At this point, there’s no escaping ads. The amount of revenue that they produce for major companies is indisputable. While it’s preparing its initial public offering (IPO), the company just made an announcement regarding advertisers. Reddit just introduced its free-form ads. This will make ads on the platform appear more like regular posts.
Most people probably shuttered when they read that last part. When scrolling through Reddit, folks want to make sure to differentiate between ads and regular posts. Let’s face facts back, people avoid advertisements most of the time.
However, Reddit says that free-form ads have already shown some promising data
On Thursday, the company announced free-form ads. Basically, this will give advertisers more flexibility when making their advertisements. “Advertise like a Redditor”, the post said.
It stated that it wants advertisers to interact with potential customers in the same way that Redditors interact with others on this site. This is something that the company believes will drive engagement for advertisers. Advertisers will be able to make ad posts using several types of media just like a regular post. In fact, the announcement says that free-form ads are actually inspired by the megathread.
In its announcement post, Reddit stated that this ad format is actually seeing results. It said that companies like Kraft Heinz, Leica, and Just Eat Takeaway have seen an increase in their clickthrough rate (CTR). On average, they saw a 28% increase as well as more community engagement. So, this gave Reddit the go-ahead to push it to more advertisers- the numbers don’t lie.
The thinking behind this
So, it’s obvious that Reddit wants corporate companies to interact with users without being so… corporate. Honestly, that’s the main goal of any company advertising. The key word is relatability. Brands strive to resonate with the demographic they’re trying to sell to. This is one reason why we had the Milk ad showing a streamer playing Fortnite breaking their refrigerator with the pickaxe, collecting a milk bottle, and breaking out into a Fortnite dance (this is a real ad by the way…).
Free-form ads will allow advertisers to communicate with users in a more organic way. Rather than feeling like a company is pushing a product on you, it wants you to feel like you’re just interacting with another peer.
However, this could have its downside. Not too many people like the feeling of clicking on an ad thinking that it’s a regular post. So, with free-form ads, we expect this to happen much more often across the app and website. It will probably cause many users to be angry. We will just have to see how this goes.
