While watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night, viewers in certain markets saw a striking five-second ad from Reddit. “Wow, this really worked,” the ad said. “If you’re reading this, our bet has paid off.”
The ad, which only appeared in certain markets, caused some confusion at first. A lot of paused their broadcasts to read it better. Some apparently thought aliens took over their TV.
“Big game spots are expensive, so we couldn’t buy a full game,” the company said in the ad. “But we got inspired and decided to spend our entire marketing budget on 5 seconds of airtime. One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when they come together around a common idea.”
In fact, Reddit had decided to do a Super Bowl spot just a week ago, according to Roxy Young, the company’s chief marketing officer. But conversation about the site has boomed in recent weeks as Reddit has been at the center of the recent market madness surrounding Gamestop.
“We started to see the speed of the conversations around Reddit, around our communities. And it increased significantly in recent weeks …” Young told CNBC in an interview Monday. “It is my responsibility as a marketer to think about these opportunities and how we can use them as a springboard to get our message across and to share more about what we believe in as a platform.”
But she wasn’t sure the company would make it.
“I think any marketer would ask, Is there a chance for us to join this conversation if millions of people tune in for a special event?” she said. “And, to be honest, I thought about it, and I thought about it again, and I just didn’t think we were going to make it.”
Young said the price tag for the typical Super Bowl spot, about $ 5.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime, was beyond the company’s reach. That’s why Reddit teamed up with its agency, Interpublic Group’s R / GA, to figure out whether it should do a shorter spot, or whether it should focus its efforts regionally rather than nationally.
“Our creative partners at RGA had a great idea to ask if five seconds was possible,” said Young. “And luckily we use RGA for both creative and media, so we have the whole in-house team working … to find a solution and an opportunity. And where we ended up five seconds in nine of the top 10 regional markets. ”
Short ads can still pack a punch. Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign in 2018 spanned a series of shorter ads throughout the game, landing the brand as a spot in one of the most loved campaigns in recent memory.
Young said the company hoped to get into all 10 top regional markets, but that time in Houston was already sold out. The company eventually ran the spot as a regional purchase in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, DC.
After calling for the ad last Monday, Young said the company and creative partners were working Tuesday and Wednesday to put the place together, as the ad was due to arrive Thursday morning.
“We could see that people were really passionate about stocks and personal finance, and we knew what we wanted to say,” she said. “Once we did that, the execution, the creative execution, was actually quite simple: those words on a single screen.”
Then she said they thought about how they would bring the campaign to life on Reddit’s website on Friday. And while the ad was played a lot internally on Reddit, the focus was also on speaking to non-Reddit users.
“Given that people see and hear our brand so quickly, my primary responsibility was to find out how we can extend this to a wider audience,” said Young. And when people heard about Reddit, how can we connect some of those dots? And I think we had to be true to ourselves and who we are with our candid and brilliantly absurd tone … Do that, its creative style and tone, it also spoke to our existing communities. So hopefully it has achieved both. ”
Reddit is a 15-year-old company, but it is still fairly new to brand marketing. Young said the company has relatively small testing budgets to try out a few different tactics, or it’s making a big gamble. She said the company will look at how much deserved media attention it will receive, how people are responding, and how beneficial it has been perceived to determine whether it will make future plays this way.
Although the team put the ad together in a short amount of time, Young said the team didn’t lose much sleep on it.
“We really slept, and the reason for this is that we had so much clarity about our message and the strength of our communities,” she said. “And, you know, we saw it for real.”
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