Coinbase QR code ad generated 20M hits in one minute

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2 points·TigeriusKirk··3 comments

We wondered about that one when we were watching the game last night.

Generally I thought that many of the ads were hermetic, not really speaking to a mass audience, not having a clear message about what exactly was being advertised. For instance, I think most people have no idea what "Salesforce.com" is and even though I've developed applications for it and been to Dreamforce I've got no idea if extensions to their original business to 'catch up' with other cloud providers have materially changed where their revenue comes from. (Thus I don't know if my explanation of Salesforce is current) There was that one where they went to 'Bud Light Land' like the old McDonaldland and had 'Mayor McCheese' announce that a kind of Bud Light that wasn't beer had a 'Loud' flavor.

I was in a group of about 10 people. 4 of them took out their phone and pointed them at the screen. Only 1 phone was able to pick up the QR code - he was sitting at an angle to the TV.

He said "oh, it's for Coinbase" and immediately put his phone away. And then everyone moved on.

Congrats, I guess, for getting 20M hits. How many signups did they get?

My take is that QR code scanning is basically an Apple thing because Apple has the QR reader integrated with the camera application.

Try and scan QR codes on an Android phone and you will (1) have to download a third party app, (2) might find you have to download several of them before you find one that really works. The quality of these apps (in terms of "does it scan"?) is variable, but they are all stuffed with annoying ads.

It's yet another problem w/ Android that Google and phone vendors should have tackled three years ago.

Coinbase would have gotten better results if they had a white background and a bigger code that wasn't moving around.

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