If you stared at your chicken wings too long, you may have missed it.
Reddit, the social news site and “frontpage of the internet” launched their first Super Bowl ad shortly after the halftime show on Sunday. But the ad that was only 5-seconds long.
Super Bowl ads are not cheap — a 30-second spot for the Super Bowl LV cost a whopping $5.5 million. Hence the decision to buy such a minuscule spot. While it was easy to miss the ad, the premise of it is hoping that you saw it and looked it up afterward. Maybe you even shared it.
Image: Screenshot/Reddit
“Wow this actually worked. If you’re reading this, it means our bet pays off,” the ad reads. According to the ad, which is a text-based “post” that looks exactly like the website, the company blew its “entire marketing budget” on just 5 seconds of air time. In it, the company notes they were “inspired.”
Reading between the lines, Reddit is clearly tipping its fedora to the action that’s taken place on r/WallStreetBets over the past few weeks, where a group of retail day traders in the community got together to screw over hedge funds that bet against stocks like GameStop and AMC.
“One thing we learned about our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when the com together around a common idea,” the ad reads.
Redditors hyped the stocks so much that the price of GameStop hit a high of $483 last week, causing a reckoning in the financial world as hedge funds lost billions and some traders cashed out.
“Who knows, maybe you’ll be the reason finance textbooks have a chapter on ‘tendies.’ Maybe you’ll help r/SuperbOwl teach the world about the majesty of owls. Maybe you’ll even pause this 5-second ad,” it reads
The mention of “tendies” here is key, and is an obvious nod to r/WallStreetBets without really saying their name. Wins in the subreddit are often called “tendies,” a holdover of a meme from another era of the internet.
While Robinhood, the evil tech company in this story, has their own Super Bowl commercial and a group of Redditors even tried to crowdfund their own, the most memorable ad may have come from Reddit itself.
A 5-second ad with no music or dialogue, just a bunch of text. Just a hope that you paused the TV, or maybe Googled it and wound up reading this article.
According to CNBC, the spot ran in a few major markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington D.C.