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While watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night, viewers in some markets saw an eye-catching five-second ad from Reddit. “Wow, that really worked,” the ad reads. “If you’re reading this, our bet paid off.”
The ad, which was only shown in certain markets, initially caused confusion. A lot paused their shows to read it more closely. Some apparently thought aliens were invading their television sets.
“Big game seats are expensive, so we couldn’t buy a full one,” the company said in the announcement. “But we were inspired and decided to devote our entire marketing budget to 5 seconds of airtime. One thing we learned from our communities last week is that outsiders can accomplish just about anything when they are unite around a common idea. “
Reddit actually didn’t decide to make a Super Bowl spot a week ago, according to the company’s chief marketing officer, Roxy Young. But the conversation on the site has come to a head in recent weeks, with Reddit being at the heart of the recent market craze around Gamestop.
“We’ve started to see the speed of the conversation around Reddit, around our communities. And it has increased significantly over the past few weeks…” Young told CNBC in an interview Monday. “It is my responsibility as a marketing manager to reflect on these opportunities and how we can use them as a springboard to expand our message and share more about what we believe in as a platform.”
But she wasn’t sure the business would be able to succeed.
“I think any marketer would ask, is there an opportunity for us to be in this conversation as millions of people log on to a single event?” she says. “And, to be honest, I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I just didn’t think we would be able to do it.”
Young said the price of the typical Super Bowl spot, around $ 5.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime, was out of reach for the company. So Reddit worked with its agency, Interpublic Group R / GA, to determine whether it should do a shorter task or focus its efforts regionally rather than nationally.
“Our creative partners at RGA had a fantastic idea to start asking if five seconds is possible,” Young said. “And luckily we use RGA for both creative and media, so we have the whole internal team working… to find a solution and an opportunity. And where we landed was five seconds in nine of the top 10 regional markets. ”
Classifieds can always have an impact. Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign in 2018 featured a series of shorter-format ads throughout the game and made the brand a place in one of the most beloved campaigns in recent history.
Young said the company hopes to enter the top 10 regional markets, but the time in Houston is already over. The company ended up running the spot as a regional buy in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, DC.
After launching the call to make the announcement last Monday, Young said the company and creative partners had worked Tuesday and Wednesday to put the spot together as the premiere was scheduled to be scheduled for Thursday morning.
“We could see that people were really passionate about stocks and personal finance, and we knew what we meant,” she said. “Once we nailed that once, the execution, the creative execution, was actually pretty straightforward: those words on one screen.”
Then she said they spent Friday thinking about how they were going to bring the campaign to life on the Reddit website. And while the ad ran widely internally on Reddit, there was also an emphasis on communicating with non-Reddit users.
“Since there was this increased speed of people seeing and hearing about our brand, my first responsibility was figuring out how we can extend this to a wider audience,” Young said. “What if people heard about Reddit, how do we connect some of these dots? And I think in doing that we had to be true to ourselves and who we are with our candid and brilliantly absurd tone … I think in doing that, the creative style and tone, it also has talked to our existing communities. So I hope he achieved both. ”
Reddit is a 15 year old business but is still fairly new to brand marketing. Young said the company has relatively small testing budgets to try out a few different tactics, or is making a big bet. She said the company will look at the media coverage it has gained, how people are reacting and how favorable it has been seen to determine if it will make future games like this.
Although the team had the announcement set up within a short period of time, Young said the team was not losing much sleep.
“We actually slept, and the reason is we had such clarity on our message and the power of our communities,” she said. “And, you know, we saw it in real life.”
Nominations are open for 2021 CNBC Disruptor 50, a list of private start-ups using cutting edge technology to become the next generation of large public enterprises. Submit by Friday, Feb.12 at 3 p.m. EST.
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