Coinbase CEO tweets how they came up with Super Bowl ad, lied about it
web3isgoinggreat.com
web3isgoinggreat.com
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...
The Martin Agency’s proposal was rejected, but the idea of the QR code that they suggested remained in some minds.
The creative firm they did the ad with was Accenture Interactive, see this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6898989...
Hogging credit is, sadly, pretty common in corporate gamesmanship.
I’m not a politically adept person but even I can see that it puts into question his decision making skills as a CEO of a crypto firm. People in leadership positions generally need to be really good at calling bullshit otherwise they get surrounded by pliant yes-men.
> really good at calling bullshit
Maybe one of those things can tell us about the other?
Pro tip: Ninja edits don't work on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956369442897756... https://twitter.com/Cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517... https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...
Just imagine the vast set of use cases for such a data structure! Why it's enough to make one indiscriminately spam various web forums to tirelessly enumerated through all of them.
When you think in those terms you realize how shameful it is that, say, HN isn't getting in on the ground floor and spawning a worker in every reader's browser to mine crypto. The energy expended to mine Bitcoin pales in comparison to the early mover opportunities lost each day from lack of action.
The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.
The whole point of threading is to group Tweets in order as posted by the author and put replies below them. It wouldn't make sense to throw a bunch of Tweets and replies in chronological order and force the users to try to figure out which Tweet was in response to which parent Tweet.
But perhaps they were indeed being sincere?
EDIT: On review of their prior posts, it looks like they were.
It's fueled by the fact that there really aren't many, or perhaps any, usable web3 platforms that do anything beyond distributed ledger or NFT type stuff. Obviously nothing in web3 even resembles the scale and speed and ease of use of Twitter.
This has left the door wide open for futurists to paint the most idealistic picture possible of what web3 will look like. Blockchain technology is largely irrelevant to the projections (because it's boring). Instead, the projections suggest to solve all of the various social and legal problems in unspecified ways, with "web3" used as the excuse. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea that big corporations are evil and bad for users, but democratizing ownership will change all of that. Nevermind the fact that the big corporations are already publicly traded and you can buy a share of them today if you want, which isn't actually very different than buying governance tokens of a web3 system. The people with the most money and insider connections (to get early coins at a steep discount) are still going to be the ones calling the shots and shaping the systems to derive profits for themselves. There's nothing magical about web3 that stops people with money from buying outsized influence.
But now I'm wondering who exactly is upvoting the comment.
To be clear-- Bitcoin is an energy-gobbling database sync party trick. We would have been better off wildly exaggerating the potential of sleep sort for the past decade and a half.
Every time I talk with a blockchain enthusiast, they seriously pull similar ideas and every time I tirelessly try to convince them there are better/simplier/more effective/etc. solutions to the same problems they try to apply blockchain.
> The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.
The best "stop your blockchain bs" answer!
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956361148243804...
My guess, which may be a tad speculative, is that there is an ongoing, but previously-confidential, dispute between Coinbase and the agency over whether and how much the former owes the latter for the work they did.
A QR Code in a commercial is not novel, making the entire commercial a QR code is. Sounds like Martin Agency presented a commercial with QR codes, not a QR code commercial. Unless Martin Agency shares the slide, It’s impossible to claim it was MA’s idea.
It sounds like her reply is the result of the Coinbase CMO cutting ties with her company.
https://twitter.com/cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517...
They should have made it bounce to the exact corner at end of the ad for any Office crazies
Yes. Something like that. :)
The Superbowl ad was a qr bouncing around the screen with some retro music in the background. No mention of Coinbase at all except a brief 1/2 second "ad by coinbase" at the end
Which would also be a massive red flag.
Armstrong and Coinbase are one of the most toxic companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem, they were willing to lie to new customers entering the space during Segwit all while spreading FUD; they tried to pawn off Bcash as Bitcoin to unsuspecting newbies.
They also have a LONG history of shutting down accounts, reversing purchases, locking funds with limited recourse etc... worst yet is that they are one of YC's unicorns.
Honestly, the sooner people realize why the should look for alternatives the better. As an early adopter who was excited about they could do to bring some level of professionalism after Bitcoinica and MtGox instead I'm ashamed and embarrassed to have ever directed anyone to them.
Jack Dorsey's CASH/Block is everything that they will never be.
To begin, Jack is a maximalist, and has been funding/supporting Lightening development really early on and has recently integrated it into CASH for no cost withdraws/txs. He has also paid for Bitcoin core development and made initiatives to lower Bitcoin's mining carbon footprint and will now be making miners.
