The “Why People Trust Reddit Recommends” station was one of the activation’s most interactive elements with a conveyor belt carrying figurines representing different topic categories.
Making a splash with its “Explorers Club,” full of popular memes and cultural trends, for its first showing at the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Reddit returned to the French Riviera this year, June 19-23, with an all-new activation anchored by research. Housed in a redesigned red-orange structure covered in a façade made up of words (an aggregation of the most popular questions asked on Reddit), Reddit’s Cannes HQ brought to life the conversations and recommendations that take place across its communities.
“All of our activations are always going to highlight our communities. Communities are really the heart of Reddit,” says Susan Billingsley, senior director-global customer marketing, Reddit. “We consider Cannes to be our Super Bowl. It’s a global gathering place for our industry and for senior leaders and decision-makers in our space. So it’s a really great way for us to participate and connect with our partners, clients or prospective clients, and for us to also tell a story about who we are.”
More from Cannes Lions:
- Cannes Lions 2023: Eight Creative Experiential Tactics We Loved
- Q&A: Meta’s Global Experiential Lead on the 2023 Cannes Lions Reels SuperStudio
Launching the “Reddit Recommends” marketing program that positions the platform as a recommendation engine, the activation’s exterior was branded as “the place to go when you want to know” and featured an oval-shaped screen asking for a recommendation, such as, “What perfume do you always get compliments on?” and a countdown to find out. The main activation took place on the first floor, and a second level featured open-air meeting spaces, seating and data-driven wall displays.
Inside, red-orange was incorporated as an accent color to highlight interactive signage, screens, games and tabletops, contrasting light-colored wood floors, cream and baby blue wall panels, and white planters and cubed ottomans. Portholes in the walls gave attendees a look into a kind of kaleidoscope of popular communities and branded spaces. Of course, Reddit’s Snoo alien mascot was featured prominently throughout the footprint, as well as the site’s quirky “Redditisms,” including acronyms, bananas for scale and birds with arms.
Stations showed Cannes attendees how Reddit works, why people trust it for recommendations and how influence is shifting.
A manifesto laying out the “Reddit Recommends” concept prepared attendees for the various stations they would encounter walking through the space. First up, festivalgoers learned how Reddit works by flipping through the pages of a hanging, poster-sized storybook and then moved to the next station to learn how influence is shifting to real people giving authentic opinions, rather than influencers who have dominated the digital landscape of late.
Billingsley calls the “Why People Trust Reddit Recommends” station the “most fun interactive element.” From a conveyor belt, attendees could pick up blue and orange figurines—like a megaphone, pretzel, house, question mark and lightbulb—representing different topic categories and place them on a pedestal, triggering a series of projections of relevant user-generated content or communities on a giant screen in the middle of the space. Continuing the interactivity, the “How Big the Opportunity Is” exhibit featured a Rube Goldberg-style wall display about the recommendation economy on Reddit and how advertisers could play a role. As participants interacted with the different shapes and pulleys, they learned that “every second, an average of two redditors ask for a recommendation” and that “redditors tend to receive 19 responses to their questions on average.”
Festivalgoers could gather on the second floor of Reddit’s activation in an open-air meeting space with seating and data-driven wall displays.
New for 2023, the final station showcased Reddit’s ad products that would allow brands to participate in the site’s conversations and recommendations. In addition, every day at 1 p.m., Reddit hosted a product drop where the brand gave away a free product based on the platform’s most recommended products, such as Apple AirPods. In lieu of traditional swag, Reddit introduced its Karma Kash initiative, encouraging attendees to scan QR codes to choose a charitable organization to which Reddit would make a donation.
“We wanted to make sure there was an actionable takeaway for everyone, no matter how much time they spent in our activation,” Billingsley says. “What we see is that some people are there and have a ton of time to really experience the whole experience; some people are there to make a connection or to have a meeting. And so we built an experience that told a full story and a really good narrative if you were able to experience it from start to finish, but we also set it up in stations or modules so that even if you were only there for five minutes and only got to experience a station or two, they work as a standalone story so everyone could leave with an actionable insight.”
Reddit used learnings from its first showing to create a more accessible activation that spoke to all attendees, no matter their knowledge of the platform. According to Billingsley, presenting user-generated content was the best way to highlight existing communities, show how they work and help advertisers, marketers and festivalgoers understand different subreddits. About 1,800 attendees explored the space, up from the 1,200 guests who came through 2022’s Explorers Club.
“I think what we wanted to evolve was that the experience last year was a little bit of ‘inside baseball,’ meaning that it worked super well for people who really understood Reddit and were either Redditors themselves or had experience working with the platform. This year, what we really wanted to do was meet people where they are,” she says. “Last year was a lot of awareness, whereas this year was a lot about participation and education, so we’re going to keep expanding.” Agency: Giant Spoon.
Photo credit: Reddit
