“With Tubular, we were able to gain an understanding of what else was going on outside of our own YouTube analytics and stay on the cutting edge of content creation.”

Isaac Quiroga, Director of Video Engagement, Mattel

Global toy brand Mattel achieves relevance by harnessing the power of social video intelligence to know what their fans wanted to watch, play with, and buy. As a result, they are among the top 10 most-watched brands in the world.

The key to their success? According to Isaac Quiroga, Director of Video Engagement at Mattel, they “ looked at what types of formats were resonating with a particular audience segment and would create videos in many of these formats and then test them. It’s impossible to know how audiences will react to content without testing and iteration.”

For a while, they focused on views, as they were the main indicator of audience interest and purchase intent. It didn’t matter if it was paid or organic views, either — all of it seemed to be working.

But their approach would eventually evolve after their insights team found that engagements are more compelling to a specific property’s audience. “[Engagements] are a better indicator of how audiences interact with content. We adjusted our approach at that point, and figured out which viewership to engagement ratios we had to achieve to reach our goals,” said Quiroga.

Creating videos that audiences love with smart content strategies

Mattel’s team of YouTube strategists, marketers, and creatives publish a constant stream of first-class video content, have a footprint in all social-video arenas, and consistently monitor key performance indicators from views to watch time. 

One aspect of quality that Mattel prides itself in is strong storytelling. They start with character and story and ultimately create products to extend that storyline. “We get to create a cast of characters that we ultimately put in our content and unlock kids’ imaginations,” said Quiroga.

But good stories alone aren’t enough to cut through today’s highly competitive content marketplace. In order to stand out in a crowded category, Mattel needed the right strategies to fuel its social video growth. 

We asked Isaac Quiroga for an in-depth look at how Mattel was able to drive growth & engagement with their social audience, and how they were able to translate social video growth into stronger sales as well.

Challenge

Mattel needed to differentiate itself with engaging and entertaining content in the increasingly crowded kids’ entertainment space. As early adopters of social video intelligence, they knew they needed to leverage data and analytics to inform their content strategies. 

Action

Using Tubular Intelligence, Mattel was able to analyze the social video landscape as a whole to help them understand which content types, formats, and topics resonated with different audience segments. They also evaluated the creators who were having success with their target viewers. 

Fueled by their learnings and insights, they developed fool-proof content strategies that drove massive growth in their social channels as well as their product sales.

Growth

• Mattel grew its social presence overall with 42% growth, from 3.3B views to 4.7B in a year
• Barbie’s YouTube channel saw +36% growth in views corresponding 14% increase in product sales
• Hotwheels channels’ monthly average views & engagements grew 66%, with a 7% increase in sales, securing their spot as the #1 selling toy in the world and the #1 vehicle property in the world

Tubular: What is your perspective on the enormous growth you’ve seen in the past year?

IQ: We’ve seen a lot of growth in Barbie on YouTube specifically, we’ve grown about 36% year over year. In terms of sales growth, she’s up 14% from last year, and she’s had 5 consecutive quarters of growth which is awesome. 

I’ve got some crazy stats like a Dreamhouse is sold every 2 minutes, and 100 barbie dolls are sold every minute— which is kind of crazy if you think about it. 

Hotwheels– which is another huge iconic brand of ours, has seen about a 66% growth YoY in YouTube views and attention. Hot wheels sales are up also 7% and it still remains the #1 selling toy in the world and the #1 vehicle property in the world. 

Mattel as a whole has seen 42% growth with about 4.7B views in 2018 up from 3.3B views. We continue to see growth and we’re really proud of our achievements.

T: Tell us what you do at Mattel. How do you make the magic happen?

IQ: I try to inspire, educate and entertain kids and families around the world. And the way we do it is through content— lots and lots of it. 

I started through an acquisition of Mattel, and I was in traditional content distribution and, licensing programs. Mattel needed someone to run their YouTube program and business because they saw a huge opportunity there. So I went to work working with the brands to establish best practices on YouTube. 

We essentially needed to create a content framework that could scale across the company with just a few people. What’s wonderful about working on YouTube is the amount of resources and tools that YouTube offers you so you can be successful on the platform. 

