Are Super Bowl ads worth it?
How Coinbase scored a big bang for its buck
The Super Bowl is typically the most watched sporting event in the US, as well as the equivalent of an advertiser Olympics. It is the one day every year that everyone seemingly cares about advertising and actually anticipates the ads — rather than skip them.
It's also one of the very few remaining events that people in the United States collectively experience as a nation. The Super Bowl is the only media event that will command the attention of roughly 100 million Americans. We used to have more of these large-scale opportunities in previous media eras when the landscape was far less fragmented, but in today’s media climate, they’re few and far between.
To put this in perspective, 98 million Americans watched the Super Bowl in 2021; the audience for the second most-watched prime time show that year — an episode of the long-running procedural NCIS — topped out at 12.7 million, 7x smaller. Early numbers for the 2022 game, held on February 13, range from 112 million viewers overall from Nielsen to 121 million from iSpot.tv.
In other words, if you're an advertiser with a generous budget and strong desire for your messaging to reach the majority of the US population in one fell swoop, the Super Bowl is your best — and perhaps only — bet.
A bouncing QR code
That Super Bowl bet seems to have paid off for Coinbase. The cryptocurrency company ran a 60-second ad featuring a colorful bouncing QR code, with accompanying music and a playful, arcade-style vibe. The code took users to a website where they could score $15 in Bitcoin if they signed up for a new account by February 15. So many people pulled out their phones that Coinbase’s landing page temporarily crashed.
It can typically take months to crunch the numbers to understand the impact of the usual run-of-the-mill upper-funnel Superbowl ad. This is another area where Coinbase’s ad was different: Within 24 hours, we could already have a pretty good idea of its effectiveness. On the day after the Super Bowl, Coinbase had the second most downloaded app — up from No. 186 in the previous week.
How many downloads did it take to vault Coinbase into the No. 2 spot? Let's do some back-of-the-napkin math.
In Sensor Tower's most recent download report, from Q4 2021, TikTok took the top spot with roughly 16 million downloads, followed by YouTube with about 10.5 million downloads. That breaks down to between 150,000 (TikTok) and 127,000 (YouTube) downloads per day. Scoring somewhere around 135,000 downloads would probably be enough to propel Coinbase into the No. 2 slot.
NBC sold out all of its ad spots for Super Bowl LVI, with some hitting a record $7 million for 30 seconds. If you have $7+ million to spend on an ad buy, you want to differentiate yourself from all the other advertisers with $7+ million to spend on their ad buys, so you have to factor in the cost of the creative. We'd venture to guess that Coinbase didn't spend a ton on creative production of its ad. No celebrity retainers were required either.
Since the ad was a 60-second spot, let's assume the buy was $14 million. At 135,000 downloads, the cost per install (CPI) would be around $104. That's significantly higher than the average cost per install in the US iOS store — ~$2.37 — but far less than CPAs in financial services, which can easily command well north of $1,000. Even better, it looks like there were ample conversions from install to new accounts created. The CTO of fintech connective tissue Plaid shared these post-Super Bowl numbers:
While Coinbase was one of several fintechs running Super Bowl ads, directionally it looks like conversion numbers to new accounts created were solidly high.
Could Coinbase have spent that $14 million on other brand-safe channels to get ~135,000 installs within 24 hours? Even if it would have spent all that money on Facebook and Instagram, could it have found 135,000 people to download the app in the same time window? And therein lies the rub: Even if you had the budget, you wouldn't necessarily be able to get the reach you wanted, and certainly not within such a short time frame as is (still) possible with linear TV
Moving down the funnel
Super Bowl ads typically have a familiar formula: Find a celebrity, put them in a silly situation, hijinks ensue, and somehow viewers leave with some connection to the brand. They are awareness ads that are very clearly aimed at the very top of the funnel, without much expectation of performance. While some challenger brands have ventured into more performance-oriented television ads, what's interesting about Coinbase's ad is that it seems to be the first attempt to show how much interest the highest tier of TV advertising — a Super Bowl ad — can really drive in a very short period of time.
Most consumers seem to have high expectations for the ads they will see during the Super Bowl, but that typically doesn't include an expectation to interact with the ads. We'd love to see brands experiment with more interaction in their Super Bowl ads — a clearer value exchange between brand and consumer beyond scanning a code so that the brand can track the consumer would be welcome.
It's very difficult for traditional brands to connect their upper-funnel ads to performance. That's why brands should be thinking about whether it makes sense for them to incorporate some sort of direct response from consumers when running brand-building ads during the Super Bowl or other tentpole event.
For the right brand, the Super Bowl can indeed become both a performance and an addressable channel. It certainly looks like that may have been the case for Coinbase.
One Question
What would your media plan look like if you could spend $14 million to get the quickest and biggest bang for your buck? Alternatively, if you had the opportunity to run a Super Bowl ad, how would you incorporate interactive elements to combine branding plus performance?
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Thanks for reading,
Ana, Maja, and the Sparrow team
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