• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 25, 2024

Reddit announced the appointment of Mike Romoff as CRO to lead the company's Ads and sales businesses, as it builds on automation AI tools, from translation to creative to copywriting.

He will lead the company’s ads business -- focusing on expanding global partnerships with clients and agencies, and scaling sales and partner teams, the company announced Wednesday.

Romoff joins Reddit from Google, where he served as vice president of U.S. SMB sales and previously led the global channel sales team.

He also held executive roles at LinkedIn, overseeing global operations, founding the agency and channel sales functions, LinkedIn’s Audience Network and The B2B Institute. He also co-founded and served as general manager of the startup IDG Tech Network.

Reddit’s Ads business has expanded significantly during the last several years -- with growth of more than 41% year-over-year in Q2 2024 -- through unique ad formats. The company has also expanded ad technology with tools that improve platform accessibility and performance.

Romoff replaces Harold Klaje, who spent about 4-1/2 years at the company, most recently leading the sales and advertising teams. He also spent time at Pinterest, IAB and Google.

The company attributes its growth partly to the increased use of machine learning.

This week, Reddit also added automated translation tools to more than 35 locations in Europe, Asia and Latin America, that are intended to open its network to more users.

Previously,  the technology enabled users to translate individual posts across several languages such as French, but the new tools make it easier for users to participate in conversations across communities in many more languages.

The launch includes translation tools for Brazil and Spain, and will become available in Germany, Italy, Latin America, and the Philippines in the coming weeks. These countries follow successful tests in France, outlined last quarter in the company’s 2024 earnings.

Daily active user growth per quarter in France outpaced the U.S. and total international growth in Q2 quarter-over-quarter, the company said.

Steve Huffman, CEO, called machine translation for language “one of the best opportunities we've ever seen to rapidly grow the content base outside of English.”

Last week, Reddit announced Ads Manager tools that use AI and automation to help small businesses create ads.

The tools included an ads inspiration library, AI copywriter and image auto-cropper.