While watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night, viewers in certain markets saw an appealing five-second commercial on Reddit. The text in the ad read “Wow, it actually worked.” “If you read this, our bet paid off.”
The ad, which only aired in certain markets, initially caused some confusion. Many interrupted their broadcasts to read it more carefully. some apparently thought the aliens were picking up their TV.
“Large playgrounds are expensive, so we couldn’t buy a full one,” the company said in the announcement. “But we were inspired and decided to spend our entire marketing budget for 5 seconds of broadcasting. One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underwater people can achieve almost anything when they gather around a common ideas. “
In fact, Reddit hadn’t decided to make a Super Bowl spot until a week ago, according to the company’s marketing director, Roxy Young. But the conversation about the site has hit a fever in recent weeks, as Reddit has been instrumental in the recent madness of the market around Gamestop.
“We’ve started to see the speed of the conversation around Reddit, around our communities. And it’s grown significantly in recent weeks …,” Young told CNBC in an interview Monday. “It’s my responsibility as a marketer to think about these opportunities and how we can use them as a springboard to spread our message and share more about what we believe as a platform.”
But she wasn’t sure if the company would be able to do it.
“I think any marketer would ask, is there any opportunity for us to be in this conversation when millions of people indulge in a unique event?” she said. “And to be honest, I thought about it and I thought about it again and I just didn’t think we’d be able to get it out.”
Young said the price for the typical Super Bowl spot, about $ 5.5 million for 30 seconds of airing, was out of the company’s reach. So Reddit worked with its agency, the Interpublic Group R / GA, to find out if it should make a shorter place or focus its efforts at the regional level, not at the national level.
“Our creative partners at RGA had a fantastic idea to start wondering if five seconds is possible,” Young said. “And fortunately, we use RGA for both creativity 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. ”
Short ads can still put a punch. Tide’s “It’s a Tide Announcement” campaign in 2018 included a series of shorter commercials throughout the game and drew the brand as a slot in one of the most beloved campaigns in recent history.
Young said the company hopes to enter all 10 top regional markets, but that time in Houston it had already sold out. The company has come to lead the place as a regional buyer in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, DC
After making the call to advertise last Monday, Young said the company and creative partners worked Tuesday and Wednesday to put an end to the spot, as the ad was launched on Thursday morning.
“We could see something around people who are really passionate about actions and personal finance and we knew what we meant,” she said. “Once I came up with that, then the execution, the creative execution, was actually pretty simple: those words on one screen.”
Then she said they spent Friday thinking about how they would bring the campaign to life on the Reddit site. And while the ad had a lot of internal games on Reddit, the emphasis was also on talking to non-Reddit users.
“Given that there has been this increased speed of people seeing and hearing about our brand, my first responsibility has been to figure out how we can extend this to a wider audience,” Young said. “And if people hear about Reddit, how can we connect some of those points? And I think that in doing that, we had to be true to ourselves and who we are with our sincere and brilliantly absurd tone … I think that by doing that, the creative style and tone also spoke to our existing communities. So hopefully he accomplished both. ”
Reddit is a 15-year-old company, but it’s still fairly new to brand marketing. Young said the company has relatively small test budgets to try a few different tactics, or it involves a big bet. She said the company will look at how much earned media coverage it gets, how people react and how favorable it has been perceived to determine if it will make future tracks of this kind.
Although the team made the ad in a short time, Young said that the team does not lose much sleep.
“We actually slept and that’s why we had such clarity about our message and the strength of our communities,” she said. “And, you know, I saw her in real life.”
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