Allison Stern, co-founder and VP of Marketing at Tubular, will be doing a fireside chat with JC Cangilla of New Form Digital, at [a]list Mobile + Social Video summit next week on August 19. We got some insights from Allison beforehand about what how things at Tubular have changed, what trends she’s seeing in the space and what some brands are doing with the data that they provide.

Tubular has been around for over 3 years now, and now we’re well into what is being called a “video boom.” How has the company changed and adapted to keep up with it all?

When we founded Tubular in 2012, 80 percent of video views online were on YouTube. Today we live in a cross-platform video world. Tubular originally shed insight into YouTube video and audiences, today we’re completely cross-platform. We track over 1 billion videos across YouTube, Facebook, Vine, and 25 other platforms. It’s our mission to track all video content and audiences to generate actionable intelligence for our enterprise customers to help them refine their content and distribution strategy, find and partner with influencers, and optimize their promotion budgets. Over 3 years, a lot has changed. We started as two people in a Starbucks, and now we’re 50 people, we have a patented technology, and we work with 100 enterprise customers including Comedy Central, Mattel, GE, Pepsi, Time Inc., Conde Nast, and HGTV.

In what ways are you seeing your customers utilize the platform?

Our customers use Tubular to grow larger, more engaged video audiences. They use Tubular to understand their audience and content trends, create content that resonates, publish to the right platforms at the right time, and optimize influencer marketing and paid promotion. For example, HGTV used Tubular to select DIY as a trending topic with their millennial fans, and launched youtube.com/hgtvhandmade. They used Tubular to select content topics and select the right DIY influencers to work with. With Tubular data, they were able to grow their audience mostly organically from 0 to 125,000 subscribers in a year.

What trends are you seeing in digital video and where do you see things going in the future?

We see online video growing at an exponentially high rate. The number of viewers, time spent, ad dollars, production budgets, and new players and platforms are ALL increasing rapidly. In fact, by 2017, 74 percent of all Internet traffic will be digital video. And with this rapid growth, comes a gap in data and insight. While traditional players provide TV viewing data, no one is filling the data gap for