‘An awkward space’: Reddit’s ad sales efforts haven’t gone unnoticed, but there’s still work to be done

New year, same problems for Reddit: in the eyes of advertisers, it’s still an outlier.

To be clear, the social news site has definitely made strides to curry favor with advertisers since the last time Digiday checked in a year ago. A clearer understanding of what it is and isn’t among marketers is a testament to that.

Even so, it’s arguable that Reddit must do more to turn that sentiment into ad dollars. No mean feat for a platform that’s still trying to find a permanent space for itself on media plans.

“Reddit straddles an awkward space between social media, blog, forum and community interest site,” said Elliott Millard, head of planning at Wavemaker U.K. “While user numbers are pretty good, it’s always lacked the scale of Facebook, the media cachet of TikTok or the singular focus of something like Pinterest. The breadth is an issue because clients can’t put it in a neat box.”

Take the U.K., for example. While Reddit has certainly evolved since its U.K. expansion back in 2020, and marketers appear to be happy with the moves it’s making, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Pitching to marketers

According to Steve Riad, vp, global mid-market & smb sales at Reddit, the platform has some strong relationships, and in most instances, official partnerships with all the major holding companies, globally.

“In 2022, we announced a global enterprise partnership with IPG, and our global commerce advertising advisory partnership with WPP, the latter being led specifically out of London,” he explained. “Additionally, our internal deal labs team is responsible for structuring our annual partnership agreements with our agencies, or we can do that with client direct programs through our Reddit Partnership Program (RPP), which continues to expand in the U.K. with the likes of Samsung U.K., and Huel.”

While these partnerships seem impressive, what exactly do they mean?

In certain circumstances, Reddit has offered some of Dentsu’s clients introductory ad credits for new brands keen to ease their way into advertising on the platform.

Similarly, Paul Kasamias, managing partner (performance) at Starcom noted that Reddit provides the agency’s highest spending clients on the platform first refusal for new ad formats.

“They’re definitely proactive in bringing the alphas and betas to clients, which is a nice sell because clients love being at the forefront of innovation,” he added.

Reddit has also helped Starcom through its creative services arm called Karma Lab.

“Reddit runs workshops, provides insights and trends, as well as access to measurement studies, for us and our clients about how best to use creative and ad formats on the platform, to ensure they are specifically fit for Reddit and that user base,” Kasamias added. “It’s definitely incentivizing clients in the right way, not just discounting ad spend but actually giving clients a deeper, more meaningful, experience of using the platform, which is smart.”