Amidst the avalanche of celebrity cameo’s, Hollywood production, budget-busting CGI and big name brands clammering for Superbowl spot supremacy, it was a little floating QR code which got everyone talking.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ll know about Coinbase’s reported $14m 60-second spot, which yielded 20m website hits in a minute and crashed their site (it didn’t ‘break the internet’ as reported— the internet was fine, just not their inadequately prepared servers).
Fear not, this isn’t a write-up on the adland obsession with the Superbowl. Instead, I doth my cap to Coinbase’s bold decision to take an often neglected approach. One that brand marketers sometimes sneer at. The ugly duckling of tactical thinking — direct response.
We can all safely acknowledge that effective brand marketing requires saliency (getting noticed) and building mental availability. But for direct response there’s a further challenge — stimulating an action. Encouraging your audience, there and then, to do something they hadn’t necessarily intended to do before your uninvited ad invaded their consciousness.
It’s an incredibly challenging thing to do when you think about it. In his book ‘The Tipping Point’, Malcolm Gladwell, describes direct marketers as:
“… the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to reach consumers have come from their work.”
His term ‘stickiness’ refers to a blend of getting noticed and being remembered, or at least mentally absorbed. So direct response requires both creative flair combined with an appreciation of behavioural psychology to spark an action. Industry legend, Rory Sutherland, likens his years in direct marketing to being paid to run social experiments on a grand scale.
And there can be no grander scale than a 60-second spot with an estimated audience of 112 million people (Source: Nielsen). Coinbase and their partners at Accenture Interactive and Martin Agency* went back to the oldest marketing playbook in the world. Their creative was a cleverly cryptic and nostalgic riff on the bouncing DVD icon, past inspiration for this memorable US Office scene.
Their QR code, rising like a tactical phoenix during lockdown as we all scanned to take our seat in the pub, considered immediacy and convenience of response, combining with the music to create an almost gamified effect. And finally, they employed the tried and trusted incentive of $15 in free bitcoin for new sign-ups, as well as prize draws for existing customers. App installs jumped as high as 309% since the ad aired.
But the real genius is that this strategy could also do wonders for their brand awareness. As the IAB rightly suggest in their annual ‘clickheads’ campaign, click’s (or CTRs) are a misleading performance metric. They rarely tell the whole story of effectiveness. It’s the downside of digital direct response — the customer journey is rife with distraction and risk of abandonment. Coinbase are unlikely to reveal exactly how many new customers their spot has directly contributed. But, arguably, that matters not one jot.
They were easily the most talked about brand post-Superbowl. Coverage of their ad was in everything from marketing and tech publishers, to the Mail Online. As shown above, the term ‘Coinbase’ experienced a monumental (though not sustained) spike in search traffic overnight.
So whether by luck or design, Coinbase, Accenture and Martin Agency turned their original spin on a traditional marketing tactic into a resounding brand success story. Winning the Superbowl in the process. We should all not be so quick to dismiss this often overlooked tactic. Viva direct marketing!
*I edited this piece on 22nd Feb 2022 after reading that Martin Agency actually pitched the original idea and didn’t get the credit for it. Well done for calling out Coinbase on their lack of creative acknowledgement
