As they watched the Super Bowl on Sunday night, viewers of certain markets saw an attractive five-second ad on Reddit. I was reading the ad text “Wow, that worked.” “If you’re reading this, our bet paid off.”
The ad, which was only published in certain markets, initially caused some confusion. Lots of paused its broadcasts to read it more closely. Some seemingly thought out the aliens took control of their television.
“Big gaming sites are expensive, so we couldn’t buy any of them completely,” the company said in the ad. “But we were inspired and decided to spend the entire marketing budget in 5 seconds of airtime. One thing we learned from our communities last week is that little ones can achieve almost anything when they get together around ‘a common idea’.
Reddit hadn’t actually decided to make a place in the Super Bowl until a week ago, according to the company’s director of marketing, Roxy Young. But the conversation about the site has been weak over the past few weeks, as Reddit has been central to the recent fashion market around Gamestop.
“We started to see the speed of the conversation around Reddit, in our communities. And it increased significantly over the last few 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 get it.
“I think any marketer would ask, is there any chance for us to be in this conversation when millions of people are tuning in to a unique event?” she said. “And, to be honest, I thought about it, and I thought about it again, and I didn’t think we would be able to move forward.”
Young said the price of the typical Super Bowl site, about $ 5.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime, was out of reach for the company. Thus, Reddit worked with its agency, R / GA of the Interpublic Group, to find out if it should make a shorter place or concentrate its efforts at the regional level instead of at the national level.
“Our creative RGA partners had a great idea to start asking if five seconds were 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 ten main regional markets. ”
Short ads can still be punched. Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign in 2018 included a series of shorter format ads throughout the game and achieved the brand as one of the most beloved campaigns in recent history.
Young said the company hoped to enter the top ten regional markets, but this time in Houston it had already run out. The company eventually ran 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 Tuesday and Wednesday to put the site together, as it was due to be posted Thursday morning.
“We were able to see something around people who were very passionate about actions and personal finance and we knew what we meant,” he said. “Once we nailed that, then the execution, the creative execution, it was really quite simple: those words on a single screen.”
He then said they spent Friday thinking about how they would bring the campaign to life on the Reddit website. And while the ad had a lot of internal games on Reddit, it also focused on talking to non-Reddit users.
“Given the 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,” Young said. “And if people heard about Reddit, how can we connect some of these points? And I think in doing that, we had to be true to ourselves and who we are with our frank, absurdly bright tone … I think that making the creative style and tone speak to our existing communities as well. So hopefully I got both of them. ”
Reddit is a 15 year old company but it is still quite new in brand marketing. Young said the company has relatively small test budgets to test a few different tactics, or is a big bet. He said the company will study the media coverage it gets, how people respond and how favorable it was perceived to determine if it will do future works like this.
Although the team prepared the announcement in a short period of time, Young said the team would not lose much sleep.
“In fact, we slept and the reason we were so clear about our message and the power of our communities,” he said. “And, you know, we were seeing it in real life.”
Nominations are open for 2021 CNBC Disruptor 50, a list of private companies that use innovative technology to become the next generation of large public companies. Present on Friday, Feb. 12 at 3 p.m. EST.