Ideas We Love: Reddit

Issue 43: Reddit. A media planners best kept secret

Hello there!

How are you all?

We hope our readers Stateside enjoyed The SuperBowl; the one night of the year brands shed some of their inhibitions and use a significant chunk of their ad $$$ to have some fun.

We particularly enjoyed how Kendrick Lamar fit the PlayStation buttons into his performance.

Outside of SuperBowl Sunday, if you follow the money it usually leads to the same four places: Facebook, Google, Amazon and The Trade Desk.

These giants dominate the ad-market because they promise reach, precision and conversion at scale - offering up tools that can help advertisers big and small achieve their varied ambitions.

But whilst brands pump billions into these platforms, something interesting is emerging from the shadows - where conversations, culture and connections are forming in real-time in a place that feels a little more real, a little more human….and a little less formulaic.

The Idea: Reddit ❤️

With over 97 million daily active users and thousands of hyper-engaged communities (or subreddits) spanning everything from skincare to meme-stocks… Reddit is where people go when they really care about or want to know more about something.

It’s where opinions are formed, decisions are debated, and purchases are justified.

And yet, despite its deep influence on internet culture and consumer behaviour, Reddit remains surprisingly overlooked in the world of modern media planning - despite having recently overtaken (X)Twitter and LinkedIn in Daily Active Users (DAUs).

We have long relied on this platform as a vibrant, vivid source of insight and inspiration - a one stop shop for customer-led views on nearly any topic you can think of. And whilst many of us use reddit in our personal lives, we often wonder why it’s not more prevalent in our working lives too…. ?

Why we love it 💕

#.1 It’s a focus-group at your fingertips 🕵️‍♂️🔦

Hat-tip to Carli for this phrase, but in a world where agency teams are shrinking and research costs are skyrocketing, it’s pretty handy that endless insights across 20 years of conversation are already sitting ready to be unlocked within subreddits.

Want to know what Gen Z thinks of your brand? Check r/GenZ. Need real-time sentiment on a product launch? There’s probably already a thread.

Reddit isn’t just a source of inventory, it’s a source of insight. A social listening and trend-spotting tool rolled into one. You’d be crazy not to use it in the discovery stage of any strategy work you’re starting.

#2. Packaging Attention & Intention 👀 💸

Most platforms sell reach, but Reddit offers something rarer—genuine, self-organized and self-moderated communities at scale.

Unlike social media, where users passively scroll or tap past agorithmically organised content feeds, Redditors actively engage in discussions about the things they’re passionate about or intending to act upon.

A runner browsing r/Running is in a completely different mindset to someone seeing a running shoe ad on Facebook.

I mean you’ve got to really be into running to get out there when it’s -6C.

This specificity, in an era where third-party cookies are crumbling, offers advertisers a level of intent that’s hard to match outside of search and retail media.

#3. The World’s Most Trusted Search Engine 🔎

In an era where Google search is increasingly AI generated, social media’s getting forever more toxic and Amazon reviews are getting gamed, Reddit, on the other hand, is brutal in its honesty and with it integrity.

If a product’s great, Redditors will rave about it. If it’s s***, they’ll yep, s*** on it. Fair enough. Advertisers might not always like what is said, but it’s likely to be the truth.

That unfiltered authenticity makes Reddit one of the most credible sources of research for purchase decisions. It has seen the service rise to become the 3rd largest Google search term as people are increasingly appending Reddit onto search terms to seek out “real” views and opinions rather than #spon’d or artificially generated ones.

This dynamic represents a potent and necessary expansion of any brands SEO and SEM efforts as part of a ‘holistic’ approach to search and search behaviour.

Something Wayfair amongst many others have sought to take advantage of, responding to consumer Q&A on-platform and in doing so expanding their brand’s visibility across it.

What we’d love to do with it 💕

To make the transition from interesting add-on to becoming an essential part of a modern media plan, requires convincing brands that don’t include Reddit in their plans that they are missing out on critical intent signals and opportunities to influence that others are benefitting from both culturally and commercially.

So how might Reddit close the loop?

As with every good comms plan, there’s three elements we’d focus on.

#1. Become THE Foresight Factory 🔮

Reddit should find evidence that positions them as the most predictive platform for consumer-decision making: Especially in high consideration categories like autos, finance, healthcare, tech and gaming.

To validate this they might do a clean-room arrangement with Google, Amazon and others and work with econometricians to statistically quantify the link between discussions “on-platform” and subsequent searches, purchases and preferences “off-platform”.

Once validated this would then give license and legitimacy for Reddit to create insight (sales) tools like a Reddit Influence Index and cadence of reporting which show which brands in which categories are growing or slowing and what the $$$ value is for brands to keep those conversations going.

In a similar vein they could then also create tools analogous with Google trends that enable media planners to simply compare and contrast the volume and sentiment of conversation between direct and indirect competitors.

Simples.

#2. Build “Community-First” Formats 🏟️

So now you’ve got people interested in stoking the bonfires taking place across the platform; you need formats that can turn those embers, into flames and then smoke signals that can be seen in-platform and beyond.

Own the white-space of “Earned-First” Media.

Big brands struggle with credibility and trust.

Reddit should position itself as the best place to seed earned conversation that drives paid effectiveness.

Therefore one way you might sell Reddit is as an earned-first platform: Start with organic brand engagement, then scale reach via paid, with tools that identify organic brand mentions and convert them into scalable paid formats that work in Reddit & beyond.

From Ad-Formats to Conversation Starters

In addition to standard formats (because programmatic), Reddit should position itself as THE participation platform, where brands don’t just advertise but join and shape conversations.

This might be via the development of smart placements that dynamically match brand messages to trending subreddit topics in real-time - click to trigger a conversational experience with the brand in-platform.

This might also come from the Scaling of Branded AMAs with paid amplification, allowing brands to have structured, interactive Q&As with key audiences via brand ambassadors and talent at critical brand or decision-making moments.

Check-out a case study along this vein from Oatly who built a megathread with a difference on Reddit to promote their new “spam” newsletter - breaking records along the way.

Make it even easier to buy again and again

Now this has probably already been done (we’re strategists, not activation specialists) but Reddit should partner with media agencies and AdTech partners to make Reddit fully programmatic and bundled into existing PMPs (private marketplaces) with automated creative assembly and optimisation.

Once they’re easier to buy, they’ll be easier to buy again and again.

Then to close the loop, they should use the data-partnership and methodology they’ve striked to establish the link between engagement on-platform and success off-platform to create measurement solutions that prove audiences engaged have gone on to convert.

Lovely.

#3. Don’t just take-part, take-over critical stages of planning workflows 💼

Google and Meta dominate media plans because they have built-in habitual spending.

Reddit needs to embed itself in planning workflows in the same way Google started to in the early days to start forming those same habits in their favour.

Using all of the fore-mentioned insights and intelligence, they should partner with holding companies and key clients to create Reddit Insider Briefings; sharing proprietary trend data before key planning cycles - Then when everything starts to settle, build category-specific playbooks for automotive, finance, gaming, and CPG to show where Reddit engagement drives disproportionate impact.

In doing some or all of the above, we’d be confident they’d start to earn a much fairer share of media plans moving forwards.

Until next time 🚀

We hope you’ve enjoyed our little trip off the beaten track today; as you can probably tell we’re big fans of the platform and hope to work more of their insights, influence and untapped impact into our clients work moving forwards.

What are you using it for, if anything yet? We’d be keen to hear how other marketers are using it.

Until next time,

Matt & Tom x