The Next Performance Hack: Reddit Threads

This week:

Ads inside ChatGPT, Reddit’s new AI buying engine, and a fresh Creator Spotlight (Murph Studio).

Ads are coming to ChatGPT and they won’t be cheap.

ChatGPT is about to turn your “search moment” into a paid moment.

Instead of brands competing in a feed where nobody pays attention, they’ll compete inside a conversation where the user did ask — and where attention is naturally higher.

Early reporting points to premium pricing (around the $60 CPM range) plus strict guardrails (no minors, no sensitive categories) and limited measurement at the start.

So this won’t behave like display ads. And it won’t behave like social.

💡 What this signals:

This isn’t “AI made the ad.”

It’s AI changing where advertising can show up, and what people will tolerate there.

A chat interface is a trust environment. Which means the bar is different: relevance isn’t a bonus, it’s the entry fee.

Shake Shack’s secret sauce was gen AI, now Reddit turned it into a product

Reddit turned one clever brand experiment into a product roadmap.

Back in 2024, Shake Shack used Known’s “Big Letbotski” — a Reddit-native gen-AI bot — to scan Reddit at scale, spot the situations people were actually talking about, and translate that into a tight set of high-intent communities to run ads in.

Fast forward 2026: Reddit is now baking that exact logic into the platform.

First came Reddit Community Intelligence + Reddit Insights (Alpha) — positioned as AI-powered social listening designed to help marketers plan campaigns and validate creative ideas based on Reddit conversations. And now comes the next step: Max Campaigns (beta) — Reddit’s automated, AI-powered buying setup that optimizes campaign settings in real time, “enabled by Reddit Community Intelligence.

💡 What this signals:

Shake Shack wasn’t the story. It was the early demo. The bigger shift is that Reddit is trying to become a full-stack “conversation → campaign” machine: listen → identify context → activate → optimize.

In other words: contextual intelligence isn’t just a brand tactic anymore, it’s becoming the platform’s default way of selling performance ads.

‼️REMINDER

💡 Industry Insights

FOOH Creator Spotlight: Meet Murph Studio

Murph Studio’s first FOOH project didn’t start with a brief, it started while waiting for a flight in Barcelona.

Founder Ana Carolina Barbosa filmed a perfectly symmetrical street from above, then turned a purse she designed into “traffic” through the scene. That low-pressure test became the beginning of a FOOH practice built on one thing: making CGI feel like it genuinely belongs in real life.

In this week’s Creator Spotlight, she shares the tools behind Murph Studio’s workflow, how clients find them, where AI actually helps (and where it doesn’t), and why FOOH is shifting from one-off virals toward stronger storytelling.

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