“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.