The Stoned and Single advertisement, created as Contemporary Art, was well-received, but it was clear that the audience would be limited by my available advertising budget. This made way for the question, "can organic traffic be driven to a paid placement?" I thought about submitting the ad to a subreddit like /r/bestof which accepts content created by Reddit for submission, but that didn't seem to pan out—either due to administrative coding and moderator filtering.

Low and behold, while scrolling /new, I spotted this submission titled 'happy for you adam' and was able to land the first comment saying "I can relate, kinda" with a hyperlink to my advertisement.

I responded to the first response with a link to the two-minute tutorial, Reddit for Romance, and promptly fell asleep. While the first comments will always have the best chance at becoming the top comments due to their placement in the conversation lifecycle, it takes hours for that to happen.

I woke up in the middle of the night to pee and, looking at my phone to check the time, saw a barrage of notifications from Reddit. Quickly, I checked my real-time analytics and saw this.

As a result of the organic attention, the Stoned and Single advertisement had jumped from having 300 votes to over 700 which lowered my CPC by 25 percent. In addition, the Memo Stack surrounding the art piece started getting sizable traffic with people filtering through the nonlinear content and then PM'ing me to inquire about dates, Symposium, Networked, and more.

Lesson

Good creative resonates with the audience and breaks all rules of measurement.

Jumps

• Targets do more harm than good

Contexts

• #stoned-and-single (See: Stoned and Single)

• #index (See: #index)