How Reddit’s Interactive Ads Are Designed to Match It’s Community-Driven Culture
Reddit introduced interactive ads to its platform last week and it will give advertisers and brands the opportunity to create custom, interactive ads in lieu of the traditional (and soon to be dated in a few years) image, video, or text formats.
The interactive ad units on Reddit now span everything from fully custom creative activations to quick, repeatable formats such as countdowns, quizzes, dynamic reveals, and trivia. The range is designed to give advertisers flexibility, whether they want a bespoke campaign or a lighter-lift option that still delivers high impact.
Powered by Reddit’s Developer Platform, these interactive formats allow brands to build more creative, engagement-driven campaigns. The company positions them as tools for driving upper-funnel impact, strengthening brand affinity, and turning user participation into measurable action
The new format is the platform’s response to demand for more top-of-funnel formats that help marketers expand brand awareness. It is currently in alpha testing and Paramount is the first brand to take advantage of it for The Running Man’s film promotion.
Ben Rosen, Senior Creative Strategist at Reddit, said Every Interactive Ad unit is essentially created as an app built on Reddit’s Developer Platform, which means it plays natively in-feed. That allows brands to create high-impact, immersive ad experiences like games, dynamic reveals, or gamified challenges, as well as lower-lift, repeatable templates like countdowns, quizzes and polls.
“Interested advertisers can partner directly with KarmaLab to create custom, bespoke units based on their creative goals, while templatized units will allow mid-market and small-to-medium-sized businesses to easily serve ads without significant lift,” said Rosen.
Paramount isn’t the only alpha tester for this new ad unit. Early partners also include Electronic Arts, the Ad Council, and Red Bull. Reddit remains a place where people seek answers, share ideas, and connect, and Interactive Ads are designed to meet users in that mindset.
The format lets redditors tap, swipe, and play, turning passive viewing into active engagement. These units function as open canvases, giving brands room to build everything from mini-games to dynamic reveals, countdowns, and quizzes that feel natural on the platform. Paramount, Red Bull, and The Ad Council did not respond to a request for comment on this story and Electronic Arts declined to comment.
That level of creative freedom is rare, and Rosen says it’s eager to expand testing with more brands as the format evolves.
“We will apply learnings from this initial phase, with the goal of making Interactive Ads available to managed advertisers in the year ahead,” said Rosen.
This comes at a time when the platform paused its plans to lock certain subreddits behind a paywall. With Reddit reporting 68% year-over-year revenue growth on its latest earnings report and gaining prominence in AI-driven discovery, community-led engagement is clearly reshaping influence. As AI shifts how people find and evaluate brands, resonance will matter more than reach.
“Reddit’s new Interactive Ads are more than a format innovation, they mark a participation shift. The smartest marketers will see this not as media inventory, but as a behavioral lab: a space to understand how people choose to engage with storytelling, not just consume it,” said Stephanie Harris, CEO & founder of PartnerCentric “Paramount’s pilot proved that when interaction feels organic to the platform, participation becomes its own performance metric.”
