There was a three-hour-long crypto ad occasionally interrupted by some football last night. At least, that’s definitely what it looked like to the casual viewer of both professional sports and cryptocurrency markets. FTX and Crypto.com made some major, insufferable appearances, but one commercial in particular seems to have captured the current monetary milieu better than the rest, albeit unintentionally.
At one point during the Super Bowl, Coinbase offered millions of viewers a 60-second-spot comprised simply of a color-changing QR code bouncing around the TV screen, in keeping with the company’s current “Less talk. More Bitcoin” campaign. Pulling up the QR code on your phone hypothetically should have directed you to a promotional site offering $15 in BTC for new Coinbase signups, and it briefly did, before imploding under the online traffic surge.
The website appears to be back up and running, so you now have until tomorrow to create an account for the BTC stipend — or you can read the damn room and pause before offering your personal banking data to a company that couldn’t properly anticipate the web traffic surge from an ad airing during the Super Bowl of all TV events.
No one asked you, Meta —
If the entire situation wasn’t insufferable enough already, the House of Zuckerberg wasted no time in attempting to glom onto the moment by firing some extremely tepid shots via their own social media account. “Hopefully this doesn’t break,” Meta’s Twitter account posted not long after Coinbase’s crash last night alongside their own QR code that presumably takes you to some kind of metaverse purgatory or something. Don’t ask us — there’s no way in hell we’re clicking any QR links sent out to us by Meta.
Great game, everyone. Can’t wait to see what wonderful Super Bowl ads air next year. Our non-crypto money is on a bunch of apology ads from these companies attempting to restore faith in their businesses after the inevitable bubble bursts.
