Why brands like Bonobos are increasingly tapping Reddit for advertising

“The communities that are on Reddit, they’re looking for answers, they’re trying to share information,” Millan said. “While it was firmly a brand campaign, it also had a lot of educational materials that led to providing some pretty useful info for their communities.”

Bonobos’ experience points to a growing trend among brands that are using Reddit and its countless forums as an acquisition tool. The service has worked for Bonobos on mid- to lower-funnel objectives like traffic, while other brands might tap new ad tools to drive lead generation or app installs. Some brands are finding that a well-crafted ad can help them tap into an audience that may not have much overlap with other paid social media. Comscore found in late 2023 that about 32% of U.S. Reddit users aren’t on Facebook, and 37% aren’t active on Instagram.  

However, long-term success requires more than one paid ad push and dedicated social listening to find the right keywords and subreddits for targets and placements. It may also take extra creative muscle to devise a strategy that succeeds on no-frills threads where users expect transparency and are sometimes voraciously anti-consumption. Indeed, there’s a whole subreddit community for “Commercials I hate,” another for “FuckNestle” and another called “AntiAmazon.”

For Reddit, advertising dollars from brands are boosting its bottom line. The third quarter of 2024 saw a 56% year-over-year increase in ad revenue to $315.1 million, per its earnings report. Reddit’s COO Jennifer Wong said during the most recent earnings call that the company has been boosting its delivery formats, measurement tools and optimization products, helping to drive nearly 50% growth in the number of conversions over the second quarter. One ongoing test is putting ads in the comments. Right now, placements are often on the side of threads or on a user’s homepage.

Evan Wolf, head of mid-market and SMB sales for North America at Reddit, said part of the reason brands are finding success on Reddit is because of how many users are looking to the site for real reviews that aren’t sponsored or paid for. Around 85% of people who use Reddit when making a purchase rely on that research in their decision, Wolf said. 

“Brands realize there’s a real opportunity here to be able to provide detailed information when somebody is looking for it, kind of meeting them at that super-relevant but specific moment,” he said. 

At Bonobos, Millan said that the company knew Redditors were already talking about Bonobos in conversations about where to find suits or when the brand is having a sale. “Before we even went into a paid campaign effort with them, we always used Reddit truly as a way to get some intel about our customers,” she said, “what people are talking about it, whether they’re happy about a product or they’re finding issues.”

From the customer standpoint, Reddit is often viewed as a good source of real product reviews and unvarnished opinions. It’s even become fairly common to add “Reddit” to search queries so that users specifically get Reddit in their top search results. But users who don’t explicitly ask for Reddit may be more likely to get a Reddit result than they once were. One analysis from SEO expert Glen Allsopp at Detailed in February found that Reddit shows up 97.5% in product review queries. And, as of this summer, an arrangement with Google that other search engines don’t have allows it to index its content, as reported by 404 Media.

Wolf wasn’t able to share how much of Reddit’s traffic comes from Google searches or how much of that can be captured by brands. But he said advertisers are often surprised by how often specific brands are discussed or how much of the conversation, in general, relies on products and services. About 40% of all Reddit posts mention either a project or brand, according to the company’s internal data.

This is especially relevant as AI-generated search results leave users frustrated and in search of real people to learn from, Wolf said. “The premium on that real experience, I think, goes up in a sea of just A.I. generalized summaries,” he said.

In the guitar subreddit, for example, much of the conversation is about the kind of guitars to buy. And skiing subreddits are more likely to have people talking about the best set of skis rather than how to execute turns, Wolf said. Brands can lurk in those conversations using Reddit Pro, a free product that can show brands all mentions of their product or category.  

Some brands may also have “unofficial” subreddits where fans swap troubleshooting tips or recipes. Popular ones include Costco, Lululemon and Instapot.

“There are hundreds of thousands of communities on Reddit,” Wolf said. “So, chances are every different retailer in the world. There’s a subreddit where somebody is talking about their product or service right now.”

Kristin Rose, head of growth at e-commerce platform Swap, said brands that get into using Reddit for paid ads should do so with a spirit of experimentation and strong creative. Reddit thrives on transparency and user trust, she said, and users won’t react to something that’s a copy-paste of a Meta ad.

“In the same way that people trust the peer-to-peer information, they’re also extremely distrustful of people not abiding by the Reddit look and feel and voice,” she said. “You need to speak Reddit’s language. You need to play up the memes and the tropes and the themes and make it look like it belongs there. But it’s a lot of work for a marketing team, and creative is one of the big bottlenecks marketing teams can face.” 

Swap even experimented with Reddit ads itself earlier this year. It aimed to generate leads from Reddit users who were e-commerce business owners looking to build their businesses in Canada. And while it performed well, Rose said the marketing team didn’t have enough time to continue to invest in the creative.

Still, Rose anticipates her team will try Reddit ads again in January to help seed Swap into conversations about tariffs and taxes that could impact the e-commerce industry. Rose said one benefit of the platform was that it was less costly than other forms of paid media; it wasn’t a huge “six-figure experiment.” She also appreciated that Reddit gives advertisers account managers to work with who can help provide detailed plans and roadmaps.

“It takes some work, but it’s worth doing,” she said.