How brands are embedding themselves in World Cup hype on Reddit

Not every brand can be an official FIFA sponsor this World Cup season, and not every fan has the opportunity to attend a match in person. But everyone can express their soccer fandom, opinions, and emotions—the good and the bad—on social.

On Reddit, conversations about the World Cup have cropped up across subreddits, and not just sports-related ones; subreddits for host cities like r/KansasCity, r/Boston, and r/Dallas for example, have been flooded with love for the visiting players and fans. It’s an unexpected twist of behavior when it comes to sports fans on social, according to Kris Kennedy, senior manager of creative strategy for Reddit’s in-house creative agency, KarmaLab.

The KarmaLab team spent about a year in the lead-up to the World Cup trying to predict some of the general themes Reddit users might take to during the tournament in an effort to help advertisers engage with those conversations, he said. And while some of those expectations have lined up with trends from other major sporting events, the beauty of the game is that it’s impossible to guess exactly what storylines will emerge.

For brands, that means “listening first, and…talking second,” Kennedy told Marketing Brew. That is usually easier said than done—but in a World Cup environment overrun with TV ads, billboards, and sponsored hydration breaks, The Reddit team is aiming to help brands to reap rewards from smaller, second-screen campaigns that take their cues from fan behaviors.

Primal instincts

Some of the most successful Reddit activations of the World Cup so far have come from brands “tapping into some of these either broad-stroke or micro-behaviors that we see out of Redditors,” Kennedy said.

DoorDash, an official World Cup partner, embraced the idea that soccer fans rarely look away from the pitch for the full 90+ minutes during big games, given the fact that there are relatively few pauses. The brand worked with KarmaLab to create dozens of ads for individual products to be served contextually on Reddit based on “moments we could anticipate happening throughout a game,” Kennedy said. After a user’s team scores a goal, they might see an ad encouraging them to order drinks to celebrate. After a loss, they might get an ad prompting them to buy a plant for comfort.

It’s a strategy born of advice Kennedy said he often gives to marketers when talking with them about Reddit: Emulate Jane Goodall.

“Spend 15 minutes in a community that you think your audience might be in,” he said. “You don’t have to join the gorillas, but you can observe them and learn their techniques.”

Only human

That being said, marketers shouldn’t go too hard trying to blend in if they want their campaigns to land among Redditors, Kennedy advised. Instead, “they really need to think of their brand in the most human way possible,” he said. That can mean a lighter, “less polished” tone in copy and video assets, or creating a campaign that’s rooted in inherently “Reddit-y behavior,” he said.

Coors Light went the second route with an interactive ad based on its “Coooors Call” campaign. To translate it to Reddit, Coors Light and KarmaLab created an experience that appears in users’ feeds that allows them to pull a virtual tap handle, which then adds Os to a leaderboard, encouraging users to create the longest Coors chant. The voice of Argentine sports commentator Andrés Cantor, who appears in the Coors Light TV spot, plays as a sound effect during the interaction, Kennedy said, adding that the idea came out of the r/OddlySatisfying subreddit.

The activation, which will run through the end of the tournament, is meant to drive engagement and participation, Brad Feinberg, VP of media and marketing operations at Molson Coors, told us. As of July 8, it had racked up more than 1.7 million Os.

“It’s less about passive exposure and more about participation,” Feinberg said in an email. “That level of engagement complements what we’re doing across broadcast and retail.”

Kennedy said strategies like the ones DoorDash, Coors Light, and other brands have used on Reddit during the World Cup ultimately tend to require marketers to take more of a backseat than they may be used to, but noted that the approach can be replicated outside of soccer fandom as sports communities on Reddit grow.

“The way that we’ve coached a majority of our brands, whether it’s in the World Cup sphere or not, is to really think about themselves as a dinner party guest to the conversation,” he said. “How do you find ways to celebrate what you’re seeing? How do you find ways to create experiences where Redditors can play along and know that you’re a fan?”