Going bananas with an end-of-year recap campaign
Over 52 million users visit Reddit every day to dive into their interests, hobbies, and passions. And, with 2.8 million Subreddits on the platform, there’s one for every and any topic—no matter how hyper-specific or obscure.
For the 2022 end-of-year Reddit Recap, Reddit enlisted DEPT® to help create and promote a campaign that felt as unique and eccentric as their audience, while also cutting through the noise of other personalized platform recaps.
Standing out from the pack
From Spotify’s “Wrapped,” to Snapchat’s “Year End Story,” to Google’s “Year in Search,” personalized recaps of the year from online platforms have become a new annual tradition that’s much anticipated by audiences.
Differentiation was key to creating a successful campaign that would stand out from the other platforms participating in this trend and stick with Reddit’s audience.
Fortunately for us, Reddit also happens to be a different kind of brand, home to content that represents characteristics like these:
- Delightfully wholesome. See: r/mademesmile, which saw a 45% increase in views over the course of 2022.
- Shamelessly authentic. See: r/amitheasshole, which became the #1 most-viewed community in 2022.
- Community-minded. See: r/place, the collaborative canvas composed of 160+ million tiles each placed 10.4+ million Redditors—and the most upvoted post of 2022.
For us, however, our favorite characteristic of the Reddit brand had to be the way that it embraces wonderful weirdness—with communities like r/SEUT, where folks share sightings of Squirrels Eating Unusual Things, and r/antimeme, the place for folks with a penchant for humor that’s so dumb it’s funny.
With a brand and a community as awesome and eclectic as this, creating a campaign that would stand out from other platforms simply meant creating a campaign that felt like Reddit.
Creating two absolutely bananas campaigns
We crafted and produced two campaigns for Reddit Recap 2022. This included two hero videos as well as a creative ecosystem for each, complete with tease, launch, and sustain assets for sharing across all social platforms.
The first campaign paid homage to the Reddit community and their favorite unit of measurement: bananas. As part of their annual recap, Reddit records the amount users scrolled on the platform in bananas. For the campaign, we flipped this idea around and imagined an alternate universe where bananas were Reddit users.
Just like the platform, we embraced wonderful weirdness, played into the community’s bizarre sense of humor, and had a ton of fun doing it.
For our second campaign, we addressed the competition head-on, hijacking a fake Spotify ad and turning it into a hilarious Reddit Recap takeover.
With tens of millions of social shares every year, Spotify’s Wrapped is a juggernaut among platform recaps and all but impossible to compete with. By adopting Reddit’s brilliantly absurd and self-aware tone, we chose to lean into that challenge rather than fight it.
In turn, the juxtaposition between the two campaigns made it clear that, among its competitors, the Reddit brand is anything but typical.
Ripe results
Both campaigns captured the attention of our audience and the media, racking up tens of thousands of views across social channels and even earning some recognition in Campaign US.
Best of all, though, was the way that the campaigns garnered the praise of Redditors, who seriously dug the tone and the characters we created. So much so that you can now join r/scaredbananas, a community dedicated to the alternative universe we came up with.
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