At Cannes this week, Reddit announced that it is testing a new ad feature that integrates the conversations users are having about a specific product below the creative promoting it.
The ad feature, called Conversation Summary Add-Ons, is powered by the newly unveiled Reddit Community Intelligence (which turns the billions of posts Reddit houses into structured intelligence) and uses AI to find and summarise posts.
There will inevitably be questions about the risk of accidentally spotlighting negative content and whether this ad product will work for every brand. But Annie-Mai Hodge, founder of girl power marketing, tells us it is ‘a low-risk play for advertisers.’
‘Reddit is only enabling this feature for brands that already have strong positive sentiment on the platform, meaning the Conversation Summary Add-Ons will highlight what users genuinely appreciate about a product or service,’ Hodge said.
She added that the product would be suitable for brands that ‘have already built goodwill in the Reddit ecosystem.’
‘If I were a brand doing social listening and saw a solid base of positive engagement, this would absolutely be the nudge to start investing in Reddit ads,’ she said. ‘It’s a smart bridge between community endorsement and paid media.’
Authentic content
Reddit’s launch comes at a time when users are increasingly searching for authentic content and real reviews on social media platforms. With this new feature, Reddit is leaning into this consumption trend.
‘In a world increasingly flattened by AI, the value of human content on our platform only grows,’ Jen Wong, chief operating officer at Reddit, said in a statement. ‘With Reddit Community Intelligence, we’re not just surfacing insights and conversations; we’re offering deep context, perspective, and the voice of real people at scale.’
The platform reported that early tests of the Conversation Summary Add-Ons have recorded positive results, with brands seeing 19% higher clickthrough rates than with standard image ads. Reddit also said that the product boosts ad relevance and helps strengthen the connection between brands and users.
‘This is a really smart move from Reddit,’ Hodge told MediaCat. ‘It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s just packaging what Reddit already does best — open, honest conversations — into a feature that benefits advertisers and users.’
She added that the new feature turns ‘social listening into social proof’ and feels ‘native to the platform’, which is critical considering that Redditors have a reputation for being anti-ads.
The social media platform also announced that it is testing another product powered by Reddit Community Intelligence, called Reddit Insights: an AI social listening tool that can help inform campaigns by offering marketers real-time insights based on users’ conversations.
Featured image: Brett Jordan / Unsplash