Reddit's David Trencher Says the Linear Funnel Is Gone

Reddit spent two decades being described by what it was not: not a feed, not a social graph. The platform is now cited by every major large language model, runs shoppable carousels inside search results, and partners with Google on AI overviews, reaching people who have never deliberately opened the app. David Trencher, Reddit’s Managing Director for UK, EMEA and Australia, spoke to ClickZ at Shoptalk Europe about what that shift means for brands still building campaigns around an outdated map of how people discover products.

Reddit’s redefinition runs through search, not just community

Trencher rejects the idea that Reddit has changed direction. “Reddit is the most human place on earth where you have real people coming for real conversations to discover things from human experience,” he said. What has evolved, in his account, is where that human activity now sits. Reddit occupies the intersection of search and social, driven by communities and the conversations happening inside them. The platform did not chase this position. It became structurally important to AI systems because those systems need exactly the kind of first-person, unstructured human testimony that Reddit’s communities generate at scale.

Brands are still trying to walk consumers through a straight line

Asked what brands get wrong about discovery today, Trencher pointed to a persistent habit. “What brands are getting wrong is thinking that consumers still sit in the linear funnel,” he said. People now discover products through search, AI tools and community conversation simultaneously, often in whatever order suits them that day. Community, in Trencher’s framing, works precisely because it sits outside those normal, controlled discovery paths. Brands that try to push people through a fixed sequence miss the real-time, peer-driven decisions happening inside communities where people talk about products they already care about.

Reddit’s AI products still depend on human signal

Reddit grew ad revenue 74% this year, a story built partly on AI data licensing, LLM citations and automated targeting tools such as Reddit Max. That commercial pitch sits next to Reddit’s long-standing claim that its value is the human conversation underneath. Trencher does not see a contradiction. “If you don’t have that human input, then the AI is making assumptions about what the desired outcome might actually be,” he said. Tools like Reddit Max use human insight to drive efficiency for advertisers, but the underlying signal still has to come from people. As synthetic content grows in volume across the wider internet, Trencher expects real human experience to become more valuable, simply because it becomes rarer relative to everything else in the feed.

Trencher had to unlearn individual-level targeting

Before Reddit, Trencher led commercial teams at Facebook and Spotify, both platforms built on precise individual targeting and granular attribution. Reddit’s proposition runs closer to the opposite: value sits in intent, consideration and context rather than the identity of a single user. “It’s just unlearning that targeting one individual is the key to success,” he said of the shift. He now asks his own team to question assumptions carried over from previous roles rather than defaulting to what worked at a prior company. The practical change is a move toward a multi-objective view of the customer journey, matching a brand to the right conversation at the right moment rather than chasing one person across the web.

Half of product conversations already happen on Reddit

Trencher was asked to grade the phrase “all roads lead to Reddit,” and landed on undersold rather than overconfident. “Fifty per cent of product conversations are happening on Reddit, which sounds overconfident, but there is still room to grow,” he said. On measurement, he pushed CMOs toward a metric he checks weekly: cost per purchase, which he argues gives a fuller view of the funnel than last-click attribution alone.

The split between AI and human media will not reach parity

Pressed on where AI-bought media sits against human-bought media in five years, Trencher gave a specific figure: seventy-thirty. “Overhyped is any platform that’s going to promise you results completely driven by AI without any human interaction or engagement,” he said, adding that the platforms worth watching sit at the intersection of human engagement and real-time feedback. His advice to anxious CMOs trying to get AI-era discovery right stayed close to that same principle:

“Focus on the fundamentals, be human, be authentic, stay true to your voice.”

Five years after building a sales function in Europe that did not previously exist, Trencher’s read on what changes fastest is the tooling. What a brand actually stands for is what carries it through.