It’s all got a bit too ‘hare-y’ for me

Reddit is not really a hare; it’s a tortoise, and the advertisers making the biggest impact on Reddit have embraced its tortoise qualities, writes WPP Media’s David Wilding.

In many ways, Reddit shouldn’t really work. It favours text over video (not cool, Grandad!). It’s not exactly beautifully designed, the onboarding process is clunky and finding the answers you’re looking for can take a lot of time and effort.

Despite this, Reddit is flourishing. In its most recent quarterly results, it reported that it now has 116m daily active users worldwide (up 19% year-on-year), with much of the analysis attributing this to Reddit’s increasingly valued ‘human element’.

It seems that more and more people are prepared to overlook Reddit’s, er, charming clunkiness in return for the reward of feeling ‘ITK’ and access to honest advice from communities of real people who know their stuff.

I recently saw Reddit referred to as “rocket fuel” for LLMs on account of the tendency for Large Language Models (LLMs) to scrape Reddit for human-generated content and opinions (last year, Statista claimed that Reddit accounted for up to 40% of citations in LLMs).

The ironic thing is that the term “rocket fuel” heavily implies speed, but Reddit is ultimately a slow burner. Its credibility comes from human interaction, and that can be slow and effortful. You can’t really fake or hurry this stuff. For all the talk of “rocket fuel”, Reddit is not really a hare; it’s a tortoise.

It’s interesting that the advertisers making the biggest impact on Reddit have embraced its tortoise qualities.

Skoda Octavia playfully celebrated the R/CarTalk subreddits’ long-standing obsession with the car; L’Oréal’s Michael CeraVe Super Bowl ad was inspired by a Reddit post many years prior that asked, “Did Michael Cera develop CeraVe?” Last month, we saw Dove displaying Reddit users’ comments about its product (not all of which were flattering) in its Out of Home media.

Tortoise-paced media

Beyond Reddit, I actually suspect that much of today’s media landscape is more tortoise-paced than we might think at first.

For every news-based, hare-paced ‘emergency podcast’, there’s a history podcast meticulously breaking down events that happened 400 years ago at a tortoise pace.

For every must-see, mass-watched, hare-paced live sport event or “please don’t spoil yesterday’s episode, I haven’t seen it yet” reality TV series, there’s a whole lot of Coronation Street, The Chase and re-runs of Friends steadily plodding along like our tortoise.

Just last month we saw more evidence of the enduring popularity of ‘tortoise’ formats when The Sidemen licensed Family Fortunes from Fremantle and adapted it for YouTube with the first episode gaining over 4m views in a week (as somebody who accidentally ended up hosting a weekly game of Blankety Blank on Twitter for five years, I like to think The Sidemen has copied me).

Advertisers and media planners tend to get excited about the ‘hares’. But are we overlooking the opportunity in the tortoises?

Perhaps we should be spending more time thinking about the media that plods along. The daily media miracles that we overlook because they’re not new or fast-paced. Honestly, the daily audience for Popmaster on Greatest Hits Radio will blow your mind!

In a world that can feel like it’s relentlessly speeding up, it’s natural that we instinctively respond by adapting hare-like behaviours. We look for trends, we make predictions, we speak of transformation. But even in this context, taking a more ‘tortoise’ approach strategy can help us prevail in a hare-paced world.

More often than not, it’s the ‘tortoise’ brands that have earned a reputation and trust by turning up consistently, delivering for people, and building distinctive offerings with the highest LLM visibility.

TikTok trends can feel entirely random and hare-like, but last summer’s “Nothing Beats a Jet2 Holiday” fun and games wouldn’t have happened if Jet2 hadn’t slowly and consistently invested in building an association between its brand and that Jesse Glynn song over several years, via TV and radio in the most ‘tortoise’ way imaginable.

Have you noticed how Currys seem to do organic social videos so much better than brands they compete with? It’s because they do it consistently, have a strategy and stick to it. Another ‘tortoise’ that gives the impression of a ‘hare’.

These examples and so many others show that a slow and effortful strategy that stays on the same path isn’t boring or a sign of failure – it’s the best way of setting your brand up for success.

We rarely do it, but if we were to stop and ask ourselves, “What hasn’t changed?” we might quickly realise that it’s ok to have the same, or a very similar, strategy from one year to the next. It might even be a very good thing.

The hare makes a lot of noise, but the tortoise ultimately wins.

David Wilding is EVP strategy at WPP Media and writes a monthly column for The Media Leader.