Tubular Labs Names Digital Veteran Greg Coleman As CEO

One of the biggest narratives out of TV’s recent Upfront ad showcases was the growing importance of social-media giants YouTube and TikTok for even the biggest and most traditional brands seeking more effective ways to reach elusive younger viewers.

At YouTube’s first appearance at the Upfronts, its executives claimed that it attracts more than 50% of watchtime for the booming Connected TV market. Days before that, the company reported a 14% jump in ad revenues for the quarter. A just-released survey of 2,000 social-video users by Channel Factory found that 56% of respondents said they turn to YouTube videos to relax, and 62% rely on YouTube over other services.

TikTok has a powerful pitch too. It attracts more than twice the view time of Netflix
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, as NYU marketing professor and commentator Scott Galloway noted in a recent analysis. Even Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings has acknowledged in investor letters and earnings calls the outsized attention share that social-video giants attract compared to his company’s putative direct competitors.

No surprise then that ad money is following the eyeballs, with TikTok also driving nearly double Netflix’s revenues, thanks to the work of magnitudes more creators whose videos can appeal to very specific audience niches or many millions of people.

What brands need, however, is third-party assurance that the ad deals they’re increasingly doing on the social-video titans are actually reaching the right audiences in the ways they want.

The opportunity created by that shift in attention and ad time is what attracted pioneering digital-media executive Greg Coleman to jump this week to the CEO role with social-video metrics company Tubular Labs, which tracks audience viewership and engagement across all the content on YouTube, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and, soon, TikTok.

“Traditional TV no longer defines culture. Now, the most important stories and conversations are born and thrive inside of social video,” said Coleman, former president of HuffingtonPost and Buzzfeed who also has held top executive roles at Criteo, AOL Time Warner, Yahoo, and Readers Digest over three decades.

“Audience preferences have shifted and Tubular is uniquely positioned to analyze video consumption globally to deliver measurement standards, giving advertisers the confidence to increase investment in social video.” Coleman said.

One key metric is impressions, a relatively new buzzword for many TV sellers, but vital as advertisers seek highly targeted audiences aggregated across multiple platforms, networks, and providers. Much of the Upfronts presentations by traditional media companies focused on their ability to deliver demographic slices composed from all their various legacy and online outlets, as Variety noted.

Other new-ish metrics of importance include watch time and sales conversions, which is the ability to connect online viewership to actual sales, especially on e-commerce sites such as Amazon
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(now the No. 3 digital-advertising platform, with $31 billion in revenue from that sector in 2021).

Since leaving Buzzfeed in 2018, Coleman has been an entrepreneur-in-residence at venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau and an adjunct professor in digital marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business (he previously taught at Georgetown University, too). Now, he sees a big opportunity in creating the next generation of measurement for media.

Coleman succeeds Scott Ernst, whom the company credited with reorganizing operations, realigning Tubular’s product offerings and expanding its focus to embrace the brands and agencies trying to leverage the vast audiences in social media. Tubular is one of the few metrics providers with access to all of the billions of videos on YouTube and the other social-video giants.

Coleman takes over at a crucial transition in the social-video industry as brands continue to shift dollars from streaming and social video outlets from legacy media.

YouTube’s Upfronts appearance was something of a watershed moment for what has traditionally been a gathering of broadcast and ad-supported cable TV networks. But the notion of “TV” is changing rapidly. The social-media giant argued in its presentation that it has a uniquely deep bond with its hundreds of millions of regular users. To connect with those users, advertisers will want reliable third-party validators to track influencers, brands, campaigns and individual videos.

The old reasons for buying ads – like the popularity of individual shows on a given network on a given night – hardly seemed to matter during the Upfronts. Instead, being able to identify, reach and aggregate will be crucial for brand success.