So the Super Bowl was last night (Bucs absolutely demolished the Chiefs, 31-9, which honestly made the whole second half kind of boring to watch) and like everybody else in my Twitter feed this morning I'm still thinking about the five-second Reddit ad instead of literally any of the football.
If you missed it: somewhere in the fourth quarter, in between the usual parade of beer commercials and a Jeep spot with Bruce Springsteen standing in a chapel that everybody's already arguing about for entirely different reasons, Reddit ran an ad that was just white text scrolling up a green screen. No celebrities. No jingle. No CGI. Five seconds, then gone. It name-checked the whole GameStop thing without actually saying GameStop, ended with a little rocket ship, and then cut straight back to the game like nothing happened.
I will not be doing a full recap of the GameStop/WallStreetBets saga here because at this point if you own a computer you already know more about short interest and gamma squeezes than you ever wanted to. Every tech outlet on earth has had a post up about it since basically the day it happened. What I actually want to talk about is the ad itself, because as a piece of marketing it's kind of brilliant and I don't think I've said that about a Super Bowl commercial in years.
A 30-second Super Bowl spot this year reportedly ran advertisers something like $5.5 million. Reddit's ad was one sixth of that length. Do the math and they basically got a full-price ad for pocket change, and it worked specifically because it looked cheap. It looked like it was made by three people in an afternoon, which, knowing Reddit's design budget, it probably was. Every other brand in that break was trying to out-produce each other with drone shots and A-list cameos, and then this one shows up looking like a PowerPoint slide and everyone's talking about it the next morning instead of the $6 million truck commercial. That's the whole game with advertising now, honestly, attention doesn't care how much you spent, it cares whether it's different from the eleven things around it.
I'll admit I've got a soft spot for this kind of thing because I've spent way too many hours of my life on forums that look exactly like that ad felt: plain text, no polish, just people typing back and forth about stuff they care about. There's something almost funny about a company built entirely on unpaid volunteer moderators and a decade of chaotic comment threads buying its way into the single most expensive advertising real estate in the country and then deciding, no, we're not even going to bother with production value. Just vibes and a rocket emoji.
Not everyone loved it, to be fair. I saw plenty of people this morning calling it a cheap stunt riding the coattails of a stock market story that, let's be honest, ended up burning a lot of regular people who bought in at the top. Reddit taking a victory lap over WallStreetBets while some of those same users are sitting on losses feels a little tone-deaf if you squint at it too hard. I get that read. I don't fully share it, but I get it.
What I keep coming back to is how weirdly rare it is for a tech company to advertise like it actually understands its own users instead of advertising like it's trying to convince my mom that the internet is fun and safe. Most of these companies hire an agency, the agency makes something glossy and inoffensive, and it airs between two car commercials and vanishes from memory by Tuesday. Reddit made something that looked like Reddit. That's a lower bar than it should be and somehow almost nobody clears it.
Anyway. I didn't watch most of the game itself, if I'm honest, I had it on in the background while I was messing around with some CSS on a side project, which is a very on-brand way for me to spend a Sunday night at this point. But I did put the laptop down for that one ad. Worth the five seconds.
Also, unrelated, but keep an eye on that Springsteen ad. News about his DUI arrest from a few months back is just starting to surface, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets pulled from rotation by the time anyone reads this.