Coinbase's Super Bowl ad is the best marketing campaign in FinTech ever. Numbers prove that 🥊 (also, lessons to learn)

$14M for a 60-second ad? It paid off immediately.

The Super Bowl is among the world's most-watched single sporting events and often has the largest audience among all American broadcasts during the year. It is second only to the UEFA Champions League final as the most-watched annual club sporting event worldwide.

Cincinnati Bengals played with Los Angeles Rams with the latter beating their opponents by 3 points, but I’d argue that Coinbase is the one that has won the Super Bowl this year. And it all has to do with marketing.

The ad

When I covered this story earlier this week, I’ve said that Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad is probably one of the best marketing campaigns the FinTech industry has ever seen.

Let’s do a quick refresh for those who missed it.

The ad 👉 The 60-second ad featured a floating and colorful QR code bouncing around the screen, similar to a bouncing DVD logo. The QR code directed people to a link offering $15 in Bitcoin to those who sign up for a Coinbase account before February 15. Meanwhile, existing users had the chance to opt-in for a chance of winning a $3M prize.

The crash 💥 The ad proved so popular that the app crashed for about an hour.

To be more precise, Coinbase had more than 20M hits on its landing page in one minute and the engagement was 6 times higher than previous benchmarks. It was hence historic and unprecedented.

As an effect, the Coinbase app also skyrocketed in popularity, rising from 186th place to 2nd on Apple's App Store.

The numbers

Once you have the context, let’s look at the numbers as to why Coinbase's Super Bowl ad is probably the best marketing campaign the FinTech industry has ever seen.

Here's some crazy math proving that:

112 million people watched the Super Bowl this year [source]. Coinbase confirmed that more than 20 million people visited their landing page in one minute [source]. 

Let’s be conservative here, disregard later visits, and use 20M as the estimate.

Let’s assume 10% signed up and a further 10% added money to their Coinbase wallet. That’s 200,000 new users.

Their annual revenue per user (ARPU) is $90 with the lifetime value (LTV) of around $200-$300 [source]

Again, let’s be conservative here and assume this cohort has an LTV of $150.

$150 x 200k new users = $30 million in revenue.

Let’s look at the cost now.

Since their creative was just a QR code, let’s assume the production cost is negligible. 

Coinbase reportedly paid $14 million for a minute-long ad¹. In addition to the media cost, the company offered $15 in free BTC for signing up, so this has to be accounted as customer acquisition cost (CAC) [source].

200k x $15 + $14M = $17 million spent.

Once you do the math, you arrive at $13 million in revenue.

And this doesn’t even account for the viral effects for everyone discussing the ad + more engagement and exposure once their site wasn’t able to handle the traffic.

That’s how you do marketing & branding on steroids.

The lessons

I already said that with this ad Coinbase shows how you should do branding and marketing in FinTech. But what other lessons could we learn from this? There are at least three:

1. Keep it simple yet challenging. The ad had no brand, no product, no humans, or any other visual, in fact, it didn’t even have any instructions - it was just a bouncing QR code. Yet, it raised curiosity and 60 seconds was the right time to challenge even the most passive users.

2. Know very well what action you want users to take. A bouncing QR code was a super clear call to action without any distractions or interruptions. Again, 60 seconds was enough for almost all viewers to find their phones and scan the code.

3. If you can’t measure it - you can’t manage it. QR is a simple yet brilliant solution here as you can easily evaluate engagement, and more importantly - track it until the end of time to measure success. And that’s crucial in any marketing campaign.

Add it all up, and you have a case study on how marketing in FinTech should be done. I hope this will inspire other businesses to get more creative as well.

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About: I am a business developer, sales professional, FinTech strategist, as well as Cryptocurrency and Blockchain enthusiast. I'm highly passionate about Financial Technology and Digital Innovation, and strongly believe that it will change the world for the better. Apart from my daily job at a global payments startup where I'm leading the company's expansion into Europe, I'm an active member of the FinTech community and a TechFin evangelist.

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I’ve to thank Shaan Puri & Taylor Holiday for inspiring this article. Some of the data used here was thanks to them, hence, they definitely deserve the credit.

1. Commercial airtime during the Super Bowl broadcast is the most expensive of the year because of the high viewership, leading to companies regularly developing their most expensive advertisements for the broadcast and commercial viewership becoming an integral part of the event.