He also has spent a great deal of time time and resources to bring Bitcoin awareness into Africa, prior to COVID he was going to live in Africa to try and pick up where Patrick Byrne left off and onboard the develope WOrld with financial services they have been denied. Unfortunately, this was when they tried a hostile take over at Twitter and tried to oust him.
Finally he has made it clear that his ambition is to make Bitcoin the currency of the Internet, and has had discussions about it's role with UBI.
Whereas Armstrong has proven himself to be an incredibly shady individual with a focus on short term gains and operates with little to no scruples.
> I'm sorry, but how is that any different from the entirety of the cryptocurrency space, or the YC startup space in fact? Plenty of scams in the former and cutthroats in the latter.
Despite what you may think, in the 10+ years I've been in the BTC ecosystem scammers are the exception not the rule; you just hear about this because it's what makes headlines. You'll never know or hear about a period of time when you could buy bitcoin by sending cash or precious metals in the mail, or the times when bitcoin that were sent to a wrong address were sent back in good faith. I can go on, but it is only in the last 5 years that this space has inundated with these kind of antics: sadly that's the cost of scaling up a project, and getting closer to critical mass.
I've been in the Corporate World, too and the two cultures never really mix well because we have different aims entirely; chiefly that monetary profit is a byproduct of our success, not the success itself.
Coinbase has it's roots in the SV VC World and Goldman Sachs, which is why I think they have conducted themselves as they have.
> They’re all toxic. >>Having spent over a year in the industry there’s no way I’d go back.
I don't disagree about the space in the last 5-6 years, I haven't been to a meet up in around that time as it became a waste of time if you were around the early days where disrupting Industries with this tech was the biggest driver of our culture. Now it's all moonbois and memes.
There are a few places I could point you to make you see what still exists from that time, but it's pretty fringe.
But I must say that a single year doesn't really amount to much; Bitcoin moves at way too fast of a pace that I doubt you got much more than the ability to scratch the surface.
In my first year, when Satoshi was still around on BTF, the Community told they didn't care what he thought and would kick the hornet's next and help out Wikileaks. In the coming years we'd see the Snowden revelations and manhunt, and Julian's releases via Wikileaks that included things like all those cables to vault 7 etc... which were only possible because Bitcoin appreciation (50,000%) allowed them to survive. [0]
It took me 5 years before I was ready to undertake a startup, that was the first of it's kind in the space and upon reflection was needed but way too early, and only now has started to get wider traction.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/16/wikileaks-julian-assange-bit...
Having spent over a year in the industry there’s no way I’d go back.
OTOH, she is confrontational, especially in her other tweet[0], so I'm thorn. But it does seem like they could be just fabricating buzz.
0: https://twitter.com/Cavallokristen/status/149586819497588326...
Google says Martin Agency is owned by IPG.
Which is like 1 of only 3 or 4 players that capture the vast % of traditional ad spend. They all own a bunch of different brands.
Acdenure, the condsulting body shop spun off from Arthur Andersen the fraudulent accounting ccompany that perpetrated the Enron fraud?
Even in the focal point of the commercial itself, LD is the alpha with the office, the desk, the awards, the guy being pitched to... and FTX expects me to instead side with a random nerd with a cell phone? Oh, and the call to action is terrible -- FTX is hardly even mentioned. I would bet 9 out of 10 regular Joe's have no idea who the Larry David ad was for.
postscript - the ad could have been saved, if the pitch was delivered by someone familiar, with equal stature and affinity. Because we always see Larry arguing with his closest circle -- and because they are also wealthy and successful (which, subconsciously, provides credibility). If it was Cheryl trying to get him to invest? Definitely. Leon? 100%. Jeff? Maybe. Richard Lewis? I think it would have worked great. Ted Danson? Possibly, hard to tell how that would go emotionally. Jerry, Jason or Julia? Could have been amazing. But some random guy with zero credibility? It's just a fatal error, self-imposed, no way around it.
Jeff: GREAT! I'll send the paperwork over first thing tomorrow. This is going to be good, you won't regret this.
theme music plays
Julia is maybe worth even more with family money?
I would have loved to see a Leon bit though. That's a great idea. You got to get in that Ass... er NFTs i guess were slinging now
A quick glance at Youtube view counts shows FTX commercial ahead of BMW's Zeus/Hera commercial which was supposedly ranked #1 by a number of online publications -- make of that what you will, but calling it a "big mistake" seems highly subjective, unless you've actually obtained viewer engagement metrics.
