LADbible’s Jon Birchall and Anna Cole joined us for a recent webinar to discuss how they keep up with younger audiences, utilize data in their day-to-day operations, and prioritize engagement.
We’ve pulled out some of our favorite excerpts and takeaways from the conversation below, and you can watch the full conversation on demand here.
How does LADbible keep up with Generation Social?
LADbible has reimagined the way publishers interact with audiences— emphasizing that content creation is a two-way street. In order to create content that resonates with Generation Social, the team maintains a deep and unwavering understanding of evolving audience interests, passions, and preferences. Three key factors allow LADbible to stay on the pulse of what is relevant:
Speaking (and listening) to Generation Social directly
LADnation, the publisher’s internal youth research panel, is where they go to understand exactly what this audience is thinking and feeling about different topics. They also tap this panel to get perspective about specific brand partnerships and ensure their content is aligned with their audience preferences.
Quality > Quantity
Generational Social has a nose for authenticity. They can detect when a publisher is listening to their preferences and when a publisher is spamming them with heaps of content for revenue. LADbible employs very strict measurements to evaluate true, quality content.
Constant data evaluation & optimization
LADBible is a long-time user of both Tubular and Chartbeat. While Chartbeat delivers real-time data for owned and operated sites, Tubular provides a bird’s eye view of social video data. This allows the publisher to detect changes in both macro and micro trends on site and social.
How does LADbible use data in their day-to-day operations?
“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.
And then on the Chartbeat side, just having that real-time story analysis across our newsroom for our journalists, it is just invaluable. It influences our teams by the second, but it also helps us to build those deeper relationships with audiences.” – John Birchall, Director of Editorial Strategy
“Even if we’ve put a lot of time and effort into a piece of content, if our audience isn’t engaging with it within five minutes, we’ll switch it out for something else.”
“We’re really strong on sharing the insights and trends we’re seeing across the business to make sure that 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. They can get creative ideas and inspiration from the insights which is really key.” – Anna Cole, Sr. Research and Insight Manager
How is LADbible redefining success?
Engagement > Reach
While reach will always be one key indicator of a publisher’s success, what matters more to LADBible is engagement. Engagement is the true measure of audience affinity and loyalty, and when you have an audience of nearly 1 billion, you have to start thinking deeper than just getting more eyeballs.
Jon shared that LADBible holds themselves to ultra-high standards of engagement with their “five-minute rule”:
“Within five minutes, a post has to hit a certain level of checkpoints from an engagement perspective. This speaks to us moving away from pure scale. Fundamentally, we want to build those deeper relationships.It’s real-time ruthlessness. Even if we’ve put a lot of time and effort into a piece of content, if our audience isn’t engaging with it within five minutes, we’ll switch it out for something else.”
Driving commercial outcomes with audience relationships
There are plenty of publishers and creators with billions of views, but what stands out to partners and results in ROI is engagement and audience loyalty.
“[Audience engagement] allows us to drive those bigger commercial outcomes because we can have really honest, transparent conversations with clients, and say,’ look, we’ve got a fantastic audience relationship. This is something that you’ll want to play into.” – Jon Birchall
Standing out with engagement and audience loyalty
Audience understanding is at the center of everything LADbible does. It informs how they attract and serve their brand partnerships, how they nurture engagement, and how they unify the different arms of their business.
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, but that’s where Tubular and Chartbeat enter the chat.
Want more insights from LADbible? Watch the full webinar here.
Chartbeat has joined forces with Tubular to help publishers engage their audiences across site and social – learn more about Tubular here.