Reddit’s CMO Busts Platform Myths

After debuting on the stock market with a pop in March, Reddit chief marketing and consumer experience officer Roxy Young joined ADWEEK’s Social Media Week event in New York this week to bust some myths for advertisers still leery about appearing on the community-driven platform.

Young outlined the platform’s performance prowess and how the community appreciates conversations from brands.

“Our role is to help you connect with our communities,” said Young, adding that there are over 100,000 communities on Reddit. Here are the takeaways.

People love brands if they show up in the right way

People interacting in Reddit’s communities don’t hate ads, stressed Young: They want brands to show up in the right way.

In the cast iron cookware community—where some 5,000 people discuss products, care and seasoning their items—people wanted to hear more from Lodge Cast Iron, which has had an active Reddit account since 2014. That spurred the brand to participate more in the conversation, responding to comments and answering questions about its product line.

Some marketers could be wary of advertising to Reddit users given headlines about the revolt after unpopular API (application-programming interface) changes last summer.

Lodge is especially cognizant about treading carefully in this community, said Young, knowing that it’s a space for the community rather than a place to hawk its wares.

“You don’t walk into a dinner party and start talking about yourself,” Young said. “It’s about reading the room, reading the community and recognizing where your perspective as a expert adds value.”

Contextual is back

With the impending death of the third-party cookie in Chrome and marketers increasingly looking for alternatives to excessive audience targeting, contextual, one of the earliest forms of internet targeting, is becoming more relevant. Spending on Reddit is “built-in protection” thanks to its reliance on contextual targeting, said Young.

Reddit has 44 interest groups, which are further broken down into more granular categories. Marketers can identify their targeting criteria, and their ad will be shown to people engaged in those communities and in conversations associated with those categories, built from its first-party targeting platform.

“I’m a woman in my 40s,” said Young. “You probably wouldn’t assume that I’m really into sports, or into machine learning, and I’m looking for an electric vehicle, but you can tell that on Reddit.”

Brand building also drives sales

The company said 70 million people come to Reddit every day to discuss topics. Two people ask for recommendations in their communities every second, taking action based on those recommendations. Reddit is building ways for marketers to tap into that.

Some marketers have been more hesitant to direct big budgets to Reddit, with other platforms like Instagram touting their performance-driving features more clearly.

Most ad units online are one-way broadcasts. Reddit’s newly released Free Form ad unit lets brands share a long-form story—including images, videos and text—to open up the conversation. To make it easier for marketers to understand how their brand or category is being discussed on Reddit, the platform launched a suite of social listening tools, Reddit Pro, in March. Skincare brand Kate Somerville has used Reddit Pro to drive sales, Young said.

To highlight its investment in safety, auto brand Volvo used ads on Reddit to ask people to share when a safety feature saved their life, spurring thousands of people to share their experiences.

A financial services brand asked users to share what they are doing today to better their tomorrow, leading to people sharing spreadsheets, their financial planning tools and thoughts on investment allocations. And Philadelphia started a conversation about recipes with novel ways of using cream cheese.

Reddit’s sales teams are vertically focused and share brand concepts, along with internal creative team KarmaLab, to ensure that brands aren’t trying to share the same message.

This way, brands are “more likely to create a promoter of the brand that will spread this message organically through word of mouth, creating deeper enthusiasts for their brand that will share the message,” said Young. “That’s the holy grail for marketers.”