When marketers ask, “How do I identify the best partnerships to reach our brand goals?” the answer often comes down to one thing: data-driven audience insights.
Too often, partnerships are chosen based on surface-level metrics like views and engagement. But with social video intelligence, brands can uncover deeper audience interests to discover unexpected collaboration opportunities.
Tubular’s latest research on cross-category partnerships shows how analyzing social media data leads to smarter collaborations. Using social video analytics, we reveal how industries like beauty, gaming, and food can connect in surprising, yet highly effective, ways.
Can’t wait to see the insights?
Why Traditional Targeting Is So Last Year…
Traditional audience targeting assumes people fit into neat categories. Beauty lovers only care about makeup, gamers only care about consoles, and foodies only care about recipes. But in reality, audiences are multidimensional.
Social video analytics let brands see:
- What other content categories their audiences watch
- Where audience overlap exists between seemingly unrelated topics
- How collaborations impact audience expansion and engagement
For example, when we looked at topics YouTube Beauty viewers in the UK were also interested in, we saw some obvious overlap with Fashion and Jewelry, and some not-so-obvious overlap with Racing and Motorsports.
Beauty Meets Motorsports
Charlotte Tilbury x Formula 1 Academy
At first glance, Beauty and Motorsports might seem worlds apart. But Tubular’s data found that UK female Beauty viewers are 11.4x more likely to watch Motorsports content than the average viewer.
Insights like these can fuel innovative partnership decisions. In fact, Charlotte Tilbury became the first beauty brand to partner with the Formula 1 Academy. And the campaign didn’t just make history — it was a runaway success:
- 9.6M TikTok views from user-generated content (UGC)
- 852K engagements across official and fan posts
- +97% increase in audience overlap between Beauty and F1 content year-over-year
Key Takeaway: Bold partnerships expand reach and unlock new audience segments.
Gaming Meets Glamour
Riot Games x Fenty Beauty
Female gamers are a growing but under-served audience. Tubular’s analytics showed strong affinities between women in gaming and major beauty brands like YSL, NYX, and L’Oréal.
Riot Games capitalized on this by partnering with Fenty Beauty on a limited-edition makeup collection inspired by its hit series Arcane. The colab went viral:
- 59M TikTok views in UGC
- 1.6M Instagram engagements
- A surge of beauty tutorials, cosplay, and swatch content that blurred the lines between gaming and beauty culture
Key Takeaway: Partnerships thrive when audiences are invited to participate, not just consume.
Bonus Research
Food Meets Nostalgic Entertainment
What happens when you merge cookware with entertainment nostalgia? You get one of the most viral cross-category collaborations of the year.
We break down the full story in our latest report — including how a cookware brand leveraged a beloved pop culture franchise to drive millions of unexpected views and engagements.
How to Identify the Best Influencer or Brand Partnerships
So, how can brands apply these insights? Here’s a step-by-step framework:
- Analyze audience affinities – Use social media analytics to uncover what else your target audience watches and engages with.
- Look for the unexpected – Viral impact comes from partnerships outside of your category.
- Validate with data – Track audience overlap and engagement growth to prove the partnership’s value.
- Enable co-creation – Encourage UGC with interactive content so audiences fuel the campaign’s momentum.
With the right social video intelligence, marketers don’t need to guess. They can see where unexpected partnerships will thrive — and confidently invest in collaborations that deliver measurable results.
Want to discover unexpected partnership opportunities for your brand?
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