Superb Owl

Why it works

Five seconds, bought market by market. Days after a Reddit forum fuelled the GameStop share frenzy, Reddit decided on February 1, 2021 to show up at Super Bowl LV, and R/GA had the spot finished within days. It opens like a glossy car ad, seems to glitch into a test card, then flashes a dense slide headed “Wow, this actually worked,” explaining that Reddit had spent its entire marketing budget on five seconds of airtime — far too much text to read without pausing. It ran on CBS in nine of the ten biggest US markets during the game on February 7. It is studied as a hack of television’s priciest real estate: the format made viewers rewind, screenshot and search, so the audience did the distributing. The New York Times called it an unlikely winner and reported it among the most-searched ads; R/GA says site traffic jumped more than 25 percent; and it won the Social & Influencer Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2021.