During the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday, Reddit unveiled its latest initiative, Reddit Community Intelligence, an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) advertising engine. This announcement coincides with the platform’s milestone 20th anniversary. The new AI engine is designed to enhance advertising capabilities by utilizing extensive user-generated discussions and insights accumulated over the years. Currently, Reddit is piloting two advertising products: Reddit Insights, a marketing analysis tool, and Conversation Summary Add-Ons, which showcase favorable user comments alongside advertisements.
In a blog post, the San Francisco-based organization elaborated on how its AI-driven advertising solutions tap into the collective intelligence of its user base. By converting over 22 billion posts and comments into structured data, the AI suite aims to assist brands in making more informed marketing decisions. Both advertising products are still in their initial testing phases.
The first tool, Reddit Insights, is characterized as an AI-enhanced social listening platform that generates actionable insights from “Reddit’s 20 years of conversations.” Essentially, it functions as a monitoring dashboard equipped with various analytical capabilities, enabling marketers to explore and compare campaign topics while also gaining insights into cultural trends and users’ purchasing behaviors.
When users investigate a topic, Reddit Insights provides a range of metrics, including conversation summaries, prominent subreddits linked to the topic, emerging trends, and notable posts. It can also be utilized to assess brand perception.
Among the early adopters of Reddit Insights is Publicis Media, a French advertising and public relations agency. The firm has reportedly employed the tool to validate creative ideas, conduct competitive analysis, uncover consumer needs, gauge brand sentiment, and predict cultural shifts.
The second advertising tool, Conversation Summary Add-Ons, employs AI to feature positive posts from users about a brand or product directly beneath the advertisement. It also provides an AI-generated summary of these posts. According to Reddit, this feature aims to offer “social proof,” potentially accelerating consumer decision-making.
Internal testing reveals that this ad tool increases clickthrough rates (CTR) by 19% compared to traditional image ads. Early users of the feature include game developer Jackbox Games and the electric vehicle company Lucid from the United States.
