Reddit's Anna Haffner on Why Retail Brands Need to Show Up Where Trust Lives

The word “Reddit” gets appended to a Google search 250 times every second. People search Google, then add “Reddit” because they want human answers, not generative summaries. That single data point tells you most of what you need to know about where consumer trust actually lives right now.

Anna Haffner, Senior Director of Large Customer Sales for Retail at Reddit, sat down with Zihan Lyu (ClickZ) at Shoptalk Spring 2026 to talk about what that behavior means for retail brands, how Reddit’s ad product is evolving to meet it, and why the platform’s measurement story has changed.

40% of Reddit conversations are commercial

The commercial case for Reddit starts with intent. Over 40% of conversations on the platform involve people researching products, comparing options, and figuring out what to buy. “We see the user base on Reddit as high intent and looking to figure out how to take a trip, what to buy, what to wear,” Haffner said.

Reddit works with large big box retailers, beauty manufacturers, beauty retailers, and branded apparel companies. Haffner described what good activation looks like on the platform: brands that contribute to the knowledge base rather than just advertising on top of it.

“Good really looks like when they can harness the power of the community and show up in a way that’s super relevant and helpful and actually contributes to the knowledge base that these high intent users are coming to the platform to find.”

The difference from other social channels, in Haffner’s framing, is the nature of the conversation. On identity-based platforms, content tends to be performative. On Reddit, people talk about products the way they actually experience them. “Reddit is kind of like the fitting room where you talk about the real real of how a product works for you,” she said.

Reddit is pushing past the upper funnel label

When asked about measurement, Haffner pushed back on the framing. “We’re not necessarily only an upper funnel platform these days. We’re really partnering in a full funnel way, especially with all the major brands and retailers out there,” she said.

The measurement picture has shifted. Reddit is now integrated with a range of third party measurement approaches. “We’re seeing increasingly that when Reddit is added to the channel mix, various third parties, including Fospha, have shown that you see a higher ROAS when you’re using Reddit, simply because it adds incremental reach in those high intent users,” Haffner said. She was blunt about performance: “We’re as performant, if not more performant, than many of the top social channels.”

Haffner’s reference to Fospha validating Reddit’s incremental ROAS connects to Fospha’s Total Commerce Integration, which unifies measurement across all marketing channels and sales destinations. Fospha’s impression-led measurement gives fair credit to demand generation channels that last-click and platform-native reporting structurally undervalue, exactly the kind of validation Reddit needs as it pushes its full funnel case to retail brands.

Reddit also announced new commerce tools at Shoptalk: Collection Ads, community overlays including “Reddit’s Top Pick,” and a Shopify integration. Shopping conversations on the platform grew 40% year on year.

The AI question brands keep getting wrong

Haffner flagged a pattern in how large retail brands approach Reddit right now. “They often come to us asking, ‘Hey, what’s my generative AI strategy?’ But what they’re missing is this piece in the middle where you need to harness the scale and the power of Reddit communities.”

The mistake is jumping straight to AI strategy without first understanding what already exists on the platform. Reddit is nearly 21 years old. Its beauty communities alone run into millions of members. The conversations go back years, and posts and comments are persistent and searchable. Reddit has built its own LLM, Reddit Answers, to summarize the accumulated knowledge of those communities. Haffner described spending time with brand marketers looking through that data: “For a sporting goods retailer, for example, what are the seasonal baseball apparel goods that moms are searching for this month?”

The broader point is that AI makes human conversation more valuable, not less. “In an AI driven world, human conversations become all the more important and helpful,” Haffner said. “AI needs human conversation to stay smart.” The 250-times-per-second Google search stat backs this up. People are actively routing around generative answers to find real ones.

What it takes to defend Reddit in a budget meeting

Haffner works in large customer sales. She’s in the rooms where channel budgets get defended and priorities get reshuffled. When asked what one thing a senior marketer needs to believe to take Reddit seriously at scale, her answer was direct: “People are really looking for information they can trust. And the scale and the user base and audience of Reddit continues to grow in ways that other social platforms are not.”

Reddit’s biggest bet for 2026, according to Haffner, is proving measurable business outcomes for partners. “We really want to be a foundational part of their marketing mix, and something that they know when they partner with us, they are going to drive growth.”

The platform has matured past community-for-community’s-sake. The purchase research conversation already happens on Reddit, at scale, whether a brand has a strategy for it or not. Over twenty years of accumulated human opinion on every product category is sitting there, searchable, and increasingly, the place consumers go before they buy anything.

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Bio: Anna Haffner, Senior Director, Large Customer Partnerships, Reddit

Anna Haffner is a marketing and technology leader with over two decades of experience building high-performing sales organizations in digital advertising. In her current role at Reddit, she leads the Beauty and Retail vertical, overseeing partnerships with some of the world’s leading brands and advising them on how to harness the internet’s most passionate communities to drive measurable business growth. Her team’s work has been recognized by AdAge and on Reddit’s earnings calls as a top-producing business.

Prior to Reddit, Anna spent nearly 16 years at Google, where she led national sales teams developing marketing strategies and solutions for major brands and agencies across consumer goods, retail, and food and beverage. Her track record spans scaling new business from the ground up, helping launch multimillion-dollar advertising solutions, and advising marketing organizations from CMOs to practitioners.

Anna holds a BA in Italian from Georgetown University and a management certificate from Duke.