Episode 8 - The Coinbase Super Bowl Ad

Coinbase Super Bowl Ad

Episode 08: Show Notes

In today’s show, we talk about the “diminished user experience” Coinbase experienced after their Super Bowl ad and what can be learned from it. At the recent Super Bowl, Coinbase aired an advert that depicted a QR code floating on a screen which led users to a landing page that offered them Bitcoin in exchange for creating an account. The ad was a wild success, leading about 20 million people to attempt to access Coinbase within five minutes. Ironically, the influx of users was so great that the app crashed. While we don’t know the exact details of the cause of failure, we give our best guess and make recommendations for how this can be avoided. Tune in and hear about the value of internal communications, leveraging the appropriate cloud technologies, and testing.

Key Points From This Episode:

• The sales funnel used by the Super Bowl Coinbase ad starting with a floating QR code.
• An outage that Coinbase experienced due to such high traffic of visitors wanting to sign up.
• A similar experience Coca-Cola had with a Super Bowl ad they ran while they still had an on-prem servers.
• Our best guess at what caused the failure in the Coinbase infrastructure.
• The error Coinbase made to be siloed and place their focus on marketing rather than production.
• A possible solution to the overload of the authentication-authorization workflow.
• What to do in scenarios where you have an unexpected influx of new user requests.
• Different options for making sure can scale once your servers hit capacity.
• Trying as much as possible to use lightweight infrastructures that can cooperate.
• Techniques for making sure your app degrades gracefully.
• The tech equivalent of offering a guest coffee while they wait in queue for a restaurant.
• An example of an app with a massive rollout that handled it successfully: Pokemon Go.
• The ads for Super Bowl LVI (2022) had deep echoes of the Dot Com ads for Super Bowl XXXIV (2000)

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Coinbase Forced Into Outage Following Super Bowl Ad After More Traffic 'Than Ever Encountered’

Coca Cola’s Migration to AWS

Creating Pokemon Go on Google Cloud

Pokemon Go today on Google Cloud

Dot Com Companies that advertised in Super Bowl XXXIV

Jon Gallagher on LinkedIn

Logan Gallagher on LinkedIn