With more than 52 million daily users, Reddit communities continue to multiply and expand their reach and influence. In this episode of “Is This Thing On?” GALE’s Ben James sits down with Reddit’s Will Cady to talk about the history of Reddit, the platform’s influential communities, and how marketers can tap into these communities for valuable cultural insights.
They discuss:
- (0:21) Reddit 101 and the platform’s influence on the internet and culture today
- (5:51) The communities that are rising to the top, plus r/VXJunkies explained
- (8:54) How marketers can use Reddit for new sources of inspiration and the different tools and insights made available to them
- (15:16) The uniquely influential Reddit audience and community – and the important conversations happening there that brands should be engaging with
- (19:19) Leveraging Reddit to understand the future of moments and movements – like that of GameStop
We’ve included the full transcript of the conversation below for easy reading, plus have a listen on Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Audible, iHeart, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever else you get your podcasts!
TRANSCRIPT
Ben James:
Would love to just take a few minutes to talk about the history of Reddit, your role there, what KarmaLabs is specifically, and what you do. If you could, as if we dropped from outer space, can you explain Reddit to us?
Will Cady:
If we dropped from outer space? Well, that's an apt metaphor because part of the mythology of the Snoo character, the mascot, is that Snoo is essentially this alien that is observing humanity as its cultures evolve, for the purposes of understanding what makes people tick. I would say Reddit is a bit like a complex of cities in the digital realm. Every subreddit is a community, it has its own culture, it has its own different roles and rituals and language and rhythms. And Reddit is a community of communities, over 100,000, from every different kind of human interest you could possibly imagine. So it's invisible if you were to drop in from space, it's not on the earth itself, other than maybe in our offices, but if you could plug into the internet, you would find it's just a vast beehive of human activity of every kind.
Ben James:
I'm already excited about where we're going. So I think one of the things that we've talked about in the past is that a lot of people need help going from, how can we get into Reddit from square one, from wherever we are in the way that we encounter Reddit. So one way that we start explorations with any platform partner is that we try to learn about the formats available to us, the funnels that are there, or the insights about the communities that are there. Reddit has a lot to share and there's a lot to be known that is unknown across these three spaces about Reddit. Could you talk a little bit about the history of it, what is available to marketers there, and where things are headed a little bit?
Will Cady:
Yeah. First and foremost, Reddit is extremely influential on the culture of the internet on any given day, week, month, news cycle, what have you. And it's been that way for the better part of 20 years, at this point. It's been a fixture of the internet for a very long time, and that has given us the ability to see how internet culture really ticks across a lot of different hive cycles. Right now, you almost get whiplash in how fast people are running from Web3 to AI and then to the next thing and to the next thing. Reddit has been around for so long that we're able to basically take a historic perspective on the history of the internet, from the origins of Web2 to now the dawn of Web3, and really take a look at, well, what does it actually look like when a trend is going to shake things up and change the conversation and culture? What does it look like when it's going to be a blip? What does it look like when it's going to be a quick moment?
But that is where I would begin, just in the simple fact of that, that this is a highly relevant space for marketers, for creators to be looking at, to really understand where the conversation is now in culture, but also where it's going, and on top of that, where it's been. We have a long archive of great content on the platform that you can still find very easily.
Ben James:
I'm tempted to jump in and talk about what happened with GameStop, or I'm tempted to jump in and talk about Reddit AF, I'm tempted to talk about Reddit Hot Takes. There are all of these resources and stories that are good to deep dive and go deeper on, but I think a conversation about community, through something I saw from you recently, would be a really fun way in, and then we'll go into all of that.
Will Cady:
Yeah, sure.
