The 2022 edition of the Super Bowl is notable for the numerous crypto companies advertising on it. Today, I want to hone in on 2 of the most popular crypto exchanges available on the market today, and more importantly, the extreme polar opposite strategies they took to executing their commercial.
They are Coinbase and FTX.
How much does an ad spot at Super Bowl cost?
First things first, understand it’s SUPER expensive to run a commercial spot at the Super Bowl. A 30-second spot will set you back US$6.5M. Yeap, let me spell that out for you. that’s US$6,500,000, or $216,666 per second!
Now that we know what’s at stake, let’s take a look at the different approach Coinbase and FTX took.
FTX Super Bowl Spot
In keeping with traditional Super Bowls of the past, FTX opted to go with the humour route.
The commercial had Larry David as various characters throughout history, mocking the inventions as they were created, with variations of “Bah! This is stupid!”
It ends with Larry boo-booing FTX, saying he’s never wrong about these things, and the tagline “Don’t be like Larry”.
Brilliant.
It’s funny, memorable, utilises a celebrity and hits all the right notes of what audiences expect of a Super Bowl commercial.
Coinbase Super Bowl Spot
And now… for the amazingly simple, yet extremely effective Coinbase Super Bowl spot… with a bit of commentary and statistics behind how it performed…
Let’s break down some of the more salient points here:
- Over the 60 second duration that the ad aired, Coinbase saw 20M visits to the landing page from the QR code.
- The App shot up to #2 on the appstore, from #186. THAT is an impressive jump!
Undoubtedly the cheapest ad to produce for Super Bowl, probably ever, you can argue that it is likely also the most effective, especially as the results are there for all to see.
In fact, the volume of traffic was so immense that it promptly crashed the site (which is not actually new news).
Performance over Flair
Coming from a performance marketing background and perspective, this definitely ranks as one of the most impressive and effective ads on a grand scale, along with very very tangible results to show for it.
If I were a CMO, I would be so proud of the coinbase ad over FTX.
We see many commercials that have multi-million dollar budgets behind them, but the results that they deliver, are often murky, dubious, and hardly trackable.
I think many people will be talking about this ad for a long time to come.
Commercials like FTX’s is a joy to watch and consume, but will they spur action? How would you know how effective they are? Would a person, 3 months down the road, remembering the ad, recall that it was from FTX? Or just remember “oh yeah… it was a crypto ad, maybe from Crypto.com.. or was it Gemini? Eh.. doesn’t matter.”
One of the tenets of performance marketing is the ability to get a user to take action as quickly as possible from the point of exposure, which is traditionally what TV or big game commercials were NOT built to do. So it’s really brave, simple and brilliant what Coinbase did. And as we can all see, paid off handsomely.
If crypto is new to you, and you’re interested in looking into starting your journey, check out these articles:
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