The "Ask Me Anything" session, a format that has been a Reddit staple since users began peppering celebrities with impertinent questions sometime around 2010, has now been given the full brand-safety treatment by an automaker looking to reach the platform's 126.8 million daily active users without actually letting them ask anything they want.
Kia, which renewed its partnership with the WNBA and NBA this year, staged what it called "Ask Me Anything: Claw Edition" during the league's All-Star Weekend in July. The activation featured Chiney Ogwumike, the WNBA player and ESPN analyst, answering questions that had been submitted by Reddit users — and then prescreened and selected by the brand — while operating a Kia-branded claw machine. (The claw machine, presumably, was meant to evoke the unpredictability that the prescreening had removed.)
The video stream generated 61,000 views and 354 upvotes in its first 72 hours, according to information Kia shared with Marketing Dive. The automaker said it was the first time an automotive brand had launched a video AMA during WNBA All-Star Weekend, a distinction that is both technically accurate and perhaps not likely to be heavily contested.
To add what marketers like to call "stakes," Ms. Ogwumike shot a ball into a miniature net after each question, with successful shots raising money for One Warm Coat, a clothing charity. The total donation came to $20,000.
Reddit, which went public in 2024, has been working to position itself as more welcoming to advertisers, a pivot that has required some delicacy given that its users have historically regarded brand presence on the platform with the warmth usually reserved for reply-all emails. Of the company's $663 million in first-quarter revenue, $625 million came from advertising, with ad revenue growing 74 percent year over year.
Kia is not alone in its experimentation. Dove, in February, ran a campaign featuring actual Reddit reviews of one of its products, including negative ones — a transparency play that, one suspects, required rather fewer prescreening meetings.
Original story published in Social Media Today | A business community for the web's best thinkers on Social Media: "Kia takes a Reddit staple for a spin during WNBA All-Star Weekend"