Ben James:
Can we talk a little bit about VX Junkies? So I saw this thing from you on LinkedIn recently, and I think it's relevant to what you were just talking about a little bit,. But recently, you posted this on LinkedIn. "If you're not paying attention to this tech trend, you're messing up. While everyone is fixated on AI, they're missing the vastly more impactful breakthroughs the JX07 brings the VX space. This is a once in a generation type of breakthrough, bigger than AI, bigger than mobile, bigger than the light bulb. Forget everything you know. A recent leak in Reddit's VX Junkies community was the spark that lit the wildfire that has VC scrambling to revise their portfolios. As the data in this chart clearly shows, a new method of channeling Rontgen attractors has boosted capable outputs of voynichian reactions exponentially. The key discovery was that, by calibrating Moussorgski spin between a magnifying quadritangent and the colloidal time space you get when running the JX07 through ruby-quartz VibroVision, you can achieve a Kolsko-Miranov reaction without having to follow a zeta pattern."
Can you help us a little bit, really try to understand what's going on here? 'Cause this was done through VX Junkies. It is about a trend that is happening right now, which is what we should come to you in, but I think it's a good way in to talk about what community is. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of the post in that particular thread?
Will Cady:
Yeah. Every marketer knows zeta patterns. If you're not mapping your campaigns to zeta patterns, what are you even doing?
Ben James:
I think we just added it to the four Cs actually as a marketing practice, data patterns.
Will Cady:
Right, right. I think I have to break the unwritten but cardinal rule of VX Junkies here and just explain it. The whole thing's a joke. The whole thing is an absolute wind-up. And it's a community that's been around for years, seven years at this point, and it started from, I think, an offshoot of the highly technical communities inside of Reddit. And it just became a place where people just made up jargon. And it's this just incredible place where, every now and then, one of its posts will get upvoted enough to reach the front page, and then people will come across it in their feeds and they'll come in and then they'll inevitably leave a comment or a post, and they'll just be like, "What is going on here?" And nobody ever tells them what's going on.
Ben James:
Amazing.
Will Cady:
They just double down and triple down on it. And so, it's just this little unique niche pocket of culture with a joke that I find really deeply funny, and it's been there for a while. And in this moment, the reason I posted that on LinkedIn is because just the instant expertise in our space of all of us just talking about the way to work with ChatGPT or the way to create a web3 strategy, and the breathlessness of it, it just made the humor of VX Junkies so relevant to me.
And as somebody that's been at Reddit for a long time, I just have a whole back pocket full of these communities that have been around for a while that I just love in that way. But they're waiting for their moment to be brought to the surface. So it's really, it's an incredible archive of great ideas that you can just have at the ready when the cultural conversation moves to a point that it's time to bring them out.
Ben James:
Well, dude, marketers want into that stuff. There's this natural thing that happens from this that, when you're showing up authentically in something that is irony or a joke or something that's about the relatedness of the people that are inside of the communities, marketers want in. Can you break a few of those communities for us, of, "Hey, these ought to be bubbled to the top. Let's talk about a couple of these things." Where should marketers be going to source new inspiration in some of these places that you're talking about? What's in your back pocket?
Will Cady:
Yeah. Well, what I'll do is, I'll just, rather than give some examples, I'll just give my hack, my trick, that I do.
Ben James:
Oh.
Will Cady:
... that not enough people are doing.
Ben James:
Here comes the hack.
Will Cady:
Here's the hack.
Ben James:
You heard it here first. This is the hack. Okay, got it.
Will Cady:
I'm going to put myself out of a job here. I've been going to the front page of Reddit, r/all, popular, whatever it is, however you get it on your app or your web browser. And what makes Reddit unique is our ability to sort the feed by specific variables. I sort by rising, which is any post that is just getting a little blip of upvotes right now, and might have the potential to get to the front page, or might not. And what I find there is that it's just like a cultural seismograph where you get these little things in there, and the term that I use is, "Curiosity." I look for curiosities. I look for something that just, "Huh, that's interesting. What is that?" And then I click into it and I try to teach myself what this community is.
