Why Reddit Spent Its Entire Marketing Budget on a 5-Second Super Bowl Ad

Over the past couple weeks, Reddit's marketing team watched as a subset of its users went to battle with billion-dollar hedge funds and drew a flurry of international media coverage. As app downloads ticked upward and traffic to the site spiked, Reddit CMO Roxy Young knew the brand had a chance to do something big to keep the momentum going. "As a marketer, it's my responsibility to help use these moments as a springboard to extend the message and to share more about what we believe in at the platform," Young said. "And that was really the impetus and the inspiration that led to what millions of people saw last night." The result was a stark Super Bowl ad that ran for just five seconds in the country's nine biggest media markets. Produced by R/GA, the micro spot consisted of a still image with 11 sentences of text. It nodded to the Redditors behind the GameStop stock debacle and cast the company as a scrappy underdog itself in the world of big-ticket Super Bowl advertising. The 5-second ad featured a simple still screen. Reddit said in the text that it spent its entire marketing budget on the ad, and Young said the claim was not an exaggeration. Despite having been a household name for years, the forum site is relatively new to brand advertising—it just ran its first integrated marketing campaign last year. The company currently allots its budding marketing operation "test budgets" that are used to experiment with performance across different channels. "We can either choose to use the test budgets across a few small baskets or on one large bet," Young said. "And if we get some good learnings and insights, then we can go back to the table and make a case for doing more things like what we did last night." Before the Super Bowl buy came together last minute, the company had been planning to run its first campaign of the year globally in May. It will now be revisiting its marketing schedule for the year. Reddit declined to reveal exactly how much it spent on the airtime overall. Keeping it simple The spot itself came together over the course of a few days. The creatives behind it briefly experimented with adding sound but quickly realized that the most they could hope to jam into the five seconds on the screen was the chunk of text. "There's not a lot that you can do in five seconds," Young said. "Unless you plan to speed-read copy, like contest rules or sweepstakes rules, we thought the best thing to do is just to put some simple statements up on the screen, and let people read them and take away our message." The marketing team was banking on the unusual circumstances of this year's Super Bowl to give the ad a boost as well. They figured that because people were stuck at home and not gathered at Super Bowl parties, they were more likely to be willing to pause the broadcast to read the ad or share and engage with it on social media. Blowing up online The bet ended up paying off to the tune of more than 6,000 mentions of "Reddit" on Twitter, as of this morning, and around 300,000 upvotes on the site. Despite the regional buy, the ad was Google's second most-searched Super Bowl ad of the night, according to Google Trends. Young sees the Super Bowl ad as an important step in Reddit's growth as a brand marketer. While the platform has been around for a decade and a half now, it's mostly grown organically to this point and has only just begun to assemble a marketing team in the past few years. Young plans to revisit the lessons of last night's spot as the platform maps out a potential campaign for later in the year. But who knows how many hedge funds its users will decided to take on in that time. "While I don't know exactly what's next, I do know that we can make a good case for trying to come out and do something later in the year with the learnings that we have from this campaign."