Coinbase CEO Downplays Role Of Ad Agency In Super Bowl Commercial

The Coinbase CEO downplays the role of the AD agencies in the Super Bowl commercial while Kristen Cavallo of the Martin Agency says the inspiration for the QR code came from her ad company as we are reading more today’s Coinbase news.

The Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted that the company’s Super Bowl ad was created by the exchange while the ad agency created the concept. The Coinbase CMO Kate Rouch said that a different company conceptualized the ad and prompted Armstrong to update his Twitter thread. The QR code ad generated a lot of buzz this year during the Super Bowl so now the company and the AD executives are arguing over who created it.

The Coinbase CEO downplays the role of the AD agencies asserting that the idea for a floating QR code withut any details about the company came from inside the company after being rejected the pitches that it recieved. The CEO of Martin Agency Kristen Cavallo said that actually the ad was inspired by presentations of the agency that it showed the team of the exchange and even cited presentation pages and dates in August and October.

The coinbase Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch took over the role in August and chimed in so according to Rouch, the Martin Agency was one of the few companies to pitch Coinbase on using a QR Code the ideas were not conceptually what the exchange was looking for. Another firm, Accenture Interactive came up with the idea of inserting a code in the meme if they gave a green light on the idea.

Rouch’s assertion contradicted Armstrong who said that no ad agency will have done this ad so according to Rouch:

 “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.”

In an apparent response to Rouch’s comments, Armstrong stated that he didn’t realize the contributions came from outside Coinbase:

“Although we didn’t work with a traditional ad agency I’d be remiss not to mention the creative firm we worked with who actually created the ad, commissioned the song, got the clearances etc etc.”

The Super Bowl was watched by an audience of over 100 million people in the US which served as a coming-out party for crypto companies while eToro, Crypto.com FTX all paid $6.5 million per 30 seconds to run advertisements. Crypto.com featured LeBron James while Coinbase used a minimalist approach. According to the exchange, the AD had the effect of bringing people to the platform and Rouch wrote that more than 20 million people tried to use the code within 60 seconds of its runtime.