Reddit aired a five-second ad during last night's Super Bowl celebrating the ongoing saga between GameStop and Wall Street.
The Super Bowl isn't all about football. In fact, a lot of people tune in just to watch what goes down at half time. Whether that be the show on the pitch or the ads on the screen. During this year's big game, Reddit managed to bag itself some air time in the form of one of those ads, and it used that time to celebrate the ongoing saga involving GameStop and Wall Street.
The ad starts with stock footage of two four-by-fours driving alongside each other before what is made to seem like a rogue broadcast from Reddit cuts in. A message from those who run the site then appears on the screen. It's only there for five seconds, so those who wanted to read it live will have had to speedread or pause the live stream.
"One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when we come together around a common idea," part of the message reads. It is referencing users of its r/WallStreetBets subreddit who bought up GameStop stock two weeks ago. That resulted in hedge fund owners banking on the stock to keep dropping losing an awful lot of money.
The ad claims Reddit spent its entire marketing budget on the five-second ad. Since a 30-second spot cost somewhere in the region of $5.5 million this year, it can be assumed that Reddit spent roughly $1 million on the chance to get its message out there. The site may have experienced a bump in finances itself since this saga began. It welcomed ten times as many new users as usual during the last week of January.
The GameStop versus Wall Street battle has gripped just about everybody, forcing many of us to learn about things we previously knew very little about. The story has been so unbelievable that both MGM and Netflix already have movies based on it in the works. Even though the situation seems to be dying down a little two weeks in, it'll only take another well-placed tweet from Elon Musk to fire everybody right back up again.