“Coinbase is known for its progressive, irreverent work with a real focus on quality and craft,” Isle of Any co-founder Toby Treyer says. “It meant that from beginning to end there was a real desire to find new ground and lean into the idea all the way,” contextualising the NYC creative agency’s partnership with the cryptocurrency company. “We were looking to find a bold and disruptive way to land a new message for Coinbase and crypto,” fellow co-founder Laurie Howell adds, looking to shift the general perspective of crypto from being a futuristic thing to being a contemporary one – but do so in a way unexpected in the industry. “This is how we arrived on the System Update idea,” Laurie says, approaching Coinbase’s 2025 advertising campaign with irreverence over technicality or eccentricity.
The campaign’s narrative is led by an infamous – and famously annoying – system error: the blue screen of death (BSOD), transforming lines of error code into satisfying, imaginative scenes formed by ASCII art. Drawn to BSOD as a creative and storytelling device, especially due to the familiarity of the error in popular and digital culture, Toby saw the potential in what it could represent, becoming a sign and symbol for the changes to come. “It’s a trigger and a messaging device at the same time. It’s pavlovian, whenever you see it, it immediately tells you ‘something up with the system’,” he says, signalling the call for (and arrival of) fundamental change. “We liked the idea of making the experience of seeing the work as part of the message,” Laurie adds, with the films designed to initially feel like an authentic error. “The work is made for the moment, the NBA Playoffs, so we knew we’d have a captive audience on TV,” he says, “so we were looking to play with that attention and to be as disruptive as possible.”