Reddit Showcases WallStreetBets Unlikely Rise To Fame With 5-Second Super Bowl Ad

The advertisement shared on social media opened with a stereotypical running herd of horses video with a narrator talking, but it quickly “glitched out” and went to a panel that looks like a Reddit post with an orange background. The first lines read, “Wow, this actually worked. If you’re reading this, it means out bet paid off.” The bet they are likely referring to is that the ad is only 5 seconds long, so if you wanted to read it, you had to pause and rewind. This is some truly ingenious marketing, but certainly a gamble.
After that, the text said that Reddit could not buy a full ad, so they “spent [its] entire marketing budget on 5 seconds of airtime,” which reportedly cost around $1 million. The ad uses this information to further explain that underdogs can “accomplish just about anything when they come together around a common idea.”

Furthermore, “maybe you’ll be the reason finance textbooks have to add a chapter on ‘tendies’,” which is a reference to the /r/WallStreetBets subreddit, which calls cash “tendies.” You can see the whole ad up above and watch it yourself; it will not take much of your time.

Overall, it is not often that you pause an ad and rewind to try and catch what it said, and perhaps that is some sort of FOMO or just pure human nature. Either way, as we said, it is some ingenious marketing, and the ad did what it set out to do: grab peoples’ attention. Now that all is said and done, did you end up catching the Reddit ad during the big game? Let us know if you did and what you thought of it in the comments below.