The social network Reddit is attracting the attention of advertisers. Brands such as Pernod Ricard’s Absolut include the social network in their marketing strategies. Reddit’s ad business is starting to pique the interest of some advertisers in need of finding alternatives to already congested traditional social media . One such brand is Pernod Ricard’s Absolut, which is including ads on the site in its digital marketing campaign that keep attracting more and more audiences. Reddit launched the autoplay video ad format in 2018 for both its web version Dominican-Republic Mobile Database and mobile devices. While it was late to the trend started by other more mainstream networks, its growing user base makes it a tempting platform. According to information published by Digiday, Absolut bought its first ad spaces on Reddit in October 2018 and until December it was analyzing the performance in a trial and error phase. Absolut video ads were automatically played on topic-specific subreddits, targeting key audiences on topics related to areas such as “Funny” and “LGBTQ.”As Digiday Simon de Beauregard , Director of Engagement for Pernod Ricard in the United States told him,
“We wanted to test the platform and specifically assess the community’s engagement with our creativity, we tested different ads of different durations.”Based on the results obtained, video view rates outperformed 30-second native ads. On the other hand, click-through rates were low. The brand also considers that the completion rates of the videos were high, especially for those between 8 and 10 seconds in length. “It showed that more people were willing to watch the content through to the end,” De Beauregard said. Additionally, 70 percent of the shorter video ad views were on mobile. Moreover, according to the information provided by Brother Cell Phone List the brand, the combination of longer and shorter ads on Reddit helped position Absolut among users who had never bought that brand of vodka. In fact, after testing, “the results were strong enough that De Beauregard considered including the site in future media plans,” they analyze on Digiday. The head of engagement for the brand described Reddit as “a very raw and organic platform.” “This experience has shown that Reddit can deliver strong results and we now know better how to maximize its potential to provide our audience with the best experience, so we are going to test it in the future.
“Like its bigger rivals, buying ads on Reddit has risks. Brand safety is a concern, but the fear is neither greater nor less than on YouTube.The advantage of Reddit is that the platform was built based on moderators and self-regulation to maintain the subreddits. Those same mechanisms can protect advertisers. For now, Reddit remains an alternative social network for both users and advertisers. There are not yet enough advertisers aware that there is a business in that segment of social media.However, the same could have been thought of a few years ago on Instagram, and it goes without saying what happened.To this day, Reddit is missing from most media plans, and this is a bonus: there is less competition.