Reddit will begin allowing advertisers to create custom, interactive ads in lieu of traditional image, video, or text formats, the company announced Monday.
The new format, Interactive Ads, enables advertisers to create immersive ad experiences that invite audience participation directly within the Reddit feed. These ads are the platform’s answer to demand for more top-of-funnel formats that help marketers expand brand awareness.
The offering is being piloted by Paramount with a campaign promoting adventure film The Running Man, starring Glen Powell, which premieres in theaters Nov. 14.
Paramount worked with Reddit’s in-house creative strategy arm KarmaLab and production house Hi From the Future to turn the film’s chase theme into a game called ‘Dodge the Drones.’ Users help Powell avoid drones and reach an escape door for a chance to see a personalized video from the A-lister, who then shares an exclusive clip from the movie that can only be viewed by winners of the game. Powell filmed the movements of his character against a greenscreen to be used for the ad.
“We’re always looking for new ways to invite audiences deeper into our storytelling worlds,” Tamar Teifeld, senior vice president of global digital marketing at Paramount Pictures, said in a statement shared with ADWEEK. The Interactive Ads push, she said, enables the brand to “tap into the visceral, high-adrenaline spirit of The Running Man in a way that’s both participatory and cinematic.”
The new ad format is designed to be adaptable for different kinds of advertisers. Small to medium-sized businesses can use templated, plug-and-play options that include quizzes, countdowns, trivia, and dynamic reveals, while enterprise-sized brands can work directly with Reddit’s team to develop fully customized builds tailored to meet their specific needs.
“The creative strategy team at Reddit is hyper-focused on building ideas and experiences that truly add value to the Redditor experience, and this format is just going to help us accelerate and amplify that 10x or 20x by creating these templates that scale to virtually any advertiser under the sun,” Andy Schneider, KarmaLab head of scale and innovation at Reddit, told ADWEEK.
Besides Paramount, early testers of Interactive Ads include Electronic Arts, Red Bull, and the Ad Council.
For its part, EA built a custom game that tracks Reddit users’ real-time progress toward a group mission to promote Battlefield 6.
Initial feedback from advertisers has been “really positive,” Schneider said. Reddit’s KarmaLab team is taking feedback and learning how to “refine [advertisers’] custom builds and informing how we create our template library.”