But it doesn't matter. In the FTX commercial, he's the likable one. Maybe he's saying dumb things but he's the one the viewer bonds with. There's a long history of lovable, well, "losers" is the wrong word, but perhaps "serial mistake-makers." Ralph Kramden, Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Jack Tripper, Tim Allen on Tool Time, Homer Simpson, Michael Scott. Having any of these guys, even Michael Scott, saying "naaaah" to your product would be an absolute disaster for a commercial. You can't just put a tag line at the end and say "Don't Be Like _______." The human brain doesn't work that way.
I have no doubt that FTX's commercial has a lot of views and that people rate it highly. It is a funny commercial. It's interesting and compelling to watch. But it still ends in a very successful Larry David, in his big office, behind a big desk, surrounded by tons of accomplishments, saying "naaaah" to a guy who, frankly, does not have a compelling pitch, is not particularly likable or relatable, and who just about anyone would want to throw out of their office ASAP. And although lots of people may be watching the ad and praising it, I feel very confident in stating that few of them are compelled to sign up for FTX.
epilogue - Technical note #1, I just checked the extended version, FTX guy is on-screen for 3 whole seconds -- not a great way to make a strong, memorable impression. Technical note #2, the call to action "Don't Miss Out" is also on-screen for 3 whole seconds, no URL, even FTX is in tiny letters, and is followed by an epilogue with Larry. So the commercial isn't even over and people have become distracted and already forgotten who the commercial was for.
The ad was a remarkable novelty at the time, but the lack of replay ability is probably a big deal.
You can’t show a QR code ad on a phone, and potential coinbase users see a lot of digital ads.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/13/22932397/coinbases-qr-cod...
And even other interest, such as using QR code for an ad, which in itself is a unique thing.
I always considered it part of doing business. Sometimes it was even part of the contract that we couldn't mention we worked with them. That's fine until you decide to leave, and realize you aren't supposed to include any of your best work in your portfolio!
This is the default in all consulting/contracting/freelancing isn't it? Can't even mention your client, let alone the product you were working on. It's a real battle to get the reference rights in the contract.
In practice you mention in public documents something like "leading movie streaming service", and use the name in private discussions and sales.
"I guess if there is a lesson here it is that constraints breed creativity, and that as founders you can empower your team to break the rules on marketing because you're not trying to impress your peers at AdWeek or wherever. No ad agency would have done this ad."
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956368767993978...
So the DVD setup was to bounce a DVD logo (specifically not standing for anything) around in a quasirandom pattern (I believe they did try to make it roughly touch the whole screen at some point).
It makes the CEO look weak, stupid, and petty.
The general public? It has been long forgotten.
That said: this whole episode did just get Coinbase on the front of HN again, and I just learned the name of an apparently good agency. I'll laugh if it turns out this was all planned between them...
I don't particular care about this kind of nuanced back and forth, he-said/she-said type of story. In any other industry, this kind of minor drama might end up as a footnote in some industry trade blog, at best. But because crypto is attached, suddenly it gains traction on HN because people can find another excuse to take pot shots at something they dislike.
You have the people who worked on the Ad on one side and a lying billionaire on the other. It's only a "nuanced back-and-forth" if you're afraid to call a lie a lie.
Because everyone wants a winning ad, and most people don't take credit for someone else's work.
I believe every corner of the market has been reached and has either bought in or is not buying.
Perhaps eerily similar to the last time the Super Bowl brought down a major tech craze ...
Which was?
Preceeded the dot com crash
Is it mostly because of US anti-money-laundering laws?
Also, I don't know how business stuff like this works, but if a company pays an ad agency for ad ideas, aren't they paying for ownership of those ideas? How many classic commercials were actually original ideas of the company whose product was being advertised? Yet we all still consider the polar bears to be a coca-cola commercial, WAZZUUUUUP to be budweiser commercials, etc.
It just seems unprofessional. Why would a company want to hire this agency now? Of course if coinbase ceo is lying then it's definitely rude not to give credit, but that seems like it's just how these things go.
To convert it to HN-speak, this is like forking an open-source software library, then branding it as your own internal original work. Then the kicker is the Twitter thread where he publicly insults the entire profession of the people they stole it from. So imagine that a company rips off an OSS library, then says something like "no OSS community would have created this."
