SUPER BOWL LVI
On 13 February 2022, the Los Angeles Rams faced the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI. During the television broadcast, Coinbase made its Super Bowl advertising debut with a 60-second spot built around a bouncing QR code. A commercial break became an invitation to investigate an unfamiliar square.
The original code drifted across a black screen, changing colour as it met the edges, recalling a DVD screensaver. Instead of explaining cryptocurrency through a celebrity or elaborate story, the advert asked viewers to act. Scanning connected the television image to a Coinbase promotional page on their phones.
Coinbase reported more than 20 million landing-page hits in one minute. That figure described traffic, not 20 million new customers or unique viewers. The company said demand exceeded its projections and temporarily throttled its systems. The rush demonstrated the response to a small graphic on a large stage.
The artwork imagines that interruption inside an American sports bar. Fans in Rams blue and gold and Bengals black and orange face the same television. Their shirts suggest allegiance without recreating the teams' exact game uniforms. A football in a display case anchors the gathering in sports culture.
The nearly empty screen becomes the room's centre of attention. This fictional audience represents a wider shift: crypto companies were reaching people far beyond specialist communities. THE BOUNCING QR remembers how a simple visual prompt turned an expensive broadcast moment into something viewers could choose to explore themselves.
Sources & the artist’s interpretation
Sources: Coinbase Super Bowl traffic report ; Wavemaker Coinbase advertising case study ; NFL Super Bowl LVI summary ; Rams Super Bowl uniform photographs ; Bengals Super Bowl uniform photographs ; Clio review of Coinbase advert . The anime sports bar, fans and memorabilia are fictional. The broadcast advert is interpreted, not reproduced. The television QR encodes HISTROVE's public digital /scan/076/ route; the footer encodes /crypto/076/. Neither is Coinbase's original code. This fictional scene does not document a real venue or gathering.
