Wow (Reddit) It Did Actually Work!
Super Bowl LV Edition
Things are not normal, we all know this. The 2020 “unprecedented” times are now sliding into the 2021 “is the end in sight” times but there are still a few things that spring eternal. One being America’s obsession with football and of course recently we, or about 91.4 million of us, watched Super Bowl LV to bask in all that is Americana and also to watch, of course, the commercials.
The game was a bit of a snooze and so were most of the ad spots but still we wait with baited breath to see what will come up during every commercial break. The Super Bowl ads are like the Oscars, Grammys and America’s Got Talent all wrapped in one for the marketing industry. It is also the only time that the masses watch ads with as much dissection and engaged judgement as the rest of us marketing heads, so this year, like every year, people were paying attention. There has obviously been talk that this Super Bowl, and the commercials running during it this year, would be different — you know, the pandemic, social justice movements and the political climate of our times — but that’s what made anticipating, “what will they do,” even more potent.
There was your standard fare of booze, cars in vast spaces and ironic self knowing humor sprinkled throughout in the commercials that night but there was one ad that couldn’t help but make a stir and that was the ad done by Reddit.
It was a mere five second spot that started like a classic car ad, SUVs zooming across a desertscape and then glitch, glitch, a barely legible message appears in Reddit’s classic un-design of orange border, basic fonts and little Snoo (their brand character) beaming you into their message like the little hacker Reddit can be. The length of time of the spot was not long enough to read the text in real time but have no fear, the internet (and live pause) is here, thus allowing this “glitch” of an ad to do double duty for its dollars by making the audience do the work of finding it again.
Did I personally “like” the ad? No, but it’s not about liking or not liking, it’s about did it work and yes, it certainly did. Here’s how.
It wasn’t selling you anything but it was building on its brand traction as being the “underdog.” It was recently a part of the now infamous GameStop frenzy from just a few weeks ago where Reddit users massively destabilized (and revealed) the way stocks and big hedge funds impact financial markets. That story of David (Reddit) vs. Goliath (Wall Street and now the Super Bowl) was back in primetime to show that as the ad says, “Powerful things happen when people rally around something they really care about.”
This idea of fighting the system by using its own tools is a tactic that is rich with reward. As the Kellogg School Super Bowl Advertising Review attests, this commercial was one of the most effective ad spots in the broadcast and it was the most searched for spot on Sunday night on Google. This was a tactic that was fully calculated as Reddit chief marketing officer, Roxy Young, said in a New York Times article:
“I felt like, with all the conversation around Reddit, we had really earned the right to be in that Super Bowl moment, where there are millions of people tuned into a singular event,” Ms. Young said. “I just didn’t think that we could come together with 30 seconds of beautifully produced material — but I was confident that we could do something in five seconds.”
This ad not only reflects the cultural moment of big vs. little, David vs. Goliath, but how the same old marketing tactics are just not as effective anymore. As NYU Marketing Professor Joanne Tombrakos says, “None of us want to be marketed to,” and Reddit is directly acknowledging this through this ad. Marketers and brands do not have to (and shouldn’t) trick consumers or treat them like a metric. They have to show them respect by speaking to them — not at them, and Reddit, being a community based platform, thrives from that type of authentic engagement.
And as the ad says, “Wow, this actually worked” and that’s the biggest takeaway. By sticking to its core brand ethos and not trying to push sales and a contrived message to its loyal users, it re-upped its cultural capital with those loyalists while also building traction for their brand to potential new users. The timeliness of Reddit being in the news recently for its impact on Wall Street and the inertia people feel from being over advertised to made this five second spot have more bang for its buck than any other ad spot played during this year’s Super Bowl.
So what is the takeaway? Know your audience, respect them and create more converts. The whole strategy of this ad accomplished all of these and did it with both subversive appeal and merry prankster aplomb. Was this all a strategy? Yes, of course it was but it did work and it is a test case in what other brands should be thinking about if they want their ad dollars to stretch not only their budgets but to get people to pay attention to them even when we are all cooped up inside and passing around a tray of nachos.