And in fact, that really became a big part of the charter for KarmaLab's approach. Our mission statement was to turn curiosity into understanding so that, whether it's in culture or on the platform, when you go through these feeds and you see something... A great example is seeing VTubers, which is virtual YouTube influencers that are entirely anime characters. First started to see that bubble up in this context a couple of years ago. And I'm like, "Okay, this is a curiosity. This doesn't make sense to me, but something is coming here." Double click, go in, look at the community, and you're seeing a culture that is coming and is really starting to come to bear now in America, because it was actually something that was really popular, is really popular, in Asia. But this is the blueprint by which people are engaging with AI influencers and virtual influencers and these characters that simply aren't real.
And that's the hack. Just sort by rising and see what you get.
Ben James:
That is a great way in. What a great beginning. I want to say, a lot of us became very curious about Reddit late last year. It naturally started coming up in a lot of conversations with our clients. And because marketers do want to be part of these communities, I really appreciate the hack, and that's an amazing way to even just begin and get a little bit of experience before meeting with you and you all. But I want to highlight and give you a chance to talk a little bit about as well is that you do have a lot of tools, reports and access to what marketers can use in other different ways. I mentioned it before, but now, can you spend a little bit of time talking about Reddit AF or Hot Takes, and how do those come to life and how do you see marketers using those effectively?
Will Cady:
Yeah. Hot Takes is really it's Reddit's global insights team doing what I just described for you, for marketers, for the industry, and basically just watching the horizon, whale watching, in a way. And they see something breach the surface off in the distance, and they have the ability to really size it. They can look at, "All right. What is the growth of this community? What is the increase in activity in this community? What are the metrics that we have that can point to specifically why we think this is going to be important in two months, six months, a year from now, or urgently?" You can sense its velocity, in a way.
And we just deliver that to our partners in easy to digest reports and materials, sometimes even little audio nuggets where we're just having conversations about these things. 'Cause it gives us a chance to really geek out, and people that work at Reddit love Reddit, and then talk amongst ourselves and be like, "All right. What's the good stuff? What do we want to share with the market?" And that's Hot Takes, is we try to do that as seamlessly as we can, make it easy to understand.
Ben James:
Can you think of anything that's happening right now, or even in the last couple of days, that is popping for you right now, that you're just so curious about and diving into, like, "Hey, watch out for this"?
Will Cady:
Well, what has my interest right now are some of the more protracted trends that represent some larger shifts. So the low and no alcohol communities, the communities where people are looking at lifestyles without lawns, and they're basically figuring out how to have edible gardens. And people are just rethinking the foundational stuff of what modern, particularly American, culture is. Just rethinking the lawn, rethinking the car, rethinking their alcohol intake. That to me is the most interesting area to watch on Reddit right now, because people know a little bit more about what they don't want, and then they're now shifting to what they do want.
From a cultural standpoint, that's incredibly interesting, because you're seeing the invention of a new mainstream culture in real-time at the seed stage. From a marketing standpoint, it's an incredible opportunity because some of these deeply entrenched habits and brand product purchase decisions are being uprooted right now, so something new can come in. If you have something to offer a person on Reddit who's rethinking what to do with their lawn because they no longer want to plant grass, that's an incredible opportunity to build a long-term strategy for your entire business.
Ben James:
Where do you begin taking people on a journey like that? Even just now, you used a great metaphor, just beginning with a metaphor of watching the horizon for the whales breaching the surface. But I've noticed over time that you take inspiration from lots and lots of different places that really helps people along. What's step one for somebody to jump into this and make confident decisions about how they take a brand or business through a journey across Reddit?
Will Cady:
Yeah. I'm a big metaphor guy, makes me sound smart. The journey? Well, you got to start easy. So that's really where I anchor down in just the simple fact that Reddit is a extremely relevant and influential space with an audience that is unique. You really can't find this audience on other platforms. So from a simple standpoint of a marketing strategy, this is an audience that you want to get your message to. It's where opinions are formed, it's where people find a sense of belonging, it's where the whole community trend that we're seeing right now is really blossoming out of. So you don't have to overthink it, just show up. The conversation is happening, just be in it. So that's usually where we start.
