While watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night, viewers in certain markets saw an attractive five-second ad from Reddit. “Wow, that really worked,” read the ad. “If you are reading this, our bet was worth it.”
The ad, which ran only in a few markets, initially caused a bit of confusion. Many paused your broadcasts to read more closely. Some apparently thought aliens were controlling your TV.
“Ads for large games are expensive, so we couldn’t buy a complete one,” the company said in the ad. “But we were inspired and decided to spend our entire marketing budget in 5 seconds of airtime. One thing we learned from our communities last week is that the oppressed can do almost anything when they come together around a common idea. “
In fact, Reddit hadn’t decided to make an announcement in the Super Bowl until a week ago, according to the company’s marketing director, Roxy Young. But conversations about the site have been hitting a fever pitch in recent weeks, as Reddit was at the center of the recent market craze around Gamestop.
“We started to see the speed of conversations around Reddit in our communities. And it was increasing significantly in the past few weeks …” Young told CNBC in an interview on Monday. “It is my responsibility as a marketer to think about these opportunities and how we can use them as a stepping stone to extend our message and share more about what we believe to be a platform.”
But she was not sure if the company would be able to do that.
“I think any marketer would ask himself: 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 thought about it again, and I just didn’t think we would be able to do that.”
Young said the price of a typical Super Bowl ad, about $ 5.5 million for a 30-second duration, was beyond the company’s reach. Therefore, Reddit worked with its agency, the Interpublic Group’s R / GA, to find out if it should do a shorter job or focus its efforts regionally rather than nationally.
“Our creative partners at RGA had a fantastic idea to start asking if five seconds were possible,” said Young. “And, fortunately, we use RGA for creation and media, so we have the entire in-house team working … to find a solution and an opportunity. And where we landed was five seconds in nine of the top ten regional markets.”
Short ads can still make an impact. Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign in 2018 included a series of shorter-format ads throughout the game and placed the brand as a space in one of the most beloved campaigns in recent history.
Young said the company hoped to enter all ten major regional markets, but that time in Houston was already sold out. The company ended up operating the site as a regional purchase in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, DC
After making the call to make the announcement last Monday, Young said the company and creative partners worked on Tuesday and Wednesday to get the announcement, since the creative was for Thursday morning.
“We could see something around people being really passionate about personal actions and finances and we knew what we wanted to say,” she said. “After we got it right, the execution, the creative execution, was really quite straightforward: those words on a single screen.”
Then she said they spent Friday thinking about how they would bring the campaign to life on the Reddit website. And while the ad was very successful internally on Reddit, the focus was also on talking to non-Reddit users.
“Considering that there was this increasing speed of people seeing and hearing about our brand, my first responsibility was to find out how we can extend this to a wider audience,” said Young. “And if people were hearing about Reddit, how can we connect some of those points? And I think, in doing so, we had to be true to ourselves and who we are with our frank and absurdly absurd tone … I think doing what, the creative style and tone, also spoke to our existing communities. So, hopefully, it achieved both. ”
Reddit is a 15-year-old company, but is still fairly new to brand marketing. Young said the company has relatively small test budgets to try out a few different tactics, or outweighs a big bet. She said the company will look at how much media coverage it has gained, how people respond and how favorable it was perceived to determine whether it will make future moves like this.
Although the team assembled the ad in a short time, Young said the team was not losing much sleep over it.
“We really slept, and the reason is that we were so clear about our message and the power of our communities,” she said. “And, you know, we were seeing this in real life.”
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