In the world of broadcast distribution, I couldn’t just Google “how do you license programming to TV broadcasters?” But when I started at Mattel, all I did was Google all day long— “How you build a video marketing strategy on YouTube,” “What is YouTube all about?” You can even get certified in different areas. So I took all these different courses and became the biggest YouTube nerd– and my team did too. 

What we found was that Google had already created a content framework which was the Hero Hub Hygiene. It was a content framework for advertisers who wanted to start getting into content programming, and we essentially scaled that approach with different brands around Mattel. That helped in terms of how we organized the content throughout the year and how we thought about the different mixes, roles, and objectives that the different content would play. 

We built and organized our content library, pipeline, and volume in a way that was meeting our marketing objectives and timelines. It was all there in the playbook which was all useful and helpful. 

But then we started seeing more competition in the space, more creators, and a lot of new entrants so we had to start thinking about how we could become more and more differentiated so that we could penetrate the already saturated marketplace.

And that’s when we started leaning in on creativity. How do we change up our strategies a bit more so that we’re really being more authentic to our audience? When we truly understood exactly what our audience loves to watch, and what they’re obsessed with— that started putting us into another stratosphere. 

The growth doesn’t happen overnight. It’s taken me four years to grow this big and it’s been a lot of work to get there. But enjoying the process is the best part about it. 

T: How do you find out what your audience loves?

IQ: Tubular Labs! Haha! Honestly, what was great for us being new entrants is that we looked for video intelligence. Because we could see our YouTube analytics and our channels and what our audiences in our channels appreciated and loved with our content, but in order to go past that we had to look at the video landscape itself. 

We were one of the first adopters of Tubular and we’re so happy that we did because we were able to see the landscape as a whole and started understanding what types of content were truly getting the maximum engagement out there. The types of audiences that were out there, and the different segments as well. It was really about video intelligence and understanding where the audiences were, what they were into, the types of format they were watching, how long the content was that they were watching, and the types of creators they were also watching. We really did use that as a main strategic input to what we were trying to do. 

The post How Mattel Grew Social Channels 42% in a Year appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“Tubular enables us to identify content themes and topics our competitors are using to find success… I don’t think that we would even be doing some of the research we’re doing if it wasn’t for Tubular.”

 Head of Data Analytics, BuzzFeed

Key Results

Challenge

BuzzFeed needed to quickly and effectively prove the value of its advertising across multiple platforms.

Action

By having a solution that housed all video data in one place, Tubular enabled BuzzFeed to run more advanced analyses that they previously never had time to do. Through bespoke saved searches on content categories, creators, trends, and competitors, BuzzFeed analysts could quickly gather data and provide the creative with inspired insights.

Result

BuzzFeed was able to create higher quantities of relevant content for their channels which increased average monthly views by over 11%. They also attract advertisers by proving dominance in each vertical.

BuzzFeed, one of the world’s most-watched media companies, made a name for itself by providing news and entertainment content to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Its mission is to produce “the most shareable breaking news, original reporting, entertainment, and video content,” and it does so through multiple social channels under its umbrella with key verticals in beauty, home crafts, travel, and food.

Monitoring views and engagement is crucial to content creation and advertising sales, but it gets complicated at this scale. On top of managing their own content for channels across virtually every social video platform, there are millions of new videos uploaded in these verticals every single day. In the age of social media where trends need to be up-to-the-minute, BuzzFeed needed a way to continuously stay on top of what’s trending. 

BuzzFeed needed a solution that would let them effectively evaluate whether and how to change content to address the interests of viewers. And since BuzzFeed has a presence on just about every social platform, they have to keep a pulse on what strategies work best on each, and understand how closely the competition is nipping at its heels.

We met with Darris Lee, Head of Data Analytics and Measurement at BuzzFeed to get an in depth look at how they use social video intelligence to stay relevant and drive growth.

Watch the video:

Companies like BuzzFeed use Tubular to:

• Win branded sponsored content deals by attracting advertisers by proving dominance in each vertical space.
• Benchmark their success against competitors with standardized cross-platform social video metrics.
• Optimize content and channel strategy for effective social video campaigns.
• Streamline content KPI tracking in a simple, cross-platform view.

