Ten years ago a community was born on Reddit. r/photoshopbattles - a small group of people built a daily competition , everyone gets the same source photo and the best edit wins. Fast forward a decade and the subreddit is now 17 million people strong. These are the people that influence culture on a wide scale, inventing new memes and bringing joy to the internet. Adobe believes everyone is creative and everyone should feel empowered to create and wanted to celebrate the folks doing just that. The objective was simple - empower these creators in a grander scale and demonstrate just how accessible Adobe Photoshop is for everyone. The obvious answer was to tap into this community, add functionality to the Reddit platform to make it even easier for anyone to participate - from creating with Photoshop, to voting, commenting and tuning into the live show in one single hub.

Adobe and Reddit had an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the organic creativity happening at the epicenter of the internet's most collaborative community. In order to do that, Adobe worked with Reddit to build a custom community for this campaign - r/psbattleslive. In order to streamline access, this was launched through the original r/photoshopbattles subreddit plus a custom icon was featured on Reddit's homepage. Once users signed up to participate, they were randomly assigned to one of five teams, each differentiated by color.

Everyday for five days, participants were given a different image to battle with. The teams quickly created their best edits, working together to comment and upvote their favorites. Each daily battle concluded with a live show through Reddit's native livestreaming platform - RPAN. The hosts and celebrity guests built games and challenges around the best creations, with a final winner being crowned in the final stream.

Adobe wanted to inspire and empower both advocates as well as students with their campaign. These people are found on Reddit, and more specifically, in the r/photoshopbattles community. In order to celebrate these folks, it was the obvious choice to build a net-new adjacent community for the activation. The brand partnered with the moderators of r/photoshopbattles to raise awareness of the new community r/psbattleslive and Reddit even custom built an icon on the homepage of the platform to drive directly to this new space.

Beyond just the new community, the campaign leveraged multiple Reddit touchpoints in order to drive mass awareness, including broadcasting the live portion through Reddit's livestreaming product - RPAN. Creators were able to photoshop within the community, other participants engaged through voting and commenting, while tuning in daily to see the results.

The campaign was a massive undertaking - not only did a new community need to be built from the ground up, but a full on live-show required production set up, and audiences on Reddit needed to be made aware of it all. Once the activation was ready to go, it was a full week of building the community, assigning teams and establishing the foundation of the community content. The second week was dedicated to broadcasting the live show and hosting the main battles.

At every touchpoint, the community and their creations were the centerpiece of the campaign. All of the top content in the subreddit were photoshopped submissions, the live show featured and joked about the best community creations, and ultimately, one creator won the honor of being the best photoshopper.

Adobe and Reddit succeeded in in not only driving mass awareness and engagement with the campaign, but also directly influenced key business results. There was a 20% lift in monthly active usage of Photoshop during the program and sales for Adobe products increased by 7% during that same timeframe.

The activation itself drove over 2 million visits to the new community r/psbattleslive. There were over 23 thousand submissions and the live broadcast saw over 13 million views that week. For each day this aftershow aired, its viewership surpassed those of culture's most iconic tv shows including The Daily Show, Project Runway, and Ridiculousness.