This Simple Super Bowl Ad Gave Us a Lesson in Connecting With the Past

Why was a floating QR code the most talked-about ad on social media?

According to digital research firm, Brandwatch, the brand that “won” the Super Bowl this year was the one that ran the simplest advertisement.

The sixty-second ad was a color-changing QR code bouncing across a black screen to an electronica soundtrack that could have been straight out of Stranger Things. It was so simple it almost seemed like an error.

But it was definitely no mistake. The ad earned its owner, Coinbase, more social media mentions during the game than any other Super Bowl advertiser — a whopping 79,000 mentions on Twitter alone.

But why?

Sweet nostaglic escape

A few weeks ago, I was feeling really nostalgic for my childhood.

I remembered how much fun I used to have hanging out with my Dad in his shed. There was hammering, drilling, sawing and the constant smell of oil and paint. We would build stuff together. I’d have no idea what I was doing most of the time but was totally engrossed in the task at hand.

Every now and then, a miscued thump of the hammer or misaligned drill hole would prompt a curse from my Dad. “Shit,” he’d say. It made me feel grown-up when he swore.

My nostalgic flashback was triggered after picking my kids up from school one afternoon. I watched them shuffle from school wearing face masks. Our discussion in the car on the way home was all about a COVID positive case, and when they got home, they both diligently scrubbed their hands like surgeons. Then, they jumped on their devices to do homework.

It made me incredibly sad that the world no longer seems like the uncomplicated place I remember. A place where a Dad can just bond with his kids over tool chests and wood shavings.

And it made me wish for simpler times where masks and vaccines and pandemics weren’t part of a child’s vernacular.

I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Nostalgia allows us to escape the present — a time that is overwhelming with the change and chaos happening around us. It helps us revisit past memories, connecting us to more positive emotions than in the present.

This could explain why the CoinBase video sparked so much conversation.

The ad was reminiscent of screen savers from the Windows 98 era. It gave anyone over the age of thirty flashbacks of walking into classrooms or offices full of beige fifteen-inch desktop computer monitors with bouncing Microsoft Windows logos.

It fed into an entire generation’s need for a nostalgic escape when they were just ripe for it. For a whole minute, it reminded us of simpler times when there was no worry about a pandemic and inspired us to share memories and recall stories with our friends online.

It gave us warm fuzzies.

“Nostalgia is the single most powerful emotion a brand can hope to harness on the internet,” according to Brandwatch’s Senior Data Analyst, Kellan Terry.

The folks at Oreo know it, too. The creme-filled cookie company launched their “Press Play to Win” campaign in mid-2021. By scanning codes on packs, consumers gained access to an online tool allowing them to create and share mixtapes — a practice much more common in the analogue music days of the eighties and nineties (particularly for forlorn lovers). Prizes given away in the promotion even included a replica cassette player cookie box filled with Oreos.

“Pressing play on a mixtape has been part of culture for as long as we can all remember,” says Rafael Espesani, senior brand manager for Oreo U.K. and Ireland, “and bringing that bang up to date in a playful way that is relevant for consumers is just great.”

Maybe Coinbase, Oreo, and many big consumer brands out there tapping into nostalgia are onto something. After all, marketing is largely based on psychological principles to make consumers feel “just great,” as Espesani put it.

So if big brands can give us that warm fuzzy feeling by stepping us back through time, perhaps we should personally seek out nostalgia more in our own lives.

How I’ve been taking nostalgic escapes

I used to enjoy playing video games. I still play on our Xbox occasionally when my son isn’t hogging it, but it’s a guilty pleasure that’s decreased as my age has increased.

It’s hard to find games that give me the enjoyment I remember having when I was younger. Recently, I had an epiphany — surely I can just go find those old games online and play them. Yes, they’d be a little retro compared to today’s standards. But, boy, I was getting excited just thinking about the memories.

One of those games I loved was Spore. I wasn’t even a kid when that was released fourteen years ago — I was a thirty-year-old adult! But at thirty, my wife and I had our first baby and — those who have had babies will attest to this — you need plenty of things to fill in time at weird hours of the day and night when you have a baby in your house.

For me, that was Spore.

Rather than go to bed between the 10 pm cute snuggly feed and 1 am screaming for a feed, I’d sit up and develop my species capability on the way to world domination and eventual space exploration. Spore was something I could lose myself in for a few hours to recharge my new father batteries.

So, a few weeks ago, I jumped online, landed on the Spore website and ended up buying it for $2.99! (I think that just happened to be a great promo at the time…the Spore universe was speaking to me!)

And I played the crap out of it. And I felt amazing. There were so many little things I’d forgotten about the game, and each discovery was a new little delightful moment. I had vivid memories of sitting in another house, with my wife getting well-deserved sleep in one room and my new son’s little baby breathing sounds in another, while I quietly slaughtered Onklebedonks, Snorflings and Dabbits.

They were challenging times, having a new baby and all, but it still made me feel good to be taken back there.

That’s the fascinating paradox of nostalgia. While it can be associated with past negative emotions, people nonetheless seem to be drawn to it because, presumably, it makes them feel good to reflect.

That is exactly the case, according to a 2020 research paper. The effect nostalgia has on our current state of wellbeing is mostly positive. The paper cites other studies where “experiments have shown that nostalgia increases meaning in life, positive affect, self-esteem, and optimism.”

Perhaps, then, reliving even a challenging time reminds us we overcame it, survived and are stronger for it — those affirmations being a source of the warm and fuzzies.

Spore’s not my only source of nostalgic escape recently.

For years, I’ve been storing photos in the cloud. Many are even from the pre-digital era, scanned from original prints. There are tens of thousands of pictures and videos spanning a quarter of a century (from when I was in my late teens), all sitting in a single cloud service.

Some evenings with the family recently have involved air playing my phone to the TV, randomly picking a month and year, and scrolling through the photos and videos together.

Unexpectedly, my kids (a teenage boy and almost teenage girl) love it. Of course, as so many over-zealous new parents will know, there is a crazy number of photos and videos of the kids when they were much younger. Some from times they were too young to really remember.

After an hour, we’re matching photos with stories about the time our daughter got stuck in an elevator in Mexico, or the time our son vomited all over me in a plane. I guarantee we’re smiling and laughing and all feel closer. It’s almost as though the nostalgic effect amplifies when you’re sharing in it with others.

I’ll keep doing this with my family; it’s fun.

There are plenty of reasons to feel overwhelmed by the present. Whether related to world events like the pandemic, or personal circumstances like children growing up, I recommend giving yourself and your family a mental vacation by romanticizing memories from the past.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some need for a sense of balance. Being constantly on the hunt for nostalgia-inducing stimuli can leave you feeling a little disconnected, without a genuine appreciation of the present moment.

Personally, nostalgia makes a meaningful connection between my past and present. I can live more fully in the present without feeling trapped there.

Somehow, that even gives me more hope for the future.

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