The post BuzzFeed Increases Average Monthly Views by 11%+ appeared first on Tubular Labs.

As the evolution of the media landscape accelerates, so too does GroupM’s innovation around digital and social strategies. They look to Tubular for the insights and analytics that let them demonstrate to their clients why social video is an essential tool in their media planning toolbox. 

Key Takeaways

Challenge

GroupM Indonesia needed support in proving the growth and relevance of social video to their clients, to win and retain business. 

Action

GroupM leverages data from Tubular Intelligence to provide benchmarks for social video, and to identify areas where their performance outshines the competition. They  include the most relevant insights in their client presentations, including weekly views, engagements, and insights on video categories and trends. 

Growth

Tubular data plays a considerable role in GroupM’s ability to prove reach and demonstrate the growth of creators and genres so they can win new business and retain current clients. These valuable insights help the agency advise its brand partners to shape their content strategy in ways that best connect with their audiences.

In order to win and retain business in the age of social video, GroupM Indonesia needed to first prove the relevance and impressive growth of social video to their clients. Not only did they need to benchmark social video on success, but they also needed to project future growth through AI learning models.

Once the relevance of social video is locked in, the next step is exhibiting GroupM’s expertise and knowledge within categories like gaming, beauty, electronics, and beyond. This global media investment company has an incredible understanding of the macro-media landscape, but they needed a way to prove that they were just as strategic within sub-genres and emerging content spaces.

Insights to Actions

GroupM uses Tubular Intelligence to obtain the most trustworthy cross-platform insights available today. They regularly use Tubular’s data to benchmark views and engagements. These capabilities let the media investment group track patterns in categories and content so they can easily spot a trend before it goes viral.

For example, GroupM used data to surface topic areas that are popular with beauty creators on YouTube. This helped them identify unsaturated content that was steadily performing well. It also helped them find creators who were already thriving and connecting with the unique audiences brands wanted to target. The agency was able to identify subtopics that resonated the most with creators.

Impact

Tubular data paired with GroupM’s creative advertising expertise makes the agency unstoppable and exponentially increases the success of their client’s investments. They are able to prove social video reach and demonstrate the growth within specific genres and creators. For existing clients, this means they can better determine their campaign ROI and increase loyalty to the group. For prospective clients, GroupM can offer more thorough pitch decks that project with greater accuracy the benefit of potential partnerships.

These valuable insights help GroupM advise their brand partners, refine their content strategies, and create campaigns that connect with their target audiences.

The post GroupM Validates Social Video Relevance to Win New Business appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“We rely heavily on [Tubular’s] V30, because of our conversations with brands. They tell us it’s not enough to have views; they want quality experiences correlated with quality content… We believe [V30] should be the #1 indicator if a publisher is good or not.”

Guy Oranim, CEO, First Media

Key Takeaways

Challenge

Growing an audience and monetizing unique channels in the over-crowded, highly competitive world of social video.

Action

The creative department worked closely with the insights team to create a data-informed content strategy. The sales team used V30 as a metric to prove to potential ad partners that they have “quality” content. Quality, evergreen content means advertisers get a high return on their investments as viewership continues to grow and ROI compounds over time.

Results

First Media grew from less than 100K followers in 2016 to more than 110M followers and 1.5B monthly views across its properties

In 2004, First Media was founded as a TV network — but in 2016, everything changed. When the network realized that the video ecosystem was rapidly evolving and that its highly female audience was seeking lifestyle content on social platforms, the company launched its digital-first model into the stratosphere.

The results? First Media grew to more than 87M Facebook page likes, and 28M YouTube subscribers across its properties, including Babyfirst, So Yummy, and Blossom. This growth positioned First Media among the top 10 US Digital First Media Companies with the broadest global reach.

Blossom, specifically, continuously finds itself among the top 10 Home & DIY publishers with the broadest global reach (62.4M unique viewers across Facebook and YouTube in February 2022).

Blossom garnered a whopping 15.7M views per video in the first 30 days after upload on Facebook in February 2022 – for reference, the average V30 for Home & DIY videos is 1.1M. This positions them as the #1 Home & DIY media creator on Facebook based on average V30 views.

