Who created the popular Coinbase Super Bowl ad? CEO and ad agency square off

• The Coinbase Super Bowl ad was rated as the best of the bunch, but the exchange and ad agencies are going back and forth about whose idea it was.
• CEO Brian Armstrong had claimed the idea was internal, but one ad agency was quick to correct him before his lieutenants jumped in to defend him.

For football fans, the L.A Rams win was the highlight of Super Bowl LVI, played on Sunday, February 13. However, for crypto fans, it was the ads by crypto companies that made their day, and Coinbase was the undisputed winner. Its simple and elegant ad, featuring a bouncing QR code, was voted on a number of platforms as the best overall ad. But who came up with the idea? This is what the exchange, its CEO and top executives, and ad agencies have been going back and forth about.

While the likes of FTX and Crypto.com enlisted celebrities for their ads – Larry David and Lebron James respectively in this case – Coinbase went minimalistic. Its ad featured a QR code bouncing on a screen, with the slogan being “less talk, more Bitcoin.” Users who scanned the code were redirected to the Coinbase promotional website where new users could earn $15 worth of BTC. It also consisted of a $3 million giveaway.

The ad was so popular that it crashed the Coinbase app temporarily.

Read More: From betting, salaries, to ads, crypto comes to the Super Bowl LVI – here are the details

Whose idea was the Coinbase Super Bowl ad?

The controversy all started when Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase founder and CEO, took to Twitter to talk about the ad. He revealed that for one, Coinbase bought the ad space – which costs $6.5 million for 30 seconds – without knowing what it would do.

“Initially, an outside agency pitched us a bunch of standard super bowl ad ideas. I didn’t like any of them,” Armstrong wrote.

According to him, the team internally came up with a bunch of ideas, one of which was the QR code ad. He added:

…this was partially inspired by Reddit’s superb owl commercial at the previous super bowl, key insight was if you can only flash something on the screen for a moment people will google it later – how do we get them from TV to phone to convert.

7/
– since we were almost out of time we decided to just make the whole ad a QR code
– team came up with the DVD screensaver theme, and commissioned a cool song from Com Truise (whose music I like)

— Brian Armstrong – barmstrong.eth (@brian_armstrong) February 21, 2022

However, Kristen Cavallo, the CEO of The Martin Agency, an ad firm, was not having it. She quickly responded, correcting Armstrong on who exactly came up with the idea.

It was actually inspired by presentations our agency showed your team on 8/18 (pages 19-24) and 10/7 (pages 11-18) with ad concepts for the Super Bowl with floating QR codes on a blank screen.

— Kristen Cavallo (@Cavallokristen) February 21, 2022

Kate Rouch, the Chief Marketing Officer at Coinbase tried saving the CEO’s face, saying that the exchange had worked so seamlessly with ad agencies that the CEO probably thought it was one big family.

She tweeted:

The Coinbase team and I deeply value our partners. The fit with our creative partner Accenture Interactive (AI) was seamless – so much to that extent our CEO actually thought we were a single team when presenting work.