Reddit Taps Qloo's Decade of Taste Data to Sharpen Ad Targeting

Reddit announced a partnership on Tuesday with predictive inference company Qloo (pronounced "clue"), gaining access to more than 10 years of the firm's proprietary cultural and taste-correlation data to serve more relevant ads to its users.

The deal is about something more ambitious than matching an Italian-restaurant fan with another Italian restaurant. Qloo's pitch is that it can spot non-obvious links — say, connecting a user browsing a thread about upscale pizza places to a fashion brand or a jazz artist — and turn those correlations into ad placements that competitors' standard contextual signals would never surface.

What does Qloo actually bring to the table?

Qloo builds its catalogue by tracking correlations between what it calls "entities" — restaurants, musical artists, brands — based on shared attributes. A key asset is TasteDive, a multi-industry review and recommendation platform Qloo acquired in 2019. CEO and founder Alex Elias told AdExchanger that TasteDive data forms a core part of the catalogue.

The company determines similarity by categorizing entities using data points from several sources: TasteDive reviews, metadata from the open-source knowledge base Wikidata, and licensed third-party data.

The method goes deeper than menu-level labels. Elias offered the example of I Sodi, the well-known Italian restaurant in New York. Qloo doesn't file it simply under "Italian food." Its knowledge base also reads signals describing the restaurant's architecture and ambiance — which Elias characterized as "Scandinavian minimalism" — allowing it to link I Sodi to, for example, fashion brands with a similar aesthetic, not just comparable trattorias.

What does this change for advertisers?

Two things, according to Virgilio Pigliucci, Reddit's senior director of engineering: faster campaign ramp-up and privacy-clean targeting.

On speed: historically, Reddit needed days or even weeks to optimize a new advertiser's campaign, because it had to track how users engaged with the ads first. With Qloo's map of cross-category connections, Reddit can, in Pigliucci's words, "optimize against the signals" by finding a close proxy for the advertiser or ingesting its prior data — no user engagement data required. Advertisers see results "right away," he said, "instead of having to wait a little bit," as was the standard under Reddit's previous machine learning setup.

On placement: Reddit's own out-of-the-box signals typically suggest advertising a product directly related to the post a user is reading — an espresso machine ad next to a thread about the best coffeemakers. Using Qloo's data, Reddit found that people shopping for an espresso machine often also want a table for the machine to sit on. So Reddit might now serve an ad for a tall desk on that same thread, rather than echoing recommendations already cropping up organically in the conversation.

Where does privacy land in all this?

Qloo's model draws correlations between entities without knowing the user's search queries, browsing history, or even which subreddit they're visiting. Pigliucci called it a win-win: client privacy stays protected while advertisers get sharper performance.

For context, Reddit's setup runs on two tracks. Users can opt into personalized ads in their personal feed, which Pigliucci said is especially useful when they're scrolling and engaging with varied content. But inside a specific subreddit, Reddit generally serves ads that are "contextually similar" to the posts being viewed — and that's exactly where Qloo's cross-category intelligence slots in.