It breaks an industry-standard norm in the relationship between ad/marketing agencies and client companies. Everyone knows that client companies pay ad agencies. But agencies make their livelihood on their reputation. So everyone who matters in the industry knows that Ken Stewart was behind the Coca-Cola polar bears campaign, or that it was Bill Backer behind the "I'd like to give the world a Coke" campaign. They've been inducted into the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame, which is literally something only ad people care about. Same with number of stars on GitHub.
I don't think either of them come out smelling of roses here, but an ad agency relies on reputation. If a paying client threatens their future revenue by badmouthing them, they're left with two options:
1) say nothing and have future clients think they're incompetent
2) defend themselves and have future clients know they are competent, but won't put up with some of their client's BS.
Neither choice is ideal, but maybe #2 defends their reputation at the same time that it filters out clients that will spout BS like this. Fewer potential clients, maybe less revenue as a result, but more revenue than if clients thought they were incompetent.
If your agency came up a creative Superbowl ad idea, and then the CEO of the company that ran the ad goes and tweets about it, dissing outside agencies (like you), and seems to claim they came up with it internally... how do you get credit for the success of the idea you pitched, since that's a big deal to your business?
I just don't like reading twitter threads. At first I only saw the first 6 tweets of the 12(?) tweet chain because after that it was all just reaction gifs.
That being said I worked at Martin for 11 years. They pitch a ton of ideas to clients all the time and gradually dump most of them. I can easily see the QR code being pitched fairly early by a team and it getting cut.
Just speaking from experience I always take agency talk with a grain of salt. So many big names outsource their work to freelancers, boutique shops, or directors that they’ve used in the past because agency folk don’t want to fully think things through. I would be interested in hearing what Danny Robinson has to say. He’s the CCO at Martin, but I doubt he would take to twitter for this.
Depends on the contract.
What they aren't paying for is the ability to say "these guys we paid couldn't come up with anything so we had to do it ourselves".
Because the agency isn't being paid to have a client bad mouth them in public as mediocre when it was the angency that came up with the idea.
It's crypto. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pay them at all.
That's the dispute, they didn't pay. Coinbase met with Martin, listened to their pitch(es), including something about a floating QR code, then said no thanks.
A few months later Coinbase aired a Super Bowl commercial with a floating QR code, and either claims to have created it in-house or created it with Accenture.
The Martin CEO (Cavallo) has every right to be pissed.
Sounds like the ad worked and accomplished its mission; living in their heads rent free and in the millions of people talking about it.
Feels pretty unethical to take credit for someone else's creative work..
However taking that idea and running with it with the vision and conviction that it will work, staking your reputation as an ad agency and as a customer backing with $12M or more in ad spends. The customer and ad agency both part of that process, the fight seems a bit petty.
What I find far more interesting though is the response, which really reveals the core use case of Twitter.
The people responding are having a party. Read it. This is the moment where they shine. Piling onto somebody that made a mistake or is embarrassed. Watch how much pleasure they take from it, "best thing they've seen all day". Frantically liking, retweeting, dancing on somebody's corpse. This really is the best part of their day, they've been scrolling all day without proper outrage, and this is the jackpot for their hate addiction. It fulfills them.
It's a white male even, no better target than that. Let's make it a feminist and BLM issue too. The more the target is stamped into the ground, the better.
And the twisted part is that these people typically signal how good and righteous they are. They're not. They're sadists that take joy from the suffering of others.
Case in point, "DHH" (from Basecamp) still can't open comments on his Twitter a whopping 6 months after bringing himself into trouble. The harassment is this intense.
It's not that neither of these two didn't do anything questionable, but they didn't exactly commit war crimes either. The "good" people are so relentlessly cruel. They've lost any sense of proportionality, reason, perspective, and basic human forgiveness.
When you've spent some more time on (tech) Twitter, as I unfortunately have, you actually recognize the grifters. It's always the same few dozen people that have many followers. They are basically the distributors of outrage. A fresh high profile outrage? Count on them to be there in minutes, dropping their low effort hot take. They're experts in maximizing pain in the fewest characters.
They live for this. How absolutely pathetic.
given that reddit's QR-code commercial was the most discussed one from the prior year and that coinbase explicitly considered this inspiration [0], it seems prudent to gather more data before judging who was wrong.
given the reddit precedent and the proliferation of QR codes under covid, it does not seem unreasonable for multiple people to independently conceive of commercials with QR codes.
1. when did coinbase discuss the reddit commercial?
2. how similar are the agency proposal and the final commercial?
3. did coinbase brief the marketing agency on all previously considered ideas?