When it comes to content, less is more

The cluttered world of social video is incredibly competitive. Every month, 13M creators upload almost 100M videos online, and in February 2022 the Home & DIY category received more than 16B views and over 190M engagements.

First Media has cut through the clutter and reached its audiences by aligning all actions with its brand promise: inspiring action to make the everyday extraordinary through its diverse content offerings in verticals like DIY, lifestyle, food, and beauty.

So what’s First Media’s secret sauce?

They regularly create unique content that people want to watch by striving for quality rather than quantity. While hundreds of thousands of publishers believe that churning out content is the way to remain relevant, First Media proves that investing in fewer, high-quality videos inspired by trustworthy data is the way to grow an audience in both size and loyalty.

It all starts with a process of collaboration between several people from traditionally disparate teams. By pairing data analysts with creative masterminds, actionable insights inspire content production from one video to the next. As a result, First Media publishes high-quality and high-performing social videos consistently.

Virality is hard to replicate, but applying data-informed strategies to creativity allows First Media to create videos that its audiences love.

Pitching to brand partners using Tubular’s V30

First Media’s strategy leverages Tubular Labs to identify what is most relevant to its audiences by tracking shifting values, interests, cultural trends, and consumer behaviors.

First Media uses Tubular’s time-based video ratings as a proxy for content quality. With the V30 metric (the number of views within the first 30 days after publishing), they can objectively compare performance since videos accumulate views over time.

“If you’re able to make people watch your content consistently over 30 days, that’s the best evidence of your quality.”

Consistently maximizing views per video is critical to media companies like First Media because that is how they prove success to brand partners. In other words, long-term views on content prove compounded ROI during pitches.

First Media uses the V30 measurement across market to compare its success to its competitors. “With this data, we don’t have to compliment ourselves. We can prove that our videos are performing the best relative to our direct competition,” said Oranim. When pitching to new brands or benchmarking success with current partnerships, First Media presents its V30 against competitive sets in each vertical.

The post First Media Proves Quality Over Quantity to Brand Partners appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“Tools like Tubular provide an immense amount of value to us.  Whether it’s revealing demographics, geo-data, insights related to specific posts, handles, and hashtags — it all helps us tell a richer story. Telling a richer story means we build stronger relationships.”  

Rich Calacci, Chief Revenue Officer at Overtime

Key Takeaways

CHALLENGE

Overtime needed to change the way younger audiences watch sports. While Millenials & Gen Zs have generally shifted away from TV to social, they still tune in the old-fashioned way for live game broadcasts. They needed to focus on converting traditional television sports viewers into social/digital viewers. 

ACTION

Armed with social intelligence data from Tubular, Overtime set out to revolutionize the sports viewing experience to embrace the benefits of a social media community such as engagement, direct conversation, and shared experience. 

They used Tubular’s social video solutions to understand their audience’s viewing preferences and create strategies that would capture their attention. 

Overtime creates clips & game highlights to supplement full-length game steams. They also offer a multi-dimensional sporting experience by showing behind-the-scenes footage, player highlights, and other entertaining content. 

Additionally, they leverage Tubular data to tell richer stories when pitching to potential advertising partners. Having the ability to pull data like demographics, geographic data, and video performance data relating to specific posts against specific handles or hashtags helps their teams find timely and relevant data insights. 

GROWTH

Overtime reached a monthly average of 36.3 Million unique viewers P13-35 on YouTube and Facebook since 2021, outperforming major competitors like ESPN, Barstool Sports, & Bleacher Report. 

They also attracted a broader network of advertising partners, from working with sports-centric early adopters like Adidas, Nike, and Gatorade to mass-market brands with a reach that extends well beyond athletics, including Google, Netflix, Amazon & Prime Video.

Customer Story: Overtime

With one of the fastest-growing audiences in the game, digital-first media company Overtime is paving the way for other broadcasters to embrace the possibilities of social video. By leveraging data and insights from Tubular, they have generated explosive growth and outperformed some of their biggest competitors including ESPN, Barstool Sports, and Bleacher Report. 

We sat down with Overtime CRO, Rich Calacci, to dig deeper into exactly how Tubular’s social video intelligence empowers them to innovate and capitalize on social. Calacci shares what he believes is the highest form of audience engagement and how they achieve that through understanding cultural relevance. 

