QR codes without any context. But I'm sure most people don't share those reservations

In other news, none of the 8 people at my Super Bowl party were quick enough to wipe their hands off the nacho cheese, get to the phone and scan the code.

I usually try to avoid all advertising- quite successfully. Interesting there are people who actually seem to like it.

For the Superbowl in particular, watching the ad companies go all-out has become at least as entertaining as watching the game for me.

Funny noone mentioned the office tv show DVD logo scene...

https://youtu.be/QOtuX0jL85Y

So brave, so daring.

https://twitter.com/Cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517...

No mention of how the ad crucially depended on viewers being able to access the site[1], and yet that site crashed under the anticipated load? SRE probably should have been part of the “tiny” $100k budget.[2]

I also completely forgot that it had music, which also feels like a waste.

[1] It communicated no information about the advertiser other than via that QR code.

[2] Edit: and if the $100k budget excludes the website costs, are they really bragging about being able to get a bouncing QR code in the screen and music rights for only $100k?

Your bitterness has blinded you to the fact that your [1] was the whole point. And it’s why we’re still talking about the ad right now, and not any other ads.

And your smugness has blinded you to the fact that they've defeated the "whole point" if the QR code doesn't go anywhere. People aren't talking about it outside of geek circles, and even here, dang had to intervene to clarify WTF Armstrong's talking about:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30417859

People are talking about other ads.

Nobody is talking about the ad organically. The CEO wrote a Twitter thread, so a handful of HN users are talking about it for the next few hours, then nobody will be talking about it again. It was a total gimmick that very few people even remember.

$5k in ad development, $95k in meetings. Maybe the next iteration they'll add coinbase as a scrolling ticker at bottom.

Indeed seems like it'd be much easier to give someone money (this ad) than to take it (most ads), but what do I know

The number of crypto ads felt alarmingly high this year.

Almost as if something about cryptocurrency would consolidate enough money in the hands of the few for them to start running ads about it, yeah.

I don't think it's a major coincidence that crypto ads and gambling ads are on the rise at the same time.

True story: my local Chinese food joint's fortune cookies now contain ads for cryptocoin finance bs.

Ugh. long-form twitter threads that require you to log in after scrolling..

Perhaps we should have a rule that all twitter submissions should be via nitter.

why is a coinbase ad on the hackernews frontpage?

Why shouldn't it be?

Coinbase was a ycombinator startup and they made a Superbowl ad that successfully converted enough users from TV to phone that it crashed their app. There's a couple interesting points there:

- Bitcoin is popular enough with Superbowl fans to incur an app crash

- Coinbase ignored advice from an experienced ad agency for a Superbowl ad

- The entire production was under $100k and had the desired effect

It makes sense this is on HN.

> Bitcoin is popular enough with Superbowl fans to incur an app crash

I'm not so sure it shows how popular Bitcoin is. Since it just crashed the website, I imagine the only takeaway is: If you spend 60 seconds showing nothing more than a QR code, then a lot of people will scan it and try to load the website.

... which makes this as much a story of opsec as advertising.

Imagine if someone were to go through that whole process of prepping the ad, going through the meetings, getting the sign-offs, and then had rug-pulled what resource is linked by that QR code at the last possible second...

if the camera apps do any preloading on QR URLs there is even less awareness...

The ad was just a bouncing QR code, people who scanned it had no idea that it was anything related to crypto until they were directed to the website.

Yep. Definitely shows opportunities for getting value out of zero-day exploits next Superbowl. If you can find a straightforward-to-monetize attack that works on either of latest iPhone or Android, I'd imagine it would be easy to cover the cost of running the ad. And behaviorally, I have to assume that folks would consider a QR code on their TV a more "trusted source" than, say, an unsolicited e-mail, so you can probably even get some behavioral co-operation.

At least one major old guard YC partner has been a a major investor in coinbase for some time.

People are probably interested in what went wrong with the site crashing when they very well knew they’d be seeing a large amount of traffic.

It's not. The story behind the ad is. That's on topic, partly because the ad was unusual and partly because the story of how these things come to be is sometimes interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com