'A Lot More Consultative:' Reddit Rebrands Its Creative Strategy Team as KarmaLab

Reddit announced today it has rebranded its creative strategy team as KarmaLab, expanding the group's purview as an “in-house creative strategy agency for advertisers” and making more of a concerted play for more cautious marketer budgets. The team will transition from an “RFP-based service” to a “proactive partner” for brands, said Will Cady who has led the creative strategy efforts since 2018. The shift lets the team take on more clients as well as run workshops and other new business programming. The service is named after Reddit karma, the platform's point-based credit system. “The creative strategy team at Reddit, now called KarmaLab, is evolving from helping our partners with their Reddit strategies to marketing strategies to business strategies,” Cady said. “It’s a lot more consultative, built off of all of the insights we glean about culture from Reddit.” Platforms and publishers are keen to cash in on the years-long trend of having more lucrative, longer-term consultative relationships with brands, especially in a post-Covid environment. In December, Reddit announced 2019 ad sales of $100 million and 52 million daily users in October, up 44% from the same period the year before. But some brands still find the platform a little confounding. It’s just really intimidating to buy ads on a platform that eats brands for breakfast.Ellen Vanderwilt, Adobe The team of 20 will help advertisers better understand the platform and build custom campaigns, but also identify the trends bubbling up in different communities that could have real-world implications months later. Many of the KarmaLab staffers specialize in various subject matters found on the site. The team is expanding in league with a broader Reddit push to double its total staff this year. Since Reddit has its own culture, language and etiquette, Cady’s team helps brands plan effective advertising campaigns that will resonate with the community. KarmaLab clients include Samsung, Snickers and Little Caesars. “We want to help our marketing partners on the higher end of our relationships—and really across the board—be able to anticipate important cultural trends that are coming six or 12 months ahead of time so they can be agile in that moment,” Cady said. “That’s a huge part of what we’re going to lean into.” ‘Hello, fellow kids’ With Samsung, Cady said his team was able to locate confusion around the 5G rollout dating back to 2018 and worked with the tech and telecom giant to educate Reddit users in the lingo of the subreddit Explain Like I'm Five, or ELI5. The community-involved campaign was aptly called ELI5G. Ellen Vanderwilt, the global campaign marketing lead for Adobe’s youth-oriented business, said that Reddit was an intimidating place before she started working with the creative strategy team in the last few years. Now she said her team spends 10% of its annual marketing budget on Reddit. “It’s just really intimidating to buy ads on a platform that eats brands for breakfast,” she said. “And so many people have had that experience, so even from a selling your brand to executives standpoint, you get a lot of ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’” Early mock-ups from Cady’s team helped Vanderwilt sell the idea of advertising on the platform to higher-ups at Adobe. The client was the first brand partner to test out Reddit’s Trending Takeovers product in late 2019 through an activation called Layers, based on the popular Photoshop function. Layers was a hit with Reddit’s audience with more than 150,000 contributions, so Adobe brought it back for a second year this fall. “There’s a lot of community behavior on the platform that’s related to Adobe,” Vanderwilt said. “There are 17 million people on the PhotoshopBattles subreddit, for example, so we've always kind of benefited from this organic community behavior, but the last thing you want to do is be that corporate brand that swoops in and says ‘Hello, fellow kids.’”