How Reddit Recommendations Drive Business for Brands

As the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023 kicked off last month, Reddit launched a report titled ‘How Community Recommendations Drive Collective Influence’ and followed it up with a week-long activation on the Croisette.

The research is centred around the statistic that every second, two people turn to Reddit communities (or ‘subreddits’) for a recommendation, receiving an average of 19 responses in return. Positioning itself as the go-to platform for highly-informed, high-quality recommendations - something of an alternative to traditional influencer marketing models - Reddit aimed to spread the news at the ad industry’s biggest event of the year, and convince brands, with this new research at the ready, to harness the power of the collective.  

At Cannes, LBB’s Ben Conway caught up with Reddit’s global ambassador and former head of creative strategy, Will Cady, to experience the activation together and discuss what this new research means for advertisers.

The figures paint a hugely influential picture of Reddit’s ability to sway potential customer behaviour, with the report claiming more than 93% of recommendation readers were satisfied by what they found on the site - and that 75% of Redditors were more likely to “consider a new brand or product” after seeing it on Reddit.

Will attributes this effectiveness to the high proportion of Reddit users that don’t look to other platforms for recommendations - dubbed ‘unduplicated reach’ - as well as the “different mindset” that these communities have compared to other online spaces. “They’re actively seeking, not scrolling,” he says. “Redditors come to subreddits for a reason - it’s high intent. If you can intention-match your advertising message to a consumer’s journey, you can make miracles happen.”

Highlighting brands that do this particularly well, the global ambassador picks out Adobe, Mini Cooper, Ulta Beauty and Oatly as model advertisers on the platform, saying, “The brands that represent best-in-class work on Reddit are the ones that have a full-funnel strategy.” Taking Adobe as an example, he explains that the tech company has seen success due to a combination of “really high impact and dramatic moments” on Reddit’s front page and highly targeted performance media campaigns for the platform’s communities that are likely to use Adobe software.

One key thing to consider for brands, however, is ‘brand suitability’. Will describes Reddit as “the most structured, contextual platform on the web”, and therefore any brands that wish to use the platform should be aware of the nuances between subreddits, all of which have “drastically different” cultures and rules.

“Not only can we provide the assurance and safety that brands need for their advertising at a platform level, but we’re also able to get into the nuances,” he says, explaining how Reddit helps brands find suitable audiences to reach. “If it’s a diaper company, it makes sense for that brand to be in contextual environments about parenting, rather than music… That’s what we’ve built our platform and toolkit on. Not just providing brand safety, but long-forming it and having a nuanced discussion about the strategy of suitability.”

Discussing the ‘Reddit Recommends’ research, a key figure sticks out as a proving point for the platform’s use as an alternative to influencer marketing - the fact that 73% of users actually follow the guidance they receive. This scored higher than recommendations from consumer reports (72%), a store employee or salesperson (66%), an influencer (52%), a TV ad (51%) and a celebrity endorsement (42%). But why is Reddit so effective in affecting customer behaviour?

“Because discussions are more persuasive than answers,” says Will, “And that’s what Reddit provides.” 

Stating that search engines are trained to provide users with just one answer - which has been successful for some time - he adds that people’s trust in search results alone have diminished. Google a question about a tech product, for example, and you’re likely to see ‘Top 10 Vaccum Cleaners in 2023’ lists appear near the top of the results. However, Will says that the public has become dubious of the incentives behind the creation of such lists - and equally, has become less trusting of other recommendation sources like product review sections.

“Trust has eroded in those reviews because they’ve been gamed. Because of Reddit’s contextual environment, the upvotes and downvotes… those discussions are maintained and the trust in those discussions has maintained.”

He continues, “Even if a user feels the recommendations from one community aren’t suitable for them, there’s another community that will make sense. A bass [guitar] player might be more apt to listen to the recommendations of a bass subreddit, than a guitar or general music subreddit.”

Other reasons for eroded trust in online reviews and recommendations include fake accounts and botting - something that Will shares have been a top priority for investment and a focus for Reddit’s ‘Anti-Evil Operations’ and ‘Trust and Safety’ teams since he joined in 2016. “The investment and expansion of those teams has been considerable ever since - so every minute of every hour of every day, those teams are working to combat spam.”

This interview also came at an interesting time, as Reddit had just seen largescale user protests to the platform’s changing API policy, where Redditors organised blackouts of subreddits, and disrupted advertisement on the site. The decision to charge for its previously free application programming interface (API) has meant that third-party apps now have to pay to access valuable data from Reddit, resulting in several popular applications ceasing operation. The backlash from users - many of whom utilise third-party apps on Reddit - resulted in over 7,000 subreddits temporarily going private, and other forms of digital protests.

Addressing the story and its impacts on both advertisers and users, Will says, “That [situation] continues to develop and the teams in the background are working the hardest. We’re communicating on a broad level and a person-to-person level to provide assurances and to follow up on commitments on both the user and brand side to maintain the confidence that people have had in our platform for a number of years - and will continue to.”

He continues, “The communities that we’re talking about today, that are purpose-driven, have continued to do what they do best - provide information and recommendations to the users that come to them - and have continued to be valuable environments for the brands that advertise on them. That hasn’t changed throughout any of this.”