The Million Dollar Puzzle
- Brand
- Salesforce
- Year
- 2026
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Tech & Telecom
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
Objective
Salesforce paired with MrBeast to turn a single Super Bowl LX spot into weeks of engagement, using the campaign as a live showcase of Slack and Slackbot handling real-time coordination at consumer scale — and as a public stress test of its own platform under mass traffic.
Solution
The 30-second Super Bowl spot ends on an aerial shot of MrBeast's vault complex that resolves into a QR code; scanning it lands the player on mrbeast.salesforce.com, where they register with their email and drop into a Slack-style chat with a custom Slackbot. From there it's a weeks-long hunt: the player hunts down clues hidden in the ad itself, in pinned comments, in a making-of documentary series, in other creators' videos, on social posts, and on real billboards, then logs each lead as a card on a kanban-style "Puzzle Vault" board. Slackbot talks through every card — nudging toward a direction, decoding things like Morse code — but never hands over the answer outright. Once the player assembles the full vault code and submits it, the first correct answer wins a direct Slack line to MrBeast and a shot at the $1,000,000 prize.
Results
275,815 registered players and roughly 60 million site visits by the evening of Super Bowl Sunday; 276,000 participants worked through 100+ puzzles, exchanging 2.7 million messages with Slackbot (750,000 unique conversations, 1.3 million messages in week one alone, over 1 million players using its guidance, and 10,000+ LLM calls per minute at peak); the platform held 1.5 million concurrent users with zero downtime and auto-blocked 64,000 prompt attacks (99.997% catch rate); the making-of documentary drew 419 million views, and the campaign reached 1 billion total impressions before the $1,000,000 was claimed and split among roughly 33 winners.
- 1
The campaign opens during a live Super Bowl broadcast: a 30-second Salesforce spot follows MrBeast through a guarded vault, and background details such as a spider, a bird on a wire, and coded panels are planted as clues. In the ad's final shot the camera rises to reveal the vault complex laid out as a QR code, which viewers scan to reach the campaign site.
- 2
The site states the premise — a million dollars is locked in a vault, and the code is hidden in clues waiting to be found — and asks players to register with an email address, which they confirm to unlock the game hub.
- 3
The hub is a Slack-style chat interface staffed by a custom AI assistant that helps players organize their thinking without ever supplying an answer. A How to Play section explains that clues live both online and in the real world, and that winning means being first and being correct.
- 4
In the first phase, players hunt for 51 hidden locations by decoding clues scattered across the original ad, pinned comments, a behind-the-scenes docuseries, other creators' videos, social posts, and physical objects like roadside billboards; MrBeast periodically seeds extra hints on his own social accounts.
- 5
Some puzzles are generated individually for each player, such as a numbered sudoku-style grid, so answers can't simply be copied and each player must work out the underlying pattern.
- 6
Players record each theory as a Puzzle Card holding their proposed answer, reasoning, and related chat, and organize these cards on a customizable kanban board called the Puzzle Vault, discussing each one with the AI assistant, which can translate or nudge but never confirms or reveals a solution.
- 7
Because the puzzle is nonlinear and too large to solve alone, players join official and fan-run Discord communities to pool findings and solve collectively.
- 8
A second phase then unlocks 40 additional locations on a companion site, presented through rebus, cryptographic, and geoguessr-style challenges, with a separate meta-puzzle telling players the order in which to tackle them.
- 9
Players plot solved locations on a map and connect them into lines that spell out segments of the vault code, then combine those segments with a final set of visual details to assemble the complete code and submit it to the AI assistant for verification; the first correct submission unlocks a direct channel to message MrBeast and receive confirmation of the prize.
- 10
The campaign runs until a winner is confirmed, at which point the site closes the hunt and displays a message announcing the vault is empty.