And then, the next question is, "Okay, yeah. We're ready to do something on the platform, but what do we say? What do we do?" And from there, we'll start with your existing assets. Just what are you saying on other channels? What are your videos? What are your images? What's your approach? And we can find a match in terms of which communities are going to resonate with those messages, based upon the content and the conversation that we see in those places. We can also help you as a marketer really learn these cultures that you might want to step into. And this gets a little bit more advanced at this point, but we'll start to surface some specific communities.
We talked about VX Junkies and how full of jargon it is. That's the joke that reveals a larger truth of everything else, which is that all of these communities have their own language. And so, when you're speaking to these communities, if you see a community that you really want to be a part of, then speak the language, learn the culture, learn the history, and make reference to those things in your ads. So KarmaLab will help a brand craft those ads in a way that's going to resonate with the culture of the communities that it's trying to reach.
So then, you earn your membership as a brand. If your product becomes fundamental to the culture of a community, that's really transformative. We've seen, for example, the MyFitnessPal app, calorie counting app, has become embedded in the culture of the r/fitness community for, "This is the tool that we use to count our calories." That's enormously valuable for a brand.
From there, then you have the discussion of, "Well, should we have a space for ourselves? Should we create our own community?" And that's when you're really getting into the bottom of the funnel. And it's more than conversion. We're taking the journey through conversion into loyalty and advocacy, where when you build a community, you're actually creating a flywheel, where this is a cohort, this is an audience, that is effectively marketing on your behalf because they believe in the value of your brand's or product's proposition.
Ben James:
So how long have you been with Reddit? Can you remind me of that?
Will Cady:
Seven years.
Ben James:
Seven years. I can think of some things that are pretty public things, like all that happened with GameStop. If you want to see the story of that, you could Google that and go on a wormhole adventure through articles across all kinds of publishers and platforms across the world. And that seems to be a movement itself that was started. Can you talk a little bit about that, and can you talk a little bit about other movements that have also started that maybe you've been witness to you that, "Hey, this happened and it was a thing, but we didn't really give it the same kind of highlight and concert"? Maybe through talking a little bit about GameStop, then you could then talk a little bit about some other examples of some patterns that are out there that we should pay attention to.
Will Cady:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, GameStop was the moment that the rest of the world figured out what we already knew about the power of Reddit. And Reddit had been doing things like that over and over and over again at different scales, but this was just so large and so stunning that it really became that beacon that people that may not have considered Reddit before, really were just like, "I got to look now. I got to understand what this thing... If this Reddit thing is doing that, then I got to really figure this out." And I think in a lot of respects, that really kicked off the chapter of the business that we're in right now, where we are seen, in a way, as having a unique culture, strategy, method, something going on in our platform, that's worth teaching. And that has been such a amazing thing for us to be able to go forth with, because before that moment, if we booked a hour long meeting with a partner, I would basically spend 30 minutes explaining what Reddit is.
Ben James:
All right.
Will Cady:
And now, those 30 minutes are back, and we can actually talk about something that is more interesting, to be honest, which is, what is community in the digital age? Or what is this particular insight that is impacting your industry or your business? So not having to really explain what Reddit is and what Reddit can do was such a powerful transformation for us.
And what I saw in that is, it shifted the culture of marketing in general from relying on trend lines to forecast the future, to recognizing the power of catalysts to change the future. And that is in keeping with how we see our platform and how we see the world, which is that each of these communities holds a potential future, and we can begin to recognize when one of these communities is getting ready to erupt and create something that is going to be a moment or a movement in the cultural conversation. And there's been so much that's been said about the moment that became a movement, or the movement that became a moment, that is GameStop, because it really reflected something so massive in our culture. Reddit is a place where you can see all of the potential futures like that that might be happening in the near-term or long-term future. And that was one moment that was in a long chain of many like it.
