Maisie Lloyd
I'm passionate about recording the world, but most of all driven by creativity and collaborative environments. My experience revolves around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
Reddit’s Vice President of product management ads, Jyotsna (Jyoti) Vaidee recently participated in an ‘Ask me anything’ with AdExchanger for their Talks podcast. Discussing ways to enhance marketers’ ability to target audiences, whilst nurturing and evolving the experience of its users.
Community-based interactions
Because Reddit is a forum, it hosts thousands of subreddits which cover a plethora of niches. This creates communities which is made up of users with shared interests who are actively talking about these topics in their day-to-day online life.
Marketers can utilise these established communities to position their brands and products to the relevant audiences.
Brands simply need to involve themselves in community chats to forge stronger relationships between the brands and consumers. Vaidee noted, “60% of Redditors actually want brands to participate in their communities and interact with them.”
Potentials for AI in advertising
Reddit’s existing model for marketers targeting consumers is through their likes, and engaged with content on the platform. Vaidee suggests AI could be used to auto-target audiences instead by analysing user behaviours.
How it would work is by reaching newer audiences with interests similar to, but outside of the brand’s offering. Vaidee comments “By our trajectory, what we’re moving towards is more and more, especially for the lower funnel specifically, is towards auto-targeting, and auto-targeting gives us the ability to not only build models on what we know about this specific user. But also, we’re learning and evolving as this user interacts with content on Reddit, as this user interacts with our ads, even.”
AI could change the way ads are displayed as well as who they are displayed to. Targeting capabilities could evolve to auto-optimisation on ad placements.
As Reddit continues to finance AI-driven development, it indicates a clear drive to deliver advertisers quality targeting tools. Fostering the relationships between Reddit and marketers, as well as ensuring users’ experiences are still prioritised.
Users already have the autonomy to adjust controls for ad categories, to make considerations around political, personal or religious beliefs as well as many more.
The key takeaways from the discussion
- Reddit encourages marketers to become active communicators within the Reddit communities. Involving the brand in relevant communities to ensure it’s positioned to the right audiences.
- Marketers will be able to target newer audiences which demonstrate they have similar interests which could relate in some way to the brand’s product or service.
- Reddit continues to put money into AI-driven tools to optimise placement, creativity and targeting to enhance advertising capabilities.
- Users are still empowered by Reddit, by having control over what type of ads are positioned to them. This freedom allows users to feel heard and respected rather than being preyed upon by irrelevant ads.
