How Reddit's new AI ad tools help brands join the conversation

Reddit wants to make it easier for brands to keep up with — and tap into — the cultural dialogue.

On Monday, the social media platform introduced Reddit Community Intelligence, an AI-powered product aimed at helping marketers leverage the billions of conversations taking place across its platform. The announcement, made at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity — the ad industry’s biggest annual event — coincides with Reddit’s 20th anniversary.

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“Reddit is the most human place on the internet, and one of the last places on the internet where brands can build authentic, trusted, and engaged relationships with customers,” the company wrote in a blog post. “As Reddit looks ahead to the next 20 years, we’re betting big on the power of these conversations to change hearts and minds, as well as inform and validate decisions.”

What was announced?

Reddit Community Intelligence has two separate components, both of which are being released as early-stage alpha features.

The first, dubbed Reddit Insights, is a social listening tool that uses AI to scour Reddit’s huge trove of conversational data and provide marketers with insights into how their brands are being discussed across the platform.

According to Reddit, the Paris-based advertising firm Publicis Groupe is exclusively testing Reddit Insights and harnessing the feature for campaign planning, product development, cultural analysis, and other purposes.

Then there’s Conversation Summary Add-Ons, the second feature included in the Reddit Community Intelligence package. These are AI-generated summaries of Redditors’ views on particular products, gleaned from actual conversations happening across the platform, which appear below branded ads. A paid ad for a car, for example, might be appended to a very brief overview of feedback from Redditors who’ve driven the car in person, along with links to the relevant pages where those conversations are happening on the platform.

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Early tests have shown that the Conversation Summary feature boosted click-through rates by an average of 19% compared with standalone ads, Reddit said in its blog post.

A new era for marketers

Reddit’s announcement was just a drop in the AI bucket at Cannes Lions this year.

The technology has become a central fixation for the ad industry since the public debut of generative AI tools, which began in earnest with the 2022 release of ChatGPT. Since then, legions of brand and agency marketers have begun using the technology in the creative production process while contending with its many ethical red flags — and with the possibility that it could ultimately replace them.

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Fears around that possibility have likely been heightened since it was recently reported that Meta plans to eventually automate the entire ad-production process. A suite of other new AI tools — like Amazon’s Video Generation feature, which was publicly released last week — are already making it easier for brands to generate ads without the help of an agency.

Consequently, AI has become a major annual theme at Cannes Lions, and this year’s show was no exception, with brands like Adobe debuting new AI-powered features for marketers. 

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