“Tubular informs our strategy around formats that are performing best on the different social platforms and what’s working well for our competitor set. The Tubular video taxonomy makes it easy to spot some of the top performing categories, subcategories, and also white space opportunities when we’re looking to innovate in new areas.”
Jon Birchall, Director of Editorial Strategy
LADbible Group, founded in 2012, is defined as news & entertainment for the social generation. As one of the biggest names in media, this forward-thinking company is paving the way to show more traditional publishers how to keep up with evolving trends, measure success, and drive their commercial sales engine.
When LADbible sat down with us in 2023, leaders from the company emphasized that they see content creation as a two-way street. Creating content for “Generation Social” means the team prioritizes a deep and unwavering understanding of evolving audience interests, passions, and preferences.
Challenge
Connecting with Generation Social
Generation Social is any audience, group, or community that uses social media as a part of their daily lives.
As a media company catered to “Generation Social”, LADbible has taken on the never-ending challenge of actually keeping up with the ever-evolving social landscape in a digitally connected world. While some measurement & social listening platforms might provide a birds-eye-view of the social network, only Tubular also delivers a granular view of micro-communities and emerging trends on social.
Standing Out to Brands & Advertisers
A challenge that many media companies face is cultivating a strong synergy between both content strategy and the commercial side of business. Views are great, but they’re not enough to solidify competitive brand partnerships. To win against a sea of media publishers, LADBible needed data to prove their in-depth understanding of Generation Social and unmatched audience loyalty.
Action
Reaching Beyond Social Listening
LADbible has been a long-time client of Tubular, and they are also users of our partner, Chartbeat. While Chartbeat delivers impeccable real-time data for owned & operated sites, Tubular provides a bird’s eye view of personal, competitive, and overarching category data. This allows the company to detect changes in both macro and micro trends across site & social.
Aside from third-party data, LADbible also connects with Generation Social directly through LADnation, an internal youth research panel that shares what their audience is thinking, feeling, and caring about. They also tap this panel to get perspective about specific brand partnerships and ensure they are listening to the clientele before making business decisions. This solidifies that LADbible’s content is aligned with audience preferences and their audience feels understood.
Aligning KPIs across Content and Commercial Teams
LADBible knows that long-term commercial success cannot exist without content that achieves exceptional engagement such as viewers commenting, sharing, and reposting videos —something all advertisers are looking for.
Jon Birchall, Director of Editorial Strategy, says LADBible’s engaged audience “allows us to drive those bigger commercial outcomes because we can have really honest, transparent conversations with clients. We can say: ‘Look, we’ve got a fantastic audience relationship. This is something that you’ll want to play into.’”
In order to support these conversations, LADBible comes to the table with Tubular’s behavioral data that looks beyond likes & views to prove true audience loyalty and affinity.
Growth
- In August 2023, LADbible garnered 286M engagements across platforms (more than 10 of their nearest competitors combined).
- In September 2023, LADbible was the #1 Media & Entertainment property across Facebook & YouTube
- LADbible reached 12.2% of the global population on Facebook in September of 2023 with 614.2M unique viewers.
LADbible’s unprecedented growth can also be attributed to the publisher’s ability to synergize their editorial + social strategies. Data shared across the company keeps all moving parts informed on macro and micro trends, content performance, and growth goals.
“Everything we are doing is data-driven. We have such a vast amount of data at our fingertips, so we want to make sure that everything that we are looking at, reading, and interested in is being shared widely around the business, so that all of the teams are able to utilize them.” – Anna Cole, Sr Insights & Research Manager
Tubular: What types of data sources do LADbible teams use to uncover some of the latest audience insights?
Among other tools, Tubular is a main part of the LADbible Toolkit for both the content and data intelligence teams:
JB: Tubular is incredibly useful when we get briefs to understand a brand; have we done any work with them before and how has that previous work gone? Any kind of category learnings that we can have, what are our competitors doing? This allows us to have a really strong standardized way of reporting. We’re able to get stats from Tubular and share into the market, which gives us a really good position against other brands for pitches.
LADbible has achieved momentous digital success using data to align editorial, social, and commercial teams. According to our LADbible partners, their people are practically knee-deep in data at all times.
Access to in-depth behavioral data helps LADBible:
- Make minute-by-minute decisions to keep up with the fast pace of media
- Form lucrative partnerships with brands
- Align internal teams on growth goals and pain points
With so many platforms, formats, audiences, and topics, it’s difficult for major publishers to move at a quick pace while maintaining a unified view. That’s where Tubular and Chartbeat enter the chat.
Tubular offers you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on social video across categories, as well as how well you and your competitors are performing.
Want to hear more of LADbible’s success stories? Watch the full webinar here.