CANNES – With more than 100,000 active communities, social platform Reddit has become a digital ecosystem where authentic conversations thrive, and where marketers must tread carefully if they want to connect with consumers.
“People come to Reddit to find community, to have real connection, authentic conversation with folks who share their same interests,” Mike Romoff, chief revenue officer of Reddit, said in an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Romoff emphasized that for brands to succeed on Reddit, they must engage in a way that aligns with the culture of the platform.
“No one likes people coming into the conversation that they’re having and shouting commercial messages at them,” he said. “The best marketers understand that, and they can come and participate in a way that’s authentic in all those communities.”
Reddit in June introduced Reddit Community Intelligence, a new suite of tools that transforms 22 billion posts and comments into actionable insights for marketers. Debuting at Cannes Lions, the platform includes Reddit Insights, an AI-powered social listening tool, and Conversation Summary Add-ons, which integrate authentic user sentiment directly into ads. These products enable brands to tap into Reddit’s unmatched authenticity and engage meaningfully with global, high-intent communities.
Interests over demographics for targeting
Unlike traditional platforms focused on demographics, Reddit revolves around shared interests. That creates a unique opportunity for brands to deliver personalized, relevant ads without fueling echo chambers.
“We know the interests that you have based on the communities that you join and interact with,” Romoff explained. “Humans have broad and diverse interests — professional, personal, hobbies — and taken together, we have a pretty complete profile of our user base.”
In addition to community affiliation, Reddit uses keywords and contextual cues from real-time conversations to refine ad targeting.
“We can deliver messages that are tailored to the moment that you’re in and the conversation that you’re having,” Romoff said, calling the combination of community data and contextual relevance “a really powerful combination.”
Earning trust: How brands navigate skepticism
Reddit’s fiercely independent user base means advertisers must earn their place in the conversation. But Romoff believes marketers have valuable expertise to contribute, if they approach communities with respect.
“If you’re in a big gaming subreddit talking about first-person shooters and you’re a gaming developer, there’s a lot that you have to bring to the conversation,” he said. “But if you come in and just throw commercial messages at people and don’t respect what’s happening, that’s not going to resonate particularly well.”
Romoff acknowledged that Reddit is also a scaled media platform, boasting more than 100 million daily active users, and brands can run traditional ad campaigns with strong results. But the most sophisticated marketers, he said, leverage the full range of tools to connect authentically.
AI-powered ads and the future of search on Reddit
Romoff sees Reddit’s massive archive of human conversation as a natural foundation for AI-powered innovation, both for ad products and for improving the platform’s search experience.
“Reddit is built for AI,” he said. “It’s 20 years of human conversation indexed across almost any topic.”
That foundation powers advanced targeting, personalization and new ad formats like Community Add-On, launched in June, which uses AI to pull positive sentiment and testimonials from Reddit discussions directly into advertiser campaigns.
On the search front, Reddit’s influence is growing, as users increasingly seek unfiltered, community-driven answers.
“More and more human intelligence is actually coming from Reddit,” Romoff said, noting that Reddit’s own AI tool, Reddit Answers, provides an entry point into the platform’s vast repository of conversations.
But unlike sanitized AI-generated summaries, Reddit’s approach preserves the complexity of real discussions.
“Answers to most questions that aren’t factual have some context, they have some texture, they have some conversation around them,” Romoff said. “As AI sanitizes and tries to put the human condition into a neat box, there’s going to be this craving for the messiness, the authenticity that we have on the Reddit platform.”
Respect the community, respect the conversation
For brands hoping to succeed on Reddit, the message is clear: show up with authenticity, add value to the conversation, and use AI and data tools to enhance, not disrupt, the user experience.
“Marketers are people. Reddit is a very human place composed of people,” Romoff concluded. “The best marketers understand that.”
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