There was a time when the phrase "Have you seen what people are saying about us online?" was uttered in boardrooms with the same tone one might use to report a small kitchen fire. Reddit, the platform where much of that saying has historically occurred, is now arguing that the fire is, in fact, the point.

The company's new campaign, "People Are The Best," created with the agency Mischief, amounts to a 90-second valentine to the very quality that has made brand safety officers reach for antacids: actual humans, expressing actual opinions, at considerable length and with considerable passion.

The work, which begins running in New York and Chicago before expanding nationally, focuses on three of Reddit's most reliably overwrought communities: beauty enthusiasts who treat moisturizer selection as a doctoral thesis, television viewers who can extract seventeen conspiracy theories from a single camera angle, and soccer fans for whom every match is simultaneously a tactical symposium and a personal crisis.

(One imagines the brief to Mischief was something like: "Make the chaos look charming.")

Jim Squires, who joined Reddit as chief marketing officer last year, said the campaign celebrates the "hundreds of millions who show up every day to keep the internet human." Greg Hahn, a co-founder and the chief creative officer at Mischief, added that visitors may arrive for a shared interest "but they stay for the humanity they find along the way."

The timing is not accidental. As much of the digital landscape drifts toward algorithmically generated summaries and synthetic content, Reddit is positioning its particular brand of unfiltered discourse as a feature rather than a bug — a place where engagement means something more than a thumb pausing briefly on glass.

Whether Madison Avenue finds this argument persuasive may depend on how one defines "human." Reddit is betting that, for advertisers weary of talking to no one, talking to someone who has opinions about moisturizer is a reasonable place to start.

Original story published in The Drum: "Ad of the Day: Reddit goes all in on people with first campaign from new CMO | The Drum"