[Podcast] Reading Culture Through Feeds: Leila Akhavan on Social Video Insights

Podcast Transcript

Jackie Cuyvers:
Welcome to the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast, where we showcase the incredible work of women working in the field of social intelligence. My name is Jackie Cuyvers and I’ll be your host for this journey. In this podcast, we’ll be speaking with women from enterprise agencies and academia who are leading the charge in the world of social listening and insights. Together, we’ll be exploring their careers and the challenges they’ve faced and overcome and the innovative solutions they’ve developed. Our goal is to provide valuable insights and advice to our listeners who are passionate about this field and committed to advancing their careers. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, you’ll find inspiration and guidance in these conversations. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn from the women who are shaping the future of social intelligence. Let’s get started.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Today I’m joined by Leila. Let’s start with a quick intro. Can you share a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Leila Akhavan:
Yes. Thank you so much for having me here, Jackie. My name is Leila Akhavan. I’m a senior strategist at Tubular Labs. And Tubular Labs is a global social video intelligence and measurement tool. So we provide a unified view of the passions and behaviors of audiences across social video platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and more. We have a really large social video database with more than 15 billion videos and 45 million creators. And with all that data, Tubular helps hundreds of brands, agencies, media properties grow their business and really lead on social video by anticipating trending content and new creators and really just what’s next in culture.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the world of digital and social intelligence?

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah. So to start, I was really passionate about the entertainment industry and I started working at the Ellen DeGeneres Shows digital network in 2017. I started there as a digital brand partnerships assistant. So my role crossed both the the digital production content creation world and also the brand partnerships world. And during my first year there, Data, especially data driven insights, were becoming more and more crucial to shaping the team’s content strategy. So I ended up naturally transitioning into more of a data and analytics role to support that growing space. And within a few years, I started managing the analytics team there. At the Ellen Digital Network, we built out a team, a small but mighty team, and we were responsible for tracking all of our content and providing all of our insights, recommendations and more to all levels of folks there, all the way up to the executives. And while I was working there, I actually became a Tubular user And I used Tubular for many projects to look for content opportunities to understand more about our audience or to identify creators we wanted to work with. And fast forward a few years. In 2021, I transitioned to a role at Tubular on the Insights and strategy team, where I work with clients to provide them custom data and recommendations for their social video strategy.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you’ve worked both kind of on the brand side as well as now on the tool side, and it sounds like you’ve worked with some really major brands and platforms. What keeps you passionate about your work in this space?

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah, it’s really the momentum that social video keeps changing at. It’s really different year over year. It’s really exciting to see how fast things keep changing. There’s so much growth in the social video space with new players coming up and seeing these communities emerge on social video. I love this idea on these platforms that really they’re designed so anyone who has access to recording a video, whether it’s on a phone or a camera, has an opportunity to grow and to reach an audience. You know, regardless of whether they’re a brand or an influencer or a major media company, it’s relatively easy for someone to share their voice on social video these days, which I think makes it a really unique and diverse space.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So, as a senior strategist at Tubular Labs, what does your day to day work with insights and data typically involve?

Leila Akhavan:
We are constantly talking to our clients who use Tubular, more specifically, the insights and strategy services. So this usually starts with a scoping call where we’ll talk to our client and they will share either a topic or an area of analysis that they want to look into. Then we will compile all the data we need for this analysis through our backend tool. So sometimes this involves working with our data science team or our engineer team. And we’ll then take all that data, perform the analysis, and craft a story that speaks to the question, the original question that the client asked. And we’ll usually deliver a deck. We’ll put together a deck with some visual aspects like charts and graphs to help support the narrative that we created. And I really like to describe my role here as a mix of both technical and interpersonal elements. So while we perform data analysis, we work with complex data sets. We are also storytelling and managing partnerships. So while every day is different, it is typically a mix of collaborating with our clients externally and also internally with different teams.

Jackie Cuyvers:
At Tubular, can you perhaps walk us through a recent use case where video intelligence played a key role?

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah, we’ve had a lot of really fun and unique client use cases. Recently, one that was really cool was actually around Halloween or a little prior to Halloween. We had a client who wanted to understand the moment of Halloween on social video platforms like YouTube vs Instagram vs TikTok vs Facebook to see how they could best optimize their content on all of these platforms around the holiday. So we looked at, we did started with a quantitative analysis looking at data around consumption and production over the days leading up to Halloween and also the days after Halloween to help them understand how far beforehand is it best to start posting Halloween related content and then also how long afterwards do people keep engaging with Halloween content. And then we also looked through a qualitative lens of insights, more like content trends, to see what popular categories or subcategories of Halloween content on social video were. So we saw dance videos, Halloween recipes, costume content, all of that. So this combination of both quantitative and qualitative insights really helped the client build a strategic plan to launch their Halloween related content and optimize it using the best practices that we provided.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Wow, that sounds like a really fun project and some great insights coming out of that.