Reddit has a very altruistic spirit to it where people gather around for a shared purpose. And you look at, I think there was an earthquake in Nepal, earthquake in Haiti, I believe, or maybe it was a couple of different natural disasters where Reddit would just routinely, basically, crowdfund about $200,000 or so. They did that for Emilia Clarke's charity when she... I think she suffered a brain aneurysm, of some sort, and the community just rallied around it. And so, they love, as a community, to come together and feel their power to make an impact. And that's those catalyst moments is when there is something that is a clear purpose that people can rally towards a singular point, it's just an unstoppable tidal wave and it's an incredible force to harness. So we saw that over and over and over again through the years, but GameStop was the moment that everybody saw that and basically stopped asking us who we are, and started asking us how we work.
Ben James:
You also talked about having this one hour with clients and other people and that 30 minute session.
Will Cady:
Yeah.
Ben James:
And that is so much of what we do experience our lives with, is that, okay, we have to come to this table in a room someplace, maybe it's over Zoom now, maybe it's around a table someplace, and it makes me think about your team and the makeup of your team. Can you talk a little bit about who are the people that gather around that table from Reddit to come and talk to clients and agencies about the opportunities in the future? Can you talk a little bit about the makeup of your team?
Will Cady:
Oh man, I love this question. So the KarmaLab team is really special because the goal with which we built it was to try to make the most human creative strategy team that we could. So we were looking at a lot of people that had basically the core competencies of what you would call a, "Creative strategist," then a, "Yes and." So for me, I spent 15 years as a professional musician before I did any of this. We've got people on the KarmaLab team that were EMT drivers, that were philosophy majors, that were standup comedians, that are painters, writers, gamers, all of these different perspectives on cultures, and it was fabricating this multifaceted gem where every pane looks in a different direction and culture. And it's their human experience, what they bring to the team, that completes the whole picture.
And when we get a brief on something, if it's a brief on music, I want to be in on that. I might not be the strategist that's at the table that's servicing the partnership, but we have a great... There's a member of the KarmaLab team named Kay Toll that when she came in, she brought a scrum method with us that we basically just, Tuesday mornings, just anybody from the KarmaLab team that has something that they want to work with a larger group on, they're just going to bring it in and get that feedback from all of these different perspectives. And then, they're the one that's responsible for completing the work, turning it into a presentation and a program and a pitch and whatnot, but the team itself is just, it's honestly a circle of really good humans, really unique humans brought together.
Ben James:
Man, it's so special, your human take, on the team and the place and what's happening there, and it's just really refreshing. So today you are the Reddit global brand ambassador.
Will Cady:
Correct.
Ben James:
Can you talk a little bit about that role now, and moving forward, what you see for Reddit, the world, the community, and you? What do you see in that role for what you want to do in the future with Reddit?
Will Cady:
Yeah. I see it as a continuation of what I've always done at Reddit, just in different roles. So when I first started, it was an exploration of the advertising partnership opportunity in Los Angeles. And the first thing that I had to do at that point was go around and communicate what Reddit is. But there's something that I learned in that time that we're really going to bring into the approach for this, where it's on a much larger stage on a global level, which is basically the Speak, Listen, Build framework, where we have a story that we want to tell about who we think we are, and to go out and tell that, and then listen to how people respond. Because in between of who we are and who other people see us as, that's where we want to build.
And we've got a lot of different messages, like the power of community, for example. The power of community for who? Well, that's the power of community for brands, that's the power of community for creators, that's the power of community for the European market. And there's a way to deliver that story and then just see what people come back with. People reflect their thoughts. You can see where the energy and the excitement is, like, "Oh, that's interesting. I want to do some of that."
And so then, I really feel that a portion of my role comes back to conveying that to our internal teams, to just say, "Hey, I went out, had this conversation, was in this forum with this group, and here's where the excitement was. Is there something here that we can build that is on our roadmap, or that is net new, or that is something that we already have, that is just looking for a name, because that's where the resonance is?" So even though it's very much an evangelist role and it's about speaking, the listening part is the most important way to how I want to approach it.
