The Secrets Behind Reddit's Most Successful Ad Campaign: Joe Federer Interview

Reddit loves when something that happens online affects real life, and I think the internet generally loves that principle when you can do something on the internet and it has this real-world impact outside. Uh, so my name is Joe Federer. I run a social and digital shop called An Internet Reference, and I'm the author of The Hidden Psychology of Social Networks. The Hidden Psychology of Social Networks is an analysis of social media through the lenses of evolutionary biology and psychology.

I love that. All right, let's talk about the role of evolutionary biology and psychology within social media. Can you give me a specific example of sort of how that plays out?

One of the things that blows me away is that we have in our pockets this computer that is like hundreds of times more powerful than the rocket that got us to the moon. The power— there's so much technology in our pockets, and the speed at which technology is evolving, is it's this insane curve. And social media, if we look at it, the functionality isn't that different from like the forums that we had 15 years ago. There's little things like, oh, now video plays better, it's higher quality and stuff. But the reality is social media is about humans way more than it's about technology. And we know a whole lot about humans. Like we have been, we have studied humans for a long, long time and the scientific method applied to social media. And that's this really interesting perspective on why do people spend so much time in social media? Why do they have 9 profiles on average across different social media sites? Why does that number keep increasing every year? If all people are doing is this simple, oh, I'm just getting a dopamine hit because people like my post. Then wouldn't we expect social media to consolidate into just a few networks? But what happens is people get different satisfaction and different value out of different kinds of social networks. Like when I'm, when I'm Joe Federer and I'm connected exclusively to the people who know me offline, I'm a different version of myself than when I'm on Reddit and I'm anonymous and I'm organized around a bunch of interest-based communities and meme communities that I think are funny. They're, they're the same me, but they're, they're different versions of me.

Awesome. Going to Reddit specifically, I'd love to hear the role Reddit plays in culture and movements, or however you kind of want to position it. Something that highlights the impact that Reddit has.

Yeah. So it's interesting to think about the role that anonymous communities have played on the internet now and for the last 20 years and how will evolve going forward. I think all of the Web3 predictions that I hear feel very familiar to me as somebody who's been participating in Reddit for a long time. The idea that you get to kind of own your data or that your data is kind of yours to decide whether it gets distributed, right? It's not a place that like verifies your name or your age or your, I mean, it, it'll verify your email address now if you want it to, but you don't have to. It's, it's anonymous space. Anonymous communities give people more ownership over not only like what happens in those communities, but the kinds of conversations that they can have. Like naturally Reddit has kind of stood as this bastion of free speech, maybe debatable in more recent years, but still like of the censorship laws along among the internet, Reddit is pretty lenient. I think When you look at how culture flows, like how ideas flow, how memes flow through the internet, the reality is places like Network are the top of the waterfall. Like there are these anonymous interest-based communities where people congregate to discuss the nuances of their deepest interest, whether it's like photography or art or this kind of meme culture or politics. People take from these kind of top of waterfall and share among their other kinds of social platforms. And rarely does content flow up that waterfall. Rarely does something trend on Instagram or Facebook and then make its way to Reddit unless in some kind of ironic, oh, look at what hilarious trend is happening on this social network. Reddit tends to be this kind of behind the scenes onlooker at what's, what else is happening in social media. Which gives it some, some extra drama.

Could you give like a real world example of like how that's played out an impactful way, like something in culture or something that like began in Reddit and then had significant sort of ripple effects outside it?

It's, this is like, there's so many examples of that. One of my favorite ones though is like, I was working at Reddit, it must have been 2016. Somebody posts their funny-looking cat on Reddit and says like, my cat looks like it has a frown on its face or something like that. Fast forward like 2 weeks and Grumpy Cat is now a trending meme on Facebook. Grumpy Cat gets interviewed on like Forbes and the Today Show. It's like all because this influential internet community thought something was funny, it flowed through the entire internet and really media ecosystem far beyond the internet. So you have these 200,000 communities percolating with little ideas and they're all, they all have their hierarchy of idea selection. They're all voting on what's the relevant content to be on the front page of my community. And then all of those communities compete for the front page of Reddit. And so the front page of Reddit ends up being this extremely potent set of ideas that have huge sharing potential, potential, and just flow everywhere else in the media ecosystem. I mean, that's why most of the memes that we know and love started on Reddit.

What's the value of sort of developing a community or like an audience on Reddit? Like, you know, people can earn karma. What do you get from that? What's, what's ultimately like the impact that that can have?

I think the best example, my favorite example from my portfolio of clients is HelloTushy. And HelloTushy has this kind of flywheel effect of Reddit engagement where they run a really wacky, funny tongue-in-cheek piece of creative as an ad. They enable comments, which is unusual on Reddit. They engage with people in those comments. Inevitably, the meme communities screenshot and post HelloTushy's ads without HelloTushy ever having to do that themselves. And then users summon HelloTushy into the comment thread to respond to the, oh, you guys are being fellow kids. Oh, this meme sucks. You guys aren't even funny. Because the Reddit environment and the Reddit community knows how much the HelloTushy brand is willing to engage, the community comes to our defense, which enables us to do those crazy experiences. We made a sticker for bidets that said Ass Blast 9000 because that was what Reddit voted up as the top name for what our bidet ought to be called.

