Truth behind Reddit’s five-second Superbowl advertisement revealed

The unexpected truth behind an infamous ad that ran for five seconds during the US Superbowl has been revealed.

Fans screenshot and shared this ad when it flashed on their screens during the Superbowl. Picture: Reddit

The truth behind Reddit’s bizarre five-second advertisement during America’s 2021 Superbowl has been revealed.

The ad – a simple image with 10 sentences of text – was over almost as soon as it started and was an instant success as social media was inundated with tweets from confused football fans.

Two years later, a surprising revelation about how it came to be has been made by Reddit’s Chief Marketing Officer, Roxy Young.

Addressing attendees of Sydney’s inaugural SXSW, Ms Young divulged the ad – which absorbed the brand’s entire budget – was thrown together in a few hours and just a couple of days before the game.

The team’s first meeting on the concept was on Monday, just seven days out from the Superbowl.

Fans screenshot and shared this ad when it flashed on their screens during the Superbowl. Picture: Reddit

“I saw that idea and said, ‘that’s what we’re doing’. Everyone was like, ‘are you sure?’, I said ‘yep’. We all just knew it and were like, ‘that’s it’,” Ms Young told the audience.

In a meeting the following day, the ad came together.

“No joke, in about an hour we wrote 10 lines of copy that was just a manifesto to the power of communities … we did very little editing,” she explained.

On Thursday, the ad, which was essentially a PowerPoint slide, was submitted.

It was an anxious Friday and Saturday before Sunday’s game, during which the marketing team held a virtual countdown in anticipation of how it would be received.

“Then, it just took Twitter, now X, by storm. The internet just started going crazy … and by the end of it, it was one of the most searched things during the Superbowl,” Ms Young recalled.

pic.twitter.com/nS2YiCHsuF

— Reddit (@Reddit) February 8, 2021

“People were screenshotting their televisions and posting it and saying things like, ‘what is this?’.”

The ad earned the team a Cannes Lions Grand Prix award and the envy of brands across the world.

Despite its success, Ms Young doubted a similar feat could be pulled off again.

“Honestly I think the way that we did this, I don’t think it can be done again because people realised, ‘Reddit found this weird loophole where it didn’t have to buy the whole 30 second spot and bought it at a fraction of the price but got 10 X the impact’,” she said.

“So maybe they’ve closed the loophole.”