How does Overtime define success? And what makes you successful with your audience?

It’s a pretty easy metric for us. When we think about success as it relates to being an original content creator, it defaults to our community. And the community can be evaluated in several different ways: the 50M+ fans and followers we reach every month, and the 100M+ people who touch our content during the month. 

At the end of the day, the way we assess success is through engagement. That’s where we show market leadership, where we’ve shown unbelievable growth, and where we can say to clients and other strategic partners that we’re doing something different. 

Our community is highly engaged with the conversation we’re having (which is around sports as a subject matter), but the way that we define the conversation and frame the conversation and the way we include the community in the conversation– that’s what really sets us apart. 

We want to help our clients use online social video to understand culture so they can be more relevant. Do you agree that engagement and relevance are part of the same thing?

I do. Cheating is bad in sports, but we do “cheat” a little bit at Overtime in the sense that we’re not offering such a wide panorama of content. We try to fix the best recipe when it comes to engagement. We try to stick to our knitting and stick to sports as subject matter. 

We tell different stories and we tell them in a lot of different formats. Ultimately, the engagement we receive from our community of fans signals to us that we’re telling relevant stories.

The opportunity for us to have a direct conversation by DMing our users reinforces this whole notion of relevance. When they reach out or give a shout-out to Overtime by name, it’s more than just giving a “thumbs up” on the content or a share, or even just commenting below. But responding to engagement that’s coming directly from Overtime, I think that’s a differentiator. 

The highest valuation for us in terms of an engaged member of our community that expresses relevance is when they go into our shop and buy our gear to rep the O in the street—that’s so much stronger than just saying, “Hey I really appreciate what you guys do in terms of the community you provide and the content you serve.” [By wearing the O] I’m now signaling to everyone else who may not be part of this social media network that this is my community and part of who I am. 

I think that the representation of Overtime as being part of who you are is the strongest indicator of relevance. The same way you may wear a Red Sox shirt and I may wear a Yankees shirt, which signals what our fandom is. Overtime gives a different signal but communicates the same amount of relevance and the same level of engagement. 

The most terrifying thing for a CMO is to blindly guess. Does Tubular help you eliminate some of the guesswork?

100%. I’ve always had the mindset that as a Chief Revenue Officer, there are things you control and things you don’t control. You can always control your energy, your effort, your mindset, and a lot of things in the process— even the price you negotiate. 

But there are things you don’t control and one of them is the tools you use. Whether you’re building a house or building a social media empire, you’re largely dependent on high-quality tools. 

Tools like Tubular provide an immense amount of value to us— whether it’s revealing demographic data, geo data, or data relating to specific posts against handles & hashtags. That helps us tell a richer story and in telling a richer story, we build stronger relationships. 

While my relationship with Tubular is really important as a business enterprise, my relationship with General Motors or Rocket Mortgage or State Farm, or PepsiCo is even more important. In that case, I’m highly dependent on the Tubular tools in order to do the job that I’m charged to do.

Would you rather have a magic microscope that allows you to understand exactly what’s going on today in granular detail, or a terrific telescope that will let you see into the future? 

I lean toward the latter pretty heavily. Entropy is a time’s arrow. And I think being able to look into the future is way more valuable than being able to have a look into what you’re doing today. I grew up in a business where there was analysis paralysis for a period of time. There was too much data covered by too few people, and as a result, the whole notion of a false positive was revealed. 

I think trying to understand where business is going directionally is much more valuable. That’s part of the reason why we spent so much time, effort, and resources on building Overtime. 

We’re not trying to redefine basketball for 16-18 yr olds. We’re trying to redefine the game presentation of basketball for the future. If I can get a glimpse into what the future looks like and what the demand curve looks like 5 months out, 5 years out, 5 decades out— that’s way more valuable to us because of our growth mindset. We’re builders. We’re not trying to overweigh the importance of understanding exactly what’s going on today, because things are ever-changing. 

If I’m going to invest my resources in a growth mindset, understanding what we’re worth today is valuable just like it’s important to understand what a stock is worth today. But what you really want to know is what the growth potential is for that stock or that business in the future. 

