Paypal’s Super Bowl Commercial Heralds ‘New Money’ – Ignores Bitcoin

Paypal has an ad coming out for the Super Bowl heralding the advent of “New Money.” Guided by the tunes of Demi Lovato’s hit single “Confident,” the ad directed by Crispin Porter is announcing to the world that something refreshing is coming. Meanwhile, some are asking if the company could also inadvertently bring Bitcoin to the forefront with the new campaign. 

Also read: 2nd Annual Satoshi Roundtable Coming to a ‘Secret’ Location in North America

PayPal’s ‘New Money’

“This is more than just a commercial for us. It’s a moment to reintroduce ourselves to the world,” PayPal’s marketing chief Greg Fisher told Adweek in a statement.

Paypal is pretty excited to show its new commercial, which shows young people and city life with “old money” imagery. Bold lettering streams across the screen are saying, “New money is not a dirty word. New money isn’t paper. It’s progress.” It also highlights that this new money doesn’t close at 5 pm like banks typically do. In contrast, Paypal says new money never closes explaining that it should operate 24/7. With each drum beat of Lovato’s “Confident,” the commercial makes you feel like they are talking about Bitcoin. Some could say it’s possible they are hinting to better technology like cryptocurrencies and could be implementing more uses in the near future. Speculators can only hope.

The Bitcoin and Paypal train has been a slow one as people were excited to hear the company was looking closely at the digital currency. Fisher adds:

A great Super Bowl spot doesn’t just make a splash, but also starts a conversation. That’s exactly what we want—to get people talking about the reality that the very nature of money has changed, and financial-service companies need to serve their needs, not the other way around.

Bitcoin Omitted

Most cryptocurrency enthusiasts would agree as this change has been greatly precipitated by the Bitcoin protocol. In September of 2014, the payment company had announced its subsidiary of eBay-owned Braintree would soon allow customers to accept the digital currency. The business announced via its blog that it was releasing software to help developers integrate merchant services with Bitcoin payments, stating:

While we’re focused on giving people more seamless buying experiences, we’re also fierce advocates of giving merchants — and in turn their customers — flexibility and the freedom of choice. That’s why today, we also announced that we’ll enable our customers to easily accept bitcoin in the coming months via a partnership with Coinbase.

The announcement was made at the TechCrunch event Disrupt. “When we launched the Braintree v.zero SDK as the modern foundation for accepting payments, we did so with the future of payments in mind,” the company said.

Later, in October 2015, Paypal announced in a SEC file that merchants using the service could now accept Bitcoin. Before, merchants could accept a variety of online payments, but since October “a merchant can also integrate with Braintree to begin accepting payments with credit or debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, digital currencies such as Bitcoin, or other payment solutions with a single integration.”

Of course, Paypal cannot say outright that its service operates like Bitcoin as it does have a central point of failure. The service has gone down worldwide and in particular regions time and time again. So the shift in financial experience is something the company is now focusing to improve. The Super Bowl ad may not have anything to do with Bitcoin, but it’s refreshing to see the company acknowledge that “the very nature of money has changed” as it tries to take notes from Bitcoin and get a leg up on the FinTech revolution.

PayPal’s Super Bowl commercial could be a great way to introduce this idea of “new money” and open the public up to new financial technology services, including Bitcoin. For the cryptocurrency is truly the only currency that can operate 24/7 without downtimes. Therefore, if Paypal is promoting new money, it might want to give some credit to the virtual money Satoshi Nakamoto created in their next commercial.

A Bitcoin parody, compliments of Reddit user Fiach_Dubh:

What do you think about Paypal’s new Super Bowl ad? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Pixbay, and Shutterstock

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