Reddit and Qloo sharpen cross-interest predictive ad targeting

By Priya Raman

Reddit will gain access to over 10 years of Qloo’s proprietary data through a partnership announced on Tuesday, with the immediate goal of serving more relevant ads to Reddit users.

Predictive inference company Qloo, pronounced “clue,” will supply the data through a catalog that tracks correlations among interests, or “entities,” such as restaurants and musical artists.

What does this change for advertisers?

According to Reddit senior director of engineering Virgilio Pigliucci, the partnership adds an inference layer to Reddit’s existing ad signals. Reddit’s own data generally points to products directly related to a post; Qloo can find connections among products that appear unrelated.

Qloo acquired TasteDive, a multi-industry review and recommendation platform, in 2019. Elias said data collected through TasteDive forms a key part of the catalog. Qloo categorizes entities by shared attributes using:

• TasteDive reviews;
• metadata from Wikidata, the open-source knowledge base; and
• data licensed from third parties.

Qloo’s knowledge base can link a restaurant with a fashion brand when their aesthetics align. Qloo CEO and founder Alex Elias used I Sodi, a New York Italian restaurant, to illustrate the point. Qloo classifies it as “Italian food” but also captures its architecture and ambience, which Elias described as “Scandinavian minimalism.”

Those extra signals can connect I Sodi with a similarly styled fashion brand as well as comparable Italian restaurants. Elias also described an inference in which someone reading a thread about upscale pizza restaurants might show interest in a fashion brand and jazz music.

Pigliucci said Reddit users can opt into personalized ads. Those ads are particularly useful in a personal feed, where users engage with varied content. On a specific subreddit, Reddit generally aims to serve ads that match the posts being viewed.

Pigliucci said Reddit’s standard signals might produce an espresso-machine ad on a post about the best coffeemakers. Qloo data showed that people shopping for an espresso machine also often look for a table on which to place it.

Reddit might then serve an ad for a tall desk on the same thread rather than repeat a recommendation already appearing organically in the conversation, Pigliucci said.

Reddit historically needed days or weeks to optimize a new advertiser’s campaign because it had to track user engagement with the ads, Pigliucci said. Qloo’s category and product connections now give Reddit a basis for optimization before campaign-specific engagement accumulates.

Pigliucci said Reddit can “optimize against the signals” from Qloo by finding a close proxy for the advertiser or ingesting the advertiser’s prior data. Neither method requires user-engagement data.

Pigliucci said Qloo’s data enables more resonant advertising without personal data. The model draws correlations between entities without knowing a user’s search query, browsing history or current subreddit.

He described the arrangement as a win-win for advertisers and clients, with client privacy protected. Advertisers see results “right away,” he said, “instead of having to wait a little bit,” compared with Reddit’s previous machine-learning capabilities.

For advertisers, the practical change is earlier access to cross-category demand signals rather than a wait for Reddit to learn from campaign engagement, while the ad stays detached from any individual’s search or browsing history. The commercial test is whether that earlier, broader signal can improve campaign performance without losing relevance to the discussion Reddit users are reading.