Leila Akhavan:
Yes, especially around the holidays, there’s always a lot of cool trends on social video around seasons. So it’s always really fun to look into and share that data and those recommendations with the client.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Are there any other surprising insights or trends that you’ve seen emerge from social video data recently?

Leila Akhavan:
Yes, and I love any question about trends. So a really cool one we’ve seen recently is that audiences are actually turning to social video to find answers to questions that were traditionally found on search engines or that search engines were traditionally used for. And I actually wrote up a report about this using tubular data where we looked at content that was educational in nature. So think how to videos, hacks, DIY content, recipes, or even reviews. And we looked at all this content and we saw that on Instagram, for example, the engagement across this content grew 50% year over year in 2024 and is continuing to grow. And this was really insightful for all types of accounts like brands, media companies or influencers, because the data reflected how powerful video content is in practical applications like learning and how much of a trend it has become in the last few years. And video has a really cool, strong visual element that has proven to help people understand answers to their questions even more thoroughly and clearly.

Jackie Cuyvers:
What are the most important metrics when you’re doing this type of research that brands should look at in video intelligence beyond just the views or engagement or, you know, Number of shares.

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah. So while those metrics are super important and really helpful in analysis, we’ve also seen a lot of growing interest in watch time data. And watch time data is a metric we have available through Tubular Audience Ratings. Brands in particular are looking to understand really how many minutes and audiences are contributing to their own accounts or other accounts in their vertical, maybe competitor accounts. Especially in this world of short form content, there is still a lot of value to the time that someone, as a viewer is contributing to a creator. And even on a macro level, brands can see the categories that are receiving the highest watch time or that people are spending the most time interacting with. And again, I think it’s really valuable because it helps us understand performance as a unit of time, like what fraction of someone’s time is dedicated to a certain creator or a genre. So while traditional metrics like views and engagements are still extremely important and a great way to measure success, watch time is also a metric I’d suggest keeping track of to really supplement those more traditional metrics.

Jackie Cuyvers:
How do you help clients tie social video insights to real business outcomes or business questions or impact?

Leila Akhavan:
As a professional services team, we work essentially like consultants, so we’ve developed great relationships with our clients where for each deliverable they have, they will share their questions or business initiatives they need help with and we will first walk them through the exact type of data we’re going to provide and analyze just to make sure it aligns with what they’re looking for and what they need for their business initiatives. After we complete the traditional report, we will meet with them and walk them through our findings and we typically will first show them the results of the data and then we will complement those with those actionable insights or recommendations that they can use. And the recommendations can range from best practices on programming strategy, like what is the optimal video length for a certain type of content category or what posting strategy over the week they should use or or it can be like a list of influencers who work best for the client to partner with. So all that being said, it’s really key for us as an insights and strategy team to from the start understand the context behind a client’s report and use case and we will typically ask them a lot of questions that we can ensure that the deliverable we are providing and the suggested action items address.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Their initiatives thoroughly as the lines blur between entertainment advertising and influencer content. How is Tubular helping brands understand that new landscape online?

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah, this is something I actually used Tubular for at my previous role at the Ellen Digital Network There we were looking to make strategic decisions on our brand partnerships, to see who to work with, what brands to integrate into our content. And Tubular has data on paid partnerships through a tool called Dealmaker. And this helped me in my previous role and helps our current clients identify verticals or industries or even specific creators that would make the most sense for a partnership. And through this data we’ve actually seen some really cool, unexpected partnerships arise. There’s a recent example we saw with a beauty and gaming crossover partnership that was really successful despite having two different audiences in the beauty and gaming genres. And these types of analysis can also tie in another really cool product we have in Tubular called Audience Also Watches, where you can look at a creator and see what other creators or influencers their audience is spending their other time watching. So we can make advertising feel like a natural fit by looking at that overlap of where audiences spend their time. If they are fans of one creator, what are the other creators they are most likely interacting with and engaging with? So with all these tools in Tubular, brands can really get a deep understanding of their audience and potentially find some surprising insights about their viewer profiles, like a lot of our clients have recently.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So video is now core to how people communicate online. How do you see the future of video social intelligence evolving over the next five years?

