Reddit, in celebration of its 20th birthday, is introducing new features for brands, including one that turns your organic posts and comments about the brand into advertisements.
The company introduced Reddit Community Intelligence™ at this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which it describes as:
“The collective knowledge from the billions of human conversations across Reddit. This engine powers products and insights that no other platform can deliver, turning Reddit's 22+ billion posts and comments into structured intelligence for smarter marketing decisions.”
The intelligence feature currently consists of two products:
- Reddit Insights – an AI social listening tool that provides insights to help marketers plan campaigns and validate ideas. Effectively this feature is, “Here's a summary of what Redditors think about your brand.”
- Conversation Summary Add-ons – dynamically integrates positive content from Reddit users directly below an advertiser's creative. This feature surfaces posts and comments from Reddit's archives that talk about the brand in a positive light, which means anything good you ever said about a brand can effectively become an ad.
Publicis has been an early tester of the new tools for their clients The Hersey Company, Comcast, and Lucid, and claim to have experienced 19% higher CTR than standard image ads, boosted ad relevance, and deeper connections with communities (whatever that means).
On one hand: I think that Conversation Summary Add-ons are a unique way to surface user generated content about a brand or product, which can accentuate the brand and be helpful to the user.
On the other hand: I don't love the idea of Reddit turning my posts and comments into advertising assets. Then again though, those posts and comments were already public and easily accessible via search. As Redditors, we've always known that other people are going to discover what we share about a brand.
The one thing about Conversation Summary Add-ons that perverts the traditional Reddit experience is that the platform has always been a place to get real reviews. That's why people often search Google for “brand reviews + reddit” — so that they can bypass the affiliate fluff and manipulated reviews that surface to the top of Google. However now, I imagine that brands are able to handpick the positive posts and comments and leave the negative ones behind, which undermines and cheapens the Reddit experience.
Also, what's going to happen when Redditors inevitably discover that their posts/comments are being used in an advertisement and they subsequently delete or edit the content? (Because that will 100% happen.) Or when other Redditors join the boosted thread and contribute not-so-positive things about the brand. Is Reddit going to lock content that's currently being used in an ad campaign?
Redditors historically haven't embraced advertising on the platform, especially given that it's been forcefully thrust upon them in recent years after the company killed off third-party apps, but this is the first time Reddit has blatantly turned their own content into advertisements. So we'll see how this goes…