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Coinbase $13 Million+ Superbowl Ad Fail ShowsWhy Testing is Important!

Coinbase’s Superbowl ad this year was one of the latest examples of why testing and communication are so important! This oversight by Coinbase could have cost them MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. This year during the Superbowl it was estimated that at least 117 million people would be watching, as per CNBC.

Superbowl commercials are one of the things that everyone, even non-football fans looks forward to every year. Because of this advertisers try to hardest and invest a lot of money into ads because they know it will be a centralized place to reach a large group of people at one time. This year was no different! The average ad during the Super Bowl this year was $6.5 million for a 30-second ad.

Now back to Coinbase and their Superbowl ad. First, Coinbase is an American company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. This year, Coinbase showed an ad for their company. They took out a 60-second ad, so roughly invested about 13 million dollars. The ad was very simple, a QR code that bounced across viewers tv screens for the full ad time. Curious minds of course scanned it, wondering what it was for.

Once scanned it offered $15 in free crypto to any new users that signed up by 2/15. Everything sounds perfect so far. Let’s recap, Super Bowl has millions of viewers, Coinbase wanted more exposure, so they advertised during it. The application raised in popularity, rising from 186th place to 2nd on Apple’s App Store, according to theblockcrypto.com. Also according to CNN, “Coinbase had more than 20 million hits on its landing page in one minute and the engagement that was six times higher than previous benchmarks”.
So what is the problem? The ad proved so popular that the app crashed for about an hour. Some users were met with the below…