Dive Brief:
- Reddit is leveraging the Cannes Lions festival to pitch its growing advertising business to brands and agencies, notably by rolling out video ads for the first time via its sales team and self-service ad buying platform, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
- The site could be attractive to advertisers because its users are there for honest and open conversation in self-selected communities — people go by usernames rather than their real-life names in most cases — rather than trying to curate a perfect Instagram profile, Reddit Co-Founder and Chairman Alexis Ohanian told Adweek.
- The site has also completely revamped its self-serve ad buying platform for the first time in around eight years, allowing marketers to manage campaigns, access campaign metrics and test creative elements. It's also working with WPP's Essence and Omnicom's Resolution Media to create self-serve ad products for those agencies.
Dive Insight:
One key challenge for Reddit in the push to win more ad dollars is the actual content on its site. What Ohanian describes as honest and open, some brands might consider outside of the boundaries of what they deem "safe," and Reddit users — often painted as cynical and resistant to change on their platform of choice — might not take well to a higher volume of advertisements appearing in their carefully curated communities.
Users are notoriously sensitive to being marketed to, per the Journal, with a popular subreddit called /r/hailcorporate dedicated calling out what it deems "company shills" on the site. Ohanian told the Journal Reddit can prevent ads from appearing next to such communities, and it's testing tools to help brands manage Reddit profiles and presences.
Still, some of Reddit's communities have proven incredibly toxic beyond a marketing context, and have painted Reddit in a poor light more broadly in the media. In December, Reddit stopped serving ads on the /r/conspiracy subreddit after a 28-year-old man armed with an assault rifle opened fire in a Washington DC pizzeria. The man claimed he was conducting a personal investigation into a far-right "PizzaGate" conspiracy theory that was heavily promoted on the subreddit. He was sentenced to four years in prison earlier this week, per The Guardian.
Given the current industry focus on brand safety — the issue cost YouTube 5% of its North American advertisers in April — Reddit's sell will likely only get tougher.