Inside Reddit’s U.K. advertising growth ambitions

By Seb Joseph

The world of advertising has another platform player in Europe. Enter Reddit, the social sharing site that has spent the last few months ensuring that agency folk are not only fully up to speed with what it can offer advertisers now, but what’s on its roadmap for the future too.

The verdict so far: Reddit is pragmatic about where it currently stands in the market and is keen to get agencies inside. That’s what executives from Publicis, Dentsu, We Are Social, IPG and Tinuiti told Digiday about their meetings with representatives from Reddit’s London office over the last six months.

For the first time since that office launched in 2020, those execs feel like they’ve got a firmer handle on what Reddit is: a virtual town hall where people go to learn from one another about specific topics, from anime to stock market tips.

Like they do elsewhere, advertisers can reach Reddit users through a mix of in-feed placements takeovers, promoted videos, app install options and other tried and tested formats. What makes it all that much more interesting, according to the agency execs, is the platform’s ability to contextualize advertising.

This is to say it’s an environment geared toward passions and fandoms where marketers can call on the platform’s niche interest targeting to place ads in the relevant sub-Reddit group in the right context so people there might be more willing to click on an ad. It’s a proposition made all the more intriguing by the fact that increasingly those people are more upstream along the conversion funnel.

“What we do well beyond having de-duplicated reach and our interest graph, is that at that moment when someone is researching a product they’re thinking about purchasing, they’re increasingly coming to Reddit,” said chief operating officer Jen Wong.

It’s a key part of Wong’s strategy: pointing to the fact that a high percentage of people searching for things on Google are then going to Reddit to find out about their search. Unsurprisingly, this SEO point has piqued the interest of marketers.

“The feedback we’re getting from the market here in the U.K. is that our attempts to grow the advertising business are working so far,” said Wong.

The results back this up: invoiced ad revenue for the U.K. and EMEA increased by more than 250% year-on-year in 2021, while the number of advertisers it worked with in the region has jumped 55% over the same period. Granted, these growth rates are skewed somewhat because they’re from a small base. Nevertheless, they show there’s an appetite for those ads — a vindication of sorts that the company’s decision to open the international office at the height of the pandemic was ultimately the right thing to do, said Wong.

Since it opened, the London office has grown to employ over 150 people. And the recruitment drive is showing no signs of slowing down. Currently, there are 16 roles open at the office — the majority of which are connected to supporting Reddit’s ads business.

Initially, those …read more

Source:: Digiday