Reddit Won It

Now that the Super Bowl is over all of us in adland can start our annual parsing of which ads were great, which weren’t, and debating the Ad Meter scores.

In my—and many people’s —opinion, Reddit won the game.

The :05 buy was brilliant. It cut through, literally forced people to stop, rewind and read the message, and even better, was completely on brand. It did a great job communicating Reddit’s positioning (“Powerful things happen when people rally around something they care about. And there’s a place for that. It’s called Reddit.”) Visually it looked just like any post on the platform, down to having the vote up/down, comment, and share call outs when obviously none of that functionality works in a TV spot. And of course, it was incredibly timely given all of the news about GameStop that ran up to the game.

Hats off to the client and R/GA teams for leveraging all of the power of the big game in a way that made fiscal sense, was true to the brand, and got a huge ton of PR, too. (Case in point…you’re reading this right now.)

Let’s hope we see an ad or two that is just as smart and disruptive in 2022’s Big Game.