Most Super Bowl commercials aim to be faster, louder and shinier than the rest. And then there are Big Game ads from advertisers like Coinbase.
After mystifying Super Bowl viewers in 2022 with a decidedly lo-fi ad showing nothing but a floating QR code, the cryptocurrency trading platform has returned with another spot that’s so spartan it looks like it was created by someone working on an Apple II in the 1980s. The 60-second spot emulates a karaoke screen at a bar, with basic computer animation and less-than-stylish graphics. The emphasis is on lyrics from the 1997 Backstreet Boys song “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” and the first words people will see on screen are “Oh my god we’re back again.”
The no-frills approach is the point. By not emulating “that kind of more polished feeling than every other ad at the Super Bowl time typically has,” Coinbase believes its commercial is more likely to capture attention than many of its celebrity laden counterparts, says Cat Ferdon, Coinbase’s chief marketing officer, during a recent interview.
The commercial aims to create a communal moment, the executive says and get all members of the Super Bowl audience singing the song, which has words the company hopes will suggest the broader appeal of cryptocurrency. “We’re still competing with people’s cell phones, and this ad will undoubtedly get them and anyone to look up,” she says. “We’re really trying to effectively use this as the world’s biggest singalong, to show that crypto isn’t just for techies, but really for anyone who knows the lyrics.”
Coinbase isn’t the first Super Bowl advertiser to take an extremely basic approach to its pitch. In 2020, Lifeminders.com, an email advertising company, ran what was basically a few lines of black text against a yellow screen, proclaiming that the spot was “the worst commercial in the Super Bowl.” As an error-filled version of the piano exercise “Chopsticks” plays, the ad told the audience that “We’re information experts. (Geeks). But we don’t know diddley about making ads.” In 2021, Oatly ran a spot that showed a senior executive in a field playing a keyboard and singing about its chief product, oat milk.
The commercials come off like cutoff jeans and a tank top at a formal affair. Viewers typically tune into the Super Bowl to see the best of what Madison Avenue has to offer. Expectations are high for surprise celebrity cameos, dazzling images, clever uses of popular songs and, in some cases, the chance to see a culture-defining effort like Apple’s famous “1984” commercial, which blew minds with its depiction of an athlete rebelling against autonomous society, or Chrysler’s 2012 “Halftime in America” spot, which featured a grim Clint Eastwood telling the nation to get back on the playing field after being hit by a significant recession.
Some of the unembellished spots stand out despite their rudimentary nature. GoDaddy, a web hosting company, thrived for years with bare-bones commercials that initially played on the potential for seeing a scantily clad female character. Cash4Gold, a trader that usually relied on cheaply made direct response commercials, in 2009 made a Super Bowl ad that used celebrity pitchman Ed McMahon and rapper MC Hammer.
Such efforts have surfaced as the ranks of the annual Super Bowl ad roster have swelled to include more start-ups and first-time entrants. Many of these companies have little experience with mainstream advertising, and most of their focus has instead been on using digital outreach to cultivate specific customer niches. The best Super Bowl ads find a way to capture the attention of tens of millions of viewers, while driving home a need for a product or the reliability of an overall brand.
Coinbase executives believe their approach works. The company’s 2022 commercial “was probably the most talked about ad” of that year, says Ferdon. After the QR code appeared in the Super Bowl, Coinbase saw 20 million hits on its landing page in one minute, the company revealed following the end of the 2022 game. Its app crashed in the immediate aftermath.
Perhaps Coinbase knows something about the Super Bowl audience that others don’t?
Of the 120 million tuning in to the gridiron classic, “I think 110 million have had a bit to drink,” says Joe Staples, Coinbase’s vice president of creative. “This is fun and it’s supposed to be kind of our gift to that moment.
The Coinbase team considered every element of design in the ad, he says. Should they add some of he backgrounds people see on karaoke screens in bars, like waterfalls? Should the graphics have fuzzy edges? Should the ad try to use some of the heart-shaped graphics that sometimes surface as lyrics scroll?
“Almost all of our conversations were about restraint,” says Staples. “So people can just focus on themselves.”
If it works, the ad will also help lend something that is not often attributed to cryptocurrency companies: emotion. Executives hope that spot spurs “a sense of togetherness” and that viewers will start to sing along with the tune, says Ferdon. “We know that 60% of Americans who watch the Super Bowl watch it together. It’s not exactly a solemn, singular pastime. It’s something we do in a group. And we really think that this kind of captures the spirit of it,” she says. “We’re not just buying airtime with this ad. We really designed like a shared high energy experience for our community to participate in and do that together.”
A winning Super Bowl commercial says Ferdon, sometimes must break old rules. “Ideas stand out,” she says. “And doing things other people aren’t doing stands out.”