If you have tools that better equip you, like some of the data we get from Tubular Labs, to give us better insights into what our path of growth looks like and what that trajectory can be, we can forecast that out reliably. Even though we’re taking real-time data to do that, being able to project that into the future is incredibly valuable to us as a business.

The post Overtime Steals Sports Fan Attention from TV, Attracts Advertisers appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“Tubular helps us track our station video performance, identify our best performing content, and stay on top of market trends. We consider it a valuable tool in managing our digital video business.”

Director of Digital Business Development at Hearst

Hearst Television is a premier publisher that owns and operates 26 local television stations across the US, each with its own independent social media accounts. With numerous awards for distinguished journalism and innovation, it is crucial that this premier distributor has the necessary tools needed to lead on social and bring news stories to younger, engaged audiences.

Traditional news publishers are undergoing an exciting period of evolution. As younger audiences rely more on social platforms as their main news source, publishers are challenged with understanding what types of content and topics perform best on each social channel. What works on YouTube doesn’t necessarily work on TikTok or Twitter.

Social audiences have different expectations and preferences from app to app. That’s why the copy-and-paste method that entails repurposing televised content for social is not necessarily effective. Studying each social app and creating a tailored content strategy for each might seem like a daunting task, but Tubular’s behavioral insights make understanding social easy.

With Tubular on their side, Hearst TV is making serious moves toward being a leading news publisher on social. Find out how they did it below!

Challenge:

• Hearst TV needed to increase aggregate video views across its ecosystem of social channels.

Action: 

• Hearst leveraged Tubular as a centralized tool to oversee their network of social channels and form data-driven content strategies.
• Hearst TV monitored overall content performance to gain a deeper understanding of what types of content perform best on different social channels.

Growth with Tubular

Using these insights, the Hearst TV capitalized on disseminating high-performing, trending news clips and growing their social audiences.

• Facebook Views Increased 320%
• Facebook Engagement Grew 310%
• Cross-Platform Views Increased 198%
• Cross-Platform Engagement Grew 240%

The post How Hearst TV Grew Facebook Engagement by 310% in One Year appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“We use Tubular to get at the type of videos that we think our readers and viewers will watch and want to consume, as a one-stop shop looking across social platforms in one-consolidated dashboard.”

Russ Torres, VP of Digital Content and Strategy, USA TODAY

Gannett is a leading mass-media company that effectively reaches 43% of the U.S. online population through renowned properties including USA Today and 109 local media organization across 34 states and Guam.

Traditional publishers like Gannett have faced the challenge of moving beyond their previous strategies of mass broadcasting to delve deeper into a network of localized channels that cater to specific audience interests and granular content trends.

Navigating content opportunities, emerging trends, evolving audience preferences, and new platforms is an intricate undertaking. Strategies that once relied on a generalized understanding of public trends now demand deeper insights into micro-communities, subcategories, and platform nuances. Consequently, the expertise and caliber of insights possessed by today’s analysts have become more crucial than ever.

For traditional publishers like Gannett, there are two sides of the coin to consider:

1. How to create and disseminate content that nurtures their audience
2. How to attract and cultivate relationships with advertisers

To shed light on Gannett’s distinctive customer story, we will explore how Tubular insights have empowered the publisher to overcome challenges and meet business objectives on both fronts.

Advertising

Challenge

First, let’s understand why video is so important to Gannett’s advertisers.

“Video gives us an opportunity. It’s a medium that holds [viewers] on the page and keeps them more engaged longer than a traditional article. That boosts our numbers. It’s better time spent, better engagement, likely VCR, and hopefully even CTR. Those engagement numbers are advertiser-friendly. Video makes more monetization.”

Ilana Leven, Director of National Ad Sales in the West + Midwest, Gannett

What is the primary challenge that publishers like Gannett encounter when it comes to establishing relationships with advertisers? One might assume that for a trusted household brand like USA Today, this would be a straightforward deal. However, the reality is that today’s advertisers want guaranteed views. The Gannett team constantly receives this demand, but guaranteeing views is virtually impossible due to the uncertainty and unpredictability of social platforms.

Solution

While advertisers can’t guarantee viewership or engagement in advance, they do have the opportunity to leverage real-time insights from Tubular. These insights enable them to understand why a sponsored piece of content isn’t performing as expected and quickly make adjustments to direct viewers and maximize value for advertisers.  

