By Marty Swant • January 7, 2025 •
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Reddit is rolling out several new tools for marketers that aim to demystify the platform and help advertisers engage more with users.
A new free tool for marketers called Reddit Pro Trends aims to help marketers track trends and communities in real time across the platform by analyzing keywords and phrases within Reddit conversations. Reddit also has a new ad format called AMA Ads, which gives marketers more ways to use paid media to reach the right types of users that might be interested in the platform’s “Ask Me Anything” conversations.
The updates, announced on Tuesday at CES, aims to surface contextually relevant real-time mentions of brand, topics and categories so marketers know where they should focus both paid and organic content. Pro Trends is powered by several machine learning tools such as named entity recognition, which uses natural language processing to help advertisers track more than 100,000 “smart” keywords. (For example, it’ll help a marketer know when a user or subreddit is talking about “apple” the fruit versus Apple the company.)
Both large and small advertisers — such as the NBA and Wayfair — have beta-tested Reddit Pro Trends for real-time and longitudinal analyses. Jim Squires, Reddit’s EVP for business marketing and growth, said the company sees attracting SMB advertisers as a “huge opportunity” and “big focus” for the platform in 2025. He mentioned a small brand called Yes Milady, which used Reddit to find vegan communities that might be interested in their vegan seasonings. Other examples of early testers include the NBA and Wayfair.
“What’s really special and unique here are those conversations that are happening within all the communities across Reddit,” Squires said.
Of course, Reddit’s not the first platform to offer ways to help marketers track user trends. Google Trends has been a marketer mainstay for years while others like Pinterest and TikTok also have their own features for their specific platforms and user bases. However, marketers see the appeal of having more ways to analyze Reddit’s text-focused nature, which could be especially helpful since Reddit language is often unique to the platform.
The ability to analyze content has big implications for understanding users interests and other areas like brand safety and ad-targeting. Since 2022, Reddit’s acquired three AI startups — Memorable AI, MeaningCloud and Spiketrap — which have helped build new internal tools for audience insights, text analysis and advertising.
Reddit Pro gives advertisers visibility into the conversations they’re in that they should be in, said Rob Gaige, Reddit’s head of global insights. He also noted advertisers could use it to gain a foothold with new users, new groups and potential customers or further build on existing brand equity.
“That’s really the magic of how Reddit Pro works: It shows you where you are,” Gaige said. “You can double down on that, but it shows you where you need to be and gives you a strategy for how to enter that conversation.”
One way advertisers might use Reddit Pro Trends is to identify audiences buying a takeover ad, said Jack Johnston, Tinuiti’s senior social innovation director, who noted the “raw,” and “wordy” nature of the platform. Advertisers might also use it to analyze conversations to see if brand mentions are outdated, drive fresh conversations, or maybe create new interest in an improved product that previously customers didn’t like.
“It’s very descriptive and it’s meant to be a conversation forum,” Johnston said. “… What’s different is that those other platforms are very punchy and real-time. There isn’t as much of a real time aspect to Reddit.”
Despite Reddit’s user base being smaller than other platforms, Reddit is ” one of the last text-based sources of truth on the internet,” said Erik Hamilton, vp of search and social at digital agency Good Apple.
“Adding ‘reddit’ to the end of any Google query is almost second nature to many of us,” noted Hamilton. “The Pro Trends tool will be an invaluable look into what real users are saying, though, given the smaller scale and ephemeral nature of trending topics, I wonder if the results will be less revelatory than hoped. Either way, I am excited to see what it looks like.”
The news builds on Reddit’s other recent updates powered by various types of AI. Last month, it debuted a new conversational search tool to help users more easily find answers within Reddit without relying on Google. (AI search could also potentially pave the way for new ad formats within search.) Last year, the company also announced new data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, which are using Reddit content to help train their own large language models.
The updates signal Reddit wants to be taken seriously when it comes to winning over ad dollars, said emarketer analyst Jeremy Goldman. The new AMA Ads are among the first Reddit ad formats to feel truly native. Pro Trends could help marketers “understand the underbelly of internet culture.”
The updates aren’t just about data, Goldman said: They also might help advertisers break into communities without “feeling like corporate overlords.” So far, that’s often been one of the biggest challenges since passionate users also are often the first to smell and repel any scent of “corporate insincerity.” However, treating Reddit like a “research lap instead of a minefield” could pay off.
“Reddit’s ad evolution won’t be complete until it bridges the gap between brand expectations and user authenticity,” Goldman said. “If it can walk that tightrope, Reddit might just become the digital marketer’s unlikely hero — and not just another platform trying to cash in on engagement metrics.”
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