Coinbase dunks on traditional payment methods in $15M NBA ad spend

Coinbase is launching a $15 million TV ad campaign that aims to tout the merits of cryptocurrency and exhibit the pitfalls of traditional payment rails in a language that sports fans understand: Pizza. 

FOX Business has learned that the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange is set to run three separate commercials across four channels showing the NBA playoffs starting Wednesday.

The idea behind the commercials, news of which hasn’t been reported yet, is to underscore how complex and expensive traditional payment methods are compared to crypto, which is settled almost instantly and cuts out the so-called "middleman" like banks and payment service providers. 

"We’re under the illusion that when we use credit cards or Venmo, things are happening instantly, but they're actually just part of very complex plumbing that’s masked by a digital interface," Coinbase’s chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad tells FOX Business. 

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To demonstrate the complex plumbing, the tongue-in-cheek ad shows the process a large pepperoni pizza would go through if it was money in today’s payment system. The commercial begins with the pizza going through several stages of approval and authorization. The narrator is heard saying "If pizza worked like this, you wouldn’t like pizza."

The pie then moves along an assembly line, illustrating the multiple stages of a typical credit card transaction. People even take bites of the pizza, symbolizing the intermediaries taking a proverbial slice of the pie. The narrator says "this is pretty much what happens to your money whenever you spend it or send it."

Finally, the half-eaten pizza gets put into a box and rushed through a door marked "surcharge," to indicate the hidden fees customers pay on their transactions.

It's estimated that hidden fees, or "junk fees," cost Americans around $90 billion per year, or more than $650 per household, according to the White House. 

The commercial ends with the pie getting picked up by a delivery driver who turns to the camera and says, "we deserve a better system, easier, simpler, faster. That’s how crypto works."

"Crypto is a solve for Americans who are fed up with the middlemen taking a bite every time they order and pay for pizza," Jesse Pollak, Coinbase's vice president of engineering and creator of Base, told FOX Business. "Coinbase is building the future of money to make sure American consumers own their own pie – and making sure their payment moves at the speed of the internet." 

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The 60-second ad and two 30-second ads will air starting Wednesday on TNT, ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC and run through June 9.

Pizza seems to be a reccurring theme in Coinbase’s ads. The latest spots, which cost Coinbase $15 million, come just two days after the conclusion of its Bitcoin pizza ad, which aimed to show Bitcoin’s increasing value over time by illustrating how much pizza a person could buy with one bitcoin in 2012 compared to 2024. The ad has been viewed over 3 million times on X. 

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Coinbase’s marketing blitz comes as Congress inches closer to passing legislation on so-called stablecoins — cryptocurrency that mimics the dollar. Legislation introduced in the Senate last week is the latest in a series of bipartisan bills in both chambers of Congress that aim to establish comprehensive federal oversight of stablecoins and their integration into the U.S. financial system. 

"Stablecoins are actually a huge unlock for consumers who currently have to pay fees that they just can't afford and for merchants who pay fees that they can't afford," said Shirzad. "It's not that complicated to regulate stablecoin issuance and so there's no reason why you can't get agreement on a bipartisan basis to get this done."