With Tubular’s capabilities, Gannett can ensure that advertisers’ money is effectively utilized and that their goals are reached.

Success

When Gannett acquired a sponsor for their World Series coverage, they faced an initial setback when the first two pieces of content did not generate the views or engagement they anticipated. It’s understandable that the type of content that resonated in the past for this event doesn’t necessarily work today. However, Gannet’s insight team swiftly leveraged Tubular insights to identify the reasons behind decline in viewership and offered suggestions to enhance the sponsored content. This proactive approach played a crucial role in boosting performance and satisfying their sponsor.

While advertisers will never have access to guaranteed views, partnering with trusted publishers like Gannett, who have access to real-time insights, is the next best option. This enables publishers to quickly pivot strategies and improve content based on up-to-date insights.

Today, Gannett has strengthened their client development, as returning sponsors place their trust in Gannett’s network to utilize real-time insights and effectively ensure sponsors get their money’s worth.

Content Creation

Challenge

Gannett needed to maintain leadership in a new distributed digital video age by producing engaging video content. This posed several key challenges

• Determining the types of videos to produce and selecting the most suitable platforms 
• Transforming a centralized television strategy into a network of localized channels that cater to diverse audiences and platform variations
• Competing with other publishers who are rapidly expanding their presence across social subcategories

Needless to say, today’s content strategists are under immense pressure to navigate these challenges successfully.  Keeping pace with the dynamic social video landscape is nearly impossible without comprehensive insights that provide access to emerging trends and evolving audience preferences.

Solution

Gannett used Tubular audience data to evaluate white space opportunities that drove new franchises under their umbrella.

“Tubular is helping us identify white space and understand who the leaders are in particular categories. Those are ways that we get at the type of videos our viewers will watch and want to consume— and then we think we have an opportunity.”

– Russ Torres, VP of Digital Video Content and Strategy

Gannett leverages insights to understand optimal content types for different platforms. For instance, what works on YouTube doesn’t always work on TikTok or Instagram. Understanding that copy-and-paste is not a content strategy, their content team uses insights to strategically tailor their content to new platforms.

Success

Gannett’s insights and content team learned what was working in the news space, adapted to content trends, and implemented specific strategies for each platform, all in one place.

Gannett leverages insights to identify what subcategories present unique white space opportunities to grow audience reach. One huge win has been the company’s Humankind franchise. Using Tubular insights, they understood that the channel’s most successful subcategories included military, animal, and kids content. By identifying these granular audience preferences, they were able to launch successful offspring channels under the Humankind umbrella, including Militarykind, Animalkind, and Kidskind.

The evolution of traditional publishers like Gannett necessitates a shift from mass broadcasting to social channels that cater to audience interests and emerging content trends. Navigating the complex social landscape requires deeper insights into micro-communities, subcategories, and platform nuances.

Gannett’s focus on nurturing their audience and cultivating relationships with advertisers highlights the dual objectives they face. By harnessing Tubular insights, Gannett empowers themselves to overcome challenges, achieve business objectives, and drive success in the dynamic world of social media.

The post Gannett Builds Trust with Advertisers & Identifies White Space Content Opportunities with Tubular appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“Data is at the core of all that we do at [Corus’ internal digital agency] so.da – from identifying new opportunities, developing our social strategies, to informing our content creation.

During the content ideation phase, we used Tubular to identify what types of content were over-performing, which determined the focus of the series as well as the right time to launch, and strategize which audience niches we would target with paid media for each of our episodes.

No matter if it’s a social-first series or a sales pitch, Tubular is a key element of our data-driven approach.”

Dervla Kelly, Senior Vice President, Marketing & so.da, Corus Entertainment

Challenge

Corus Entertainment’s Food Network Canada (FNC) needed a way to predict what food content would perform best for its audience, as viewers stayed at home and studios were shut down during quarantine.

FNC also wanted to understand the types of content that could give the network a competitive advantage, and see if there were mid-form series content opportunities that were untapped.

Strategy

Using Tubular within its research process, Corus Entertainment identified that baking content was among FNC’s nine of 10 top-performing posts. It further honed in on “homemade baking” as the trending topic within baking using Tubular.

