Kia has taken one of Reddit’s oldest community formats and rebuilt it as a branded video moment. Its “Ask Me Anything: Claw Edition”, fronted by WNBA player and ESPN analyst Chiney Ogwumike, ran across the 24 to 26 July WNBA All-Star Weekend and collected 61,000 views and 354 upvotes inside the first 72 hours.
What was different about the format
Traditional AMAs are live and text-based. A host sits in a thread and types replies to whatever the community throws at them, which is exactly why most large brands have kept their distance.
Kia inverted that. Questions were submitted by redditors, then prescreened and selected before filming, giving the brand editorial control over the session. Ogwumike answered them on camera while pulling each question from a Kia-branded claw machine, then took a shot at a miniature net after every answer. Each successful shot released funds for clothing charity One Warm Coat, with £-equivalent donations totalling 20,000 US dollars.
It is the first video AMA run by an automotive brand during WNBA All-Star Weekend.
Why Reddit is chasing this kind of spend
Reddit has spent the past two years converting community credibility into advertising revenue. Of 663 million US dollars in first-quarter revenue, 625 million came from advertising, with year-on-year ad revenue up 74 per cent and outpacing overall growth by five percentage points.
Packaging AMAs as a bookable brand product is part of that push. Reddit has been actively positioning itself as brand-safe territory, and formats that reduce unpredictability are the obvious carrot for marketers who have historically treated the platform as too volatile to touch.
The other pull is discovery. With 126.8 million daily active users and heavy representation in AI-generated search summaries, Reddit threads increasingly shape what large language models say about a category. Brands are no longer just buying reach on Reddit, they are influencing what gets cited elsewhere.
The trade-off marketers should weigh
Prescreening questions solves the risk problem and creates a new one. Reddit’s audience is unusually alert to anything that feels stage-managed, and the format’s authority comes precisely from the fact that nothing is filtered.
Kia’s charity mechanic softens that. Attaching a real outcome to each answer gives the video a reason to exist beyond promotion, which is a defensible way to buy back some goodwill lost to the vetting process.
Others have taken the opposite route. Dove built a February campaign around genuine Reddit reviews of a serum mask, negative ones included, and let the unfiltered tone do the persuading.
Wider context
The AMA sits inside a larger commitment. Kia widened its WNBA investment under its 2025 renewal with the league and the NBA, which also secured fan activations at the WNBA Live festival and greater talent access for content series such as “Inside a Kia.”
The lesson for brands is narrow but useful. Reddit will now sell you a controlled version of its most native format, and the value depends entirely on how much of the platform’s honesty you are willing to keep.
