Did Coinbase Steal The Viral Super Bowl Ad Idea?

Coinbase’s creative advertisement depicting a bouncing DVD meme during Super Bowl become an internet sensation and was a point of debate across crypto community. However, within just a few days, the creative campaign has now made it to the headlines over its ownership idea.

Did Coinbase steal the ad idea?

In interesting turns of events, Kristen Cavallo, head of an advertising agency called out Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the internet over the popular Super Bowl ad. Kristen claims that the iconic bouncing DVD logo idea was influenced by her company’s advertising pitch.

Earlier, Coinbase CEO took to Twitter explaining the insights from the successful ad campaign. How the bouncing QR ad was created after an outside agency suggested ‘a bunch of standard super bowl ad ideas’. However, he didn’t like any of them.

We were running short of time (a few weeks), and one of the original ideas we had included putting a QR code at the end, said Coinbase CEO, This idea was partially inspired by Reddit’s superb owl commercial from the previous super bowl, he added

However, according to Kristen Cavallo, this is false and an ad agency did suggest that idea. She also dropped the reference from the notes.

Coinbase CMO comes to rescue

In the meantime, Coinbase’s CMO, Kate Rouch, came to the rescue and wrote The Coinbase team and I deeply value our partners. 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.

Cavallo said that her decision to call out Armstrong was not about ‘intellectual property’. While she added that this thread could easily have been a celebration of creativity and breakthrough thinking, versus claiming credit and disregarding agencies.

Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange released a 60-second advertisement during Super Bowl LVI. The full ad showed a colorful bouncing QR code depicting a bouncing DVD meme. The ad was such a big hit that Coinbase’s website crashed due to a sudden increase in traffic. The app jumped to 2nd position on the apple playstore in the U.S. that day.