With this data, Corus not only was able to create and publish new ideas for baking videos, but it also developed a new original social series called The Substitute Baker.

Results

FNC grew its unique audience reach 63% from February (1.9M uniques) to March (3.1M uniques).

FNC published +19% more videos related to “homemade baking,” driving a 20% increase in views in the last three weeks of March (18M views, 255 videos) vs. the whole month of February (15M views, 215 videos).

The Substitute Baker‘s top-performing video — “Raspberry Cashew Cheezecake” — drove a 2x higher average 30-day view count (V30) than the Food & Drink category’s V30 for Facebook videos uploaded March 15 – April 15, 2020 in Canada.

The post How Corus Predicted the Quarantine Food Trend and Grew Unique Audience Reach by +63% appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“The value of a standardized measurement across social is exciting; it’s the chance to have a unified metric that identifies the audience. It’s the ability to have a deeper understanding of your own social audience and to understand their viewership, their engagement, and going beyond the view — going and looking at the person, that unique audience member, and we’re thrilled to understand the data as we work closely with Tubular to have a real understanding of this massive audience that Ellen reaches on a daily basis.”

Stephanie Guerrieri, VP of Brand Content & Partnerships, Ellen Digital

Ellen Digital reaches millions of viewers per month, but the media company had no insights into exactly who those audiences were or why their massive scale of views truly mattered. After becoming a GVMA member and using Tubular Audience Ratings, Ellen is now able to prove their total reach and validate their share of voice in the digital market.

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“Everything we do starts with who the audience is [and] what do they want that fits our purpose. We research this target audience using Tubular to build a strategy and we have done so for many of our platforms, and every one has been a market leader.”

Haris Alisic, Head of Audience Development and Engagement, AJ+, digital arm of Al Jazeera

For AJ+, audience loyalty and engagement is crucial, especially as that audience moves across its social video and digital platforms. In order to generate more engagement, the digital arm of Al Jazeera works hard to understand its audiences, what they want, and how this aligns to AJ+’s goal of being the voice of the unheard. Here’s what Haris Alisic had to say about how AJ+ uses Tubular to accomplish this purpose:

The post AJ+ Creates Leading Social Channels Thanks to Audience Measurement appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“Having consistent metrics around viewership, watch time, video type, and other insights that Tubular is able to provide us in terms of content performance and who’s watching what, is incredibly valuable and helps us understand a better visual of our overall footprint in media.”

Bobby LaCivita, Vice President, Research & Measurement, Group Nine Media

Group Nine Media Uses Performance to Validate Total Share of Voice

Group Nine Media knows industry fragmentation is a challenge for clear audience understanding and good measurement. That’s why the company uses Tubular to consolidate data across 40+ digital and social video platforms and to understand the true impact of this content, which ultimately helps Group Nine validate its total share of voice in the market.

The post Group Nine Media Uses Video Performance to Validate Total Share of Voice appeared first on Tubular Labs.

“From a validation standpoint, we had to piecemeal that before Tubular. Tubular actually allowed for us to be able to bring a lot of those signals together from the same sourcing and it obviously reduced quite a bit of the time spent internally on analysis in order to do that validation.”

Aaron Braxton, VP, Head of Business Intelligence + SEO // GM, Collective Collective
Complex Networks

Challenge

Complex Networks has a lot of great content ideas, but like many other video-first publishers, they have to strategically consider resource investment to support ideation, creation, and distribution of new series. Complex Networks needed a way to predict what ideas would be most likely to succeed, and decide on which platforms those ideas should live.

Strategy

Complex Networks uses Tubular within their business intelligence stack to generate cross-platform video insights, allowing them to evaluate different series ideas, map out potential programming and distribution, model the projected audience engagement, and confidently make talent and partnership decisions for each episode.

Results

In March 2020, Complex skyrocketed into the Top 10 Cross-Platform Entertainment creators and set a monthly viewership record on YouTube, their most engaging channel.

Learn more 

The secret (hot) sauce to Complex Networks’ growth strategy

The post Complex Networks Validates and Prioritizes Series Distribution with Tubular appeared first on Tubular Labs.