Online community Reddit has launched its own in-house creative strategy agency, which will provide assistance for businesses looking to tap into Reddit for promotions.
The new agency, called KarmaLab, will be made available to all of Reddit’s ad partners “via a scaled offering dependent on campaign objective and need”.
The team will be led by Will Cady, Reddit’s former Head of Creative Strategy, and will provide social listening and trends reports, community management assistance, creative workshops, campaign development and more.
The announcement adds to Reddit’s growing ad offering, which now includes a range of video ad options, including Trending Takeover placement, providing engaging, impactful ways to reach the platform’s highly engaged communities.
While Reddit’s audience reach is lower than what you can see on other platforms (at 52 million DAU), Reddit hosts thousands of highly active, niche subreddit communities, which enables advertises to reach people based on very specific interests.
“Recent months have demonstrated more than ever the impact and influence of Reddit’s passionate communities in the cultural zeitgeist. There is amazing potential and opportunities for brands to be part of the internet’s most relevant and authentic conversations, but with more than 100,000 communities on Reddit, some wonder where to start — this is where KarmaLab comes in,” says Global Director of Reddit’s KarmaLab, Will Cady. “Our mission is to help every brand discover how to contribute authentically, meaningfully and effectively to the communities that matter most to them and their audiences — we turn curiosity into understanding, and signals into strategies.”
“It’s been a fantastic start to the year for Reddit and especially for our Advertising business which continues to grow with exciting momentum,” said Reddit Chief Operating Officer, Jen Wong. “KarmaLab is a long term investment in industry-leading creative strategy for all Reddit advertisers, and will allow us to serve clients with more dedicated resources and diverse skill sets as more brands find their home on the platform.”
Case studies on Reddit
KarmaLab’s services are available to all of Reddit’s partners via a scaled offering dependent on campaign objective and need, with the in-house agency already servicing a diverse range of clients.
Affordable meal kit delivery service EveryPlate worked with KarmaLab in April to build custom creative for their promoted posts targeting communities like r/eatcheapandhealthy and r/budgetfood to ensure the tone and language resonated with the audience. Similarly, when Samsung set out to explain the benefits of 5G, the brand worked with KarmaLab to empower Reddit’s r/explainlikeimfive community to have them explain 5G in a simple, relatable and compelling way. Hundreds of responses later, Samsung and KarmaLab turned the responses into ads and promoted them across Reddit to help educate the wider community.
When Snickers wanted to more deeply engage with Reddit’s audience and “power up” their Promoted Posts, the brand worked with KarmaLab who hosted a creative workshop to develop a media strategy and visuals that evoked the themes of nostalgia and enjoyment in gaming with fun nods to the audiences’ favorite games.
“The gaming audience on Reddit is pretty remarkable and we wanted to reach these fans with our campaign in a way that felt natural to the community and would ultimately drive reach and contextual alignment for Snickers.” said Mars Wrigley North America Head of Social Media & Digital Content, Michael Italia. “We worked closely with the KarmaLab team to develop a series of custom gamer-centric creative and copy — targeting communities like r/gaming, r/overwatch and r/xbox — that put the Snickers-spin on some of their favorite games in a way that landed with the highly engaged audience. The creative allowed Snickers to exist within the culture of the communities’ conversations in a very authentic, relevant way.”