Could you go into that campaign? I remember last time you explained it to me. I fucking love that.

This campaign is the highest upvote rate of any ad campaign on Reddit. And essentially what we did was we ran a campaign that said, if this ad gets 10,000 upvotes, we will make Ass Blast the name on our bidet sticker or best suggestion. And we opened the comment threads. There's this huge debate about like, Should it be the bum wash? Should it be the insert expletive here? Ass Blast actually won, which is kind of hilarious because that was the brand suggestion. But then we had to follow through. And so we created these bidet decals that would go on top of anybody's existing Tushy bidet and you crank it all the way up to Ass Blast if you really wanted to. And so those stickers sold out within like a couple of weeks. That became the most upvoted campaign.

In your mind, what is like the big lesson that other brands or marketers should apply?

So one extremely important element of that campaign is we spoke their language. We used the verbiage and memes that are developed naturally within the Reddit community. And Reddit is just like visiting another country. You wouldn't walk into another country without learning how to say hello or like, where's the bathroom? The same goes for Reddit. On Reddit, you just need to learn the language that has evolved within the community. One of the things that I think really made that campaign successful was that there were stakes to it. So we knew that Redditors downvote ads. That's part of the culture. And our ad said, if you upvote this, then something drastic happens. And we didn't expect people to meet us with a 10,000+ upvote score. We ended up with like 15,000 upvotes, but there were stakes to the campaign. If you do this, then this happens. And then we delivered, right? So we, we actually made the stickers. We followed up with community. We made sure that was the, that was the, they wanted it to be an Ass Blast 9000. They didn't want it to be some other butt pun. And they had a huge role in defining what the end product looked like, which I think was a really fun experience. And I think Reddit loves when something that happens online affects real life. And I think the internet generally loves that principle. When you can do something on the internet. And it has this real-world impact outside.

Why should like viewers go on Reddit? Like what, what is going to be the benefit to them?

Most social networks don't tell you what's trending. They tell you what everybody's social profile is willing to engage with in a, in a, in an aggregate. Reddit shows you what's trending without any of the filter of like, I'm worried about what people will think if I engage with this. I'm worried about the kind of conversation that my friends will have about me if I, if I post this or if I say something like this, Reddit gives you an unadulterated slice of what the internet really thinks about the most trending topics of right now. What's funny, dude, my only million-view TikTok was like a minute long.

How are you finding it so far?

It's interesting to see what happens when one post on your account gets a million views. It's now my average reach per post goes from like 200 to 400 to like 200 to 4,000, There's like this huge shift and like the algorithm must have like tagged my account differently now. So it's like, it's prioritizing it more. It, and there's a, there's this legacy, there's weird legacy of views. Like it's not the same as other social networks where the views spike on day one and they're dead by day two. It's like, I sometimes get waves of views weeks after, and I have no idea what's driving it, but it. It's interesting. One of my interests as a social strategist is finding what is the most competitive channel on the internet. And for a long time, Reddit was that. And now I think TikTok is kind of giving it a run for its money.

It's really hard in a lot of ways to figure out why one video is performing better than another. You can kind of have all the same elements, like a great hook, all these pieces, and then you're like, why did this one tank?

Yes. I think one of the invisible metrics is, uh, reports. Like I think that TikTok is kind of, it's kind of Disney-esque. Like it, it doesn't want to show anything remotely controversial in a feed because that might send you away.

Right.

And it's got plenty of fucking videos that it could, that it could send your way. So if there's two videos that are both really engaging and trending hot, and one of them has 10 reports on it and one of them has no reports on it, they're just going to serve you the no reports one.

Yeah, it's funny because at the same time there's like so many hot girls like dancing and stuff, you know, and like all that. I mean, obviously there's nothing wrong with that, but it is sort of like, why are some going through and others not? Like Instagram, people can like have like Linktree out to like their OnlyFans and all that. Yeah, TikTok doesn't allow that. And it's like You realize there's like a legit funnel for all these like funny OnlyFans girls. They have hot girl videos on TikTok and then they're like, find the good stuff on Instagram. And you go and it's like, yep, sure enough, they've got the OnlyFans there. I wonder how much of the Instagram is essentially just like they're so symbiotic.

Did you see that TikTok is, is now in like a lawsuit for ripping videos from other social sites and just hosting them?

I did see that. Yeah.

Brilliant.

That's funny.

It's brilliant. How opaque TikTok's algorithm is, is insidious. I think that there is huge potential for manipulation in that kind of algorithm where there's really no sense of like where the last video you saw came from and how it got to you. It just shows in your feed. I think for young people especially, that is a, that's a dangerous road to go down if we don't, if we don't understand why something gets placed. The best opposition, right, is Reddit, where it's like there's a— we don't have the algorithm exactly, but it's like there's upvotes, there's downvotes, there's a net score that you can see, and the top posts in a subreddit don't vary from how the community voted.