Coinbase answers two labels with its own research

Two labels and a rebuttal

On 1 December 2023 Coinbase publishes "House", a 30-second film that carries the same description as its two siblings, "Break The Cycle" and "Side Hustle": "The 'lazy generation.' The 'quiet quitters.' These clichés miss the point. Despite what you may have heard about millennials and Gen Z, they're the ones building new tools to achieve their own goals and update the system."¹ The films open by naming two labels applied to millennials and Gen Z, and spend their thirty seconds disagreeing with them.

The campaign page the films point at carries the argument at length. Its headline reads "It's time to break the cycle. It's time to update the system.", and the paragraph beneath it repeats the film description word for word before turning to numbers.²

An advertiser that brought its own evidence

The page arranges its statistics in four blocks, and the arrangement is the argument. A grievance block establishes that the system is failing this generation, with 9 per cent of Americans satisfied with the financial system and Gen Z holding 86 per cent less purchasing power than baby boomers had in their twenties. A rebuttal block answers the labels, with 45 per cent wanting multiple income sources and 77 per cent of Gen Z wanting to choose their own path. A product block connects the two, with 31 per cent of under-40s owning crypto against 12 per cent of older people. And a politics block turns the whole thing into leverage: millennials and Gen Z will be a majority of voting-age Americans by 2028, and 51 per cent say they are likely to back crypto-friendly candidates.²

Three of those four blocks are Coinbase's own research, from a State of Crypto report it published five weeks before the films went up.^{2, 3} The grievance block is not: its cost-of-living figures sit above a separate button reading Source, linking to the consumer publisher ConsumerAffairs.² The split is the more interesting half of the campaign. Coinbase borrows the complaint, which nobody disputes and which it gains nothing by owning, and commissions the part it needs to be believed on: that this generation is building rather than quitting, and that a third of it is already holding the product.

Publishing the research first and the films second is a positioning move rather than a media one. It gives the advertising a body of evidence to point back at, and it puts Coinbase in the position of the party that measured the generation rather than the party selling to it.³

Made in-house

The One Club's record for the campaign lists Coinbase itself as the brand-side, in-house agency, with MJZ as production company and Rock Paper Scissors and Pariah Creative in post. Mike Mills directs, Emile Mosseri composes, Kate Rouch is chief marketing officer, and Matthew Moore and Michael Giepert are creative directors. It takes a Merit at the One Show in 2024 in the category for television, video on demand and online work of 30 seconds and under, series.⁴

The entry's own statement of the case is blunter than the films: "the system wasn't designed for your generation, and it's clearly not working for your generation", and "now is the time to stand up for a new system that works for us".⁴

What the line does next

The campaign runs through a downturn. A Coinbase-commissioned Morning Consult survey of American adults in February 2023 finds that about one in five Americans have used crypto. On iSpot's estimate Coinbase spends close to 10 million dollars on television in 2023, down from nearly 38 million in 2022, and keeps advertising while much of the category stops.⁵ Kate Rouch frames the longer view: "Our vision isn't specific to a run or anything short-term."⁵

The line outlasts the argument. Update the System has since carried a 60-second television spot scored to Charles Mingus, a Washington summit, and a series of stop-motion films made with Aardman that occupies the same campaign address under the same heading.^{6, 7, 1} Underneath it sits the mission Coinbase publishes on its own mission page, to increase economic freedom in the world.⁸

That is what the generational campaign was built to leave behind. A demographic argument dates the moment its demographic moves on, and this one is already retired. A four-word instruction does not: it accommodates a grievance about fees, a cast of plasticine animals or a product launch without being rewritten, and every campaign run under it deposits its audience in the same place. Coinbase spent 2023 arguing about a generation and came out holding a platform.