While watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night, viewers in some markets saw a striking five-second ad from Reddit. “Wow, that actually worked,” reads the text on the ad. “As you read this, our bet has paid off.”
The ad, which was only offered in certain markets, initially caused a bit of confusion. Very interrupt their broadcasts to read it more closely. Some apparently thought strangers take over their TV.
“Large playgrounds are expensive, so we could not buy a complete one,” the company said in the ad. “But we were 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 the underprivileged can achieve almost anything if they come up with a general idea.”
According to Redxy, the company’s chief marketing officer, Reddit actually only decided to do a Super Bowl spot a week ago. But the conversation about the site has been feverish over the past few weeks, as Reddit has been central to the recent market greed surrounding Gamestop.
“We’re starting to see the speed of conversation around Reddit, around our communities. And it’s increased significantly over the last few weeks …” Young said in an interview with CNBC on Monday. “It’s my responsibility as a marketer to think about these opportunities, and how we can use them as a springboard to expand our message and share more about what we believe as a platform.”
But she was not sure if the company would be able to do it.
“I think any marketer would ask themselves, is there an opportunity for us to be in this conversation when millions of people are tuning in to a single event?” she said. “And to be honest, I thought about it, and I thought about it again, and I just did not think we could make it.”
Young said the price for the typical Super Bowl spot, about $ 5.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime, was beyond the company’s reach. So Reddit worked with its agency, Interpublic Group’s R / GA, to find out if it should do a shorter job, or to focus its efforts on local rather than national.
“Our creative partners at RGA had a fantastic idea to start inquiring about whether 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 get an opportunity. And where we ended up was five seconds in nine of the top 10 regional markets. ”
Short ads can still get hits. Tide’s ‘It’s a Tide Ad’ campaign in 2018 included a series of shorter-format ads throughout the game, capturing the brand as a place in one of the most beloved campaigns in recent history.
Young said the company hopes to get into all ten of the best regional markets, but the time in Houston was already sold out. The company eventually had local sales in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, DC.
After Young made the call last Monday to do the ad, the company and creative partners worked Tuesday and Wednesday to put the place together, as the ad would appear 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 nailed it down, the execution, the creative execution, was actually pretty simple: those words on a single screen.”
Then she said they were thinking Friday about how they would bring the campaign to life on Reddit’s website. And while the ad plays a lot internally on Reddit, the focus has also been on talking to non-Reddit users.
“As the increase in the number of people seeing and hearing our brand is increasing, my first responsibility was to figure out how we can expand it to a wider audience,” Young said. “And when people hear of Reddit, how can we connect some of those dots? And I think to do that, we had to be true to ourselves and who we are with our candid and brilliant absurd tone … I think so. by doing so, the creative style and tone also spoke to our existing communities. Hopefully it has achieved both. ”
Reddit is a 15-year-old company, but is quite new to brand marketing. Young said the company has relatively small test budgets to try out a few different tactics, or that it’s a big bet. She said the company is going to look at how much media coverage it deserves, how people respond and how favorably it is seen to determine if it will make future plays like this.
Although the team put together the ad within a short time, Young said the team did not lose much sleep.
“We actually slept, and the reason we were so clear about 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 enterprises using breakthrough technology to become the next generation of large public companies. if by Friday, Feb. 12 at 3 p.m. EST.