Leila Akhavan:
Video is really becoming the focus of so many things. Like I mentioned earlier, it has been gaining popularity to become like a search engine. And there are so many components of this, like visual elements or seeing a human in front of the camera or behind the camera, knowing there’s a human behind the camera, that make the experience of video more relatable. That really drives the increasing popularity of video consumption. I think, and I say in the next few years we can expect to see video insights become a core part of everyone’s day, no matter what type of creator, brand, media platform you are, or no matter what vertical you’re in. Even for casual users on social media who use it just kind of more casually, the simplest data and user insights can provide even a small glimpse into what type of content your audience likes engaging with.

Jackie Cuyvers:
How is AI influencing how video insights are generated or used and what excites you or potentially worries you about it?

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah, AI is really exciting because we can now get data faster and saves us quite a bit of time with some things that might have been more tedious previously. It has just made things a lot more efficient in certain aspects of our analysis. But all that being said, we still have to be mindful of the human element. From my perspective, especially Seeing that relatable content like I talked about is always a big trend across content that does well. People enjoy seeing things on social video that are similar to to themselves or maybe experiences they are going through. And it’s this social video community that has created such a close knit space on the on these platforms. People can make friends, they can learn from each other. So this all goes to say that we will still need to balance AI generated insights with human generated stories and perspectives to really paint the full picture.

Jackie Cuyvers:
What advice would you give to someone interested in working at the intersection of social data and media?

Leila Akhavan:
I would say to really explore your personal passion in the social video and media space. Like keep an eye out for trends, look at how they develop in your own personal feeds. Watch content you really enjoy. What I’ve seen across a lot of my amazing colleagues that I’ve worked with over the last few years in this space is that everyone is very passionate about video content and truly enjoys helping the social video space grow and develop.

Jackie Cuyvers:
What skills or mindsets do you look for when hiring people into this field? Or as you say, you know, looking for excellence in colleagues or co workers?

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah, I kind of touched on this earlier, but I think there’s this amazing blend of both hard and soft skills that really come into play in this field. And for example, getting creative with finding new ways to do a certain type of analysis or finding patterns in large data sets and complex data sets is an amazing skill to have. But also someone who can communicate data to all types of stakeholders from junior level folks to executives or from marketers to engineers. Being able to tailor the data and story to the recipient is very important in this field and, and also someone who consumes content themselves. We are experts in the social video field so it’s important to have an understanding of the types of content out there. I know there’s so many, so many trends and so many verticals, but having an understanding of what is trending and just from your own personal feed. Being a consumer and engaging with this type of data really goes a long way in this field.

Jackie Cuyvers:
How do you stay current in such a fast moving industry? Are there any newsletters or content creators that you follow regularly?

Leila Akhavan:
Yeah, I’m, I’m a big fan of email newsletters. One of my favorites is the Tube Filter newsletter. I receive it in my inbox every morning and it’s a great way to stay on top of trends or new partnerships, new collabs, new platform features. It’s a really quick and easy digest, daily digest to see what’s going on in the social video industry. I also really love industry events. I will shout out the Social Intelligence Labs Observe Summit. That’s where I met and connected with you, Jackie and other amazing professionals in the field. So was a really awesome space to hear from thought leaders to share perspectives on things in the industry. The in person events are always very valuable. I also really like VidCon. VidCon is always fun because it’s more of an interactive space with you have the, you know, the behind the scenes people like vendors, but you also have the actual creators themselves all in one space. So it’s really fun to see multiple sides of the social video space all in one place and hear their stories and learn from each other.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much Leila for sharing your expertise and experience and really appreciate the time and everything that you’ve shared with us.

Leila Akhavan:
Thanks so much for having me, Jackie. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jackie Cuyvers:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation and taken away some valuable insights and advice from today’s guest. If you like this episode, please be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Spotify so you never miss an episode. And don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn for updates and additional resources. I’d like to take a minute to once again thank our interviewee for taking the time to join us on the show today and sharing her story and insights with us. Your contribution to the world of social intelligence is truly invaluable and we’re so grateful for you sharing your time and expertise. And finally, if you listeners know of anyone else who would make a great guest on our show, please don’t hesitate to introduce us. We’re always on the lookout for new and inspiring stories. Until next time, I’m Jackie Cuyvers and this is the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast. Thanks so much for listening.