[0]https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956363618898575...
The tweets are a CEO doing corporate speak about how good their company is and should be expected.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real...
He makes the case that some of the quotes from the Isaacson biography aren't true, like this one:
"Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including “They push the human race forward."
Edit: Yes, I'm agreeing with you..
He said his team was inspired by a reddit ad, the outside agency could have also been inspired by that. We don't know who was inspired first and how closley the outside agency's concept is to the ad compared to the original concept.
ESH! Lol
Based on what? Also it's been over a week now and still talking about it, hardly 5 min of fame
On the content of the article; why are we debating the validity of an argument over an advertisement posted on twitter? Surely we'd all agree we'd like content here to be better than that.
I think if there is to be any legitimate criticism of the post, it is that not that it has a tabloid quality, but that because it is mostly quotation, it could be replaced with a link to the original tweets. But I find a text post or "blogspam" like this often provides useful and concise context.
So if all this post does is provide brief but useful context, I think it's a not a good example at all for your complaint about the source. And it's not unwarranted for HN to find criticism of SV/Bitcoin bombast about how "we're different/new" to be interesting.
TL;DW: a floating color-changing QR code on a black background, with obnoxious music.
As for this one it's obviously designed to get people to look it up. Seems to have worked if we want to trust CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/14/investing/coinbase-qr-cod...
And now HN is talking about it too. More publicity for them.
Still not sure it was a very useful use of Super Bowl dollars, should have at least had coinbased.com under it or something.
> Still not sure it was a very useful use of Super Bowl dollars, should have at least had coinbased.com under it or something.
Agreed on that; perhaps just a little too avant-garde in that matter.
its probably the most public and normal qr codes have ever been
Coinbase is trying to squeeze as much marketing from the Superbowl ad as they can. The tweet thread by Brian is part of that.
I understand wanting credit where credits due, but publicly scolding is just unprofessional.
That’s disrespect worth being addressed.
It does seem like he was intentionally or unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it, but frankly I'm not sure that's a big enough misstep to warrant the marketing company replying like that trying to "out" him. In my eyes, that's an extremely unprofessional move on their part.
We bring in outside engineering contractors all the time to work on stuff. When the feature is finished, we don't tell customers "thank you, yes we're very happy with the work our engineering team and McKinsely & Sons Contracting Firm LLC did for us". That just straight up never, never, never happens; we take responsibility for both the success and failures of our contractors. Of course, success is always nice, and when directly asked we don't hide it (on the contrary; we're happy to give them some free word-of-mouth marketing if they've done good work). There's an alternate reality here where the marketing firm maybe reaches out privately and says "hey Brian; your tweets really paint a picture that we had nothing to do with it; mind giving us a shout-out?"
But that's not the direction they went, and instead they just aired dirty laundry in a public forum. Actually, its not even dirty laundry?! Its just laundry. I can say with absolute certainty that if any contractors/third parties pulled this stunt with us, we'd never use them again, period. Beyond anything else, NDAs are SOP in exchanges like this, I'd bet my life savings she absentmindedly signed one; to throw out a tweet like that isn't just unprofessional, its potentially litigable.
That's a lot of fancy words to say "he lied".
I can understand the sentiment if he was just waxing lyrical about the ad, but he explicitly said "no ad agency would come up with this".
0% chance it was unintentional given that he said “no ad agency would have done this ad”
Her tweet gets her firm attention from people who may believe that Coinbase is bad/run by men who want to take credit for other peoples’ work, which is probably… a lot of people. Her tweet is probably good for business.
No way it gets litigated or that they win, given that other people at Coinbase publicly gave her credit even before she Tweeted
But do you ever tell your customers "We used no contractors for this work. No contractor would ever have had the ideas our internal team came up with" when there were, in fact, contractors involved in the conception and design of the project?
It’s like paying someone to write your biography, then claiming you wrote it yourself and turning the author into a ghostwriter (without their agreement). You shouldn’t expect the author to let you get away with that. If the work doesn’t go in their portfolio, you need to pay extra.
Not because I care about crediting creative agencies, but because of the cheesy LinkedIn-style fake story about how much they'd achieved by rejecting unimaginative agencies, when actually they commissioned an agency which come up with the core idea and all the implementation. Nothing wrong with not naming your contractors until you start telling marketing stories about how you didn't use any because they couldn't possibly achieve what you achieved in house! Sure, it wasn't professional to call it out, but that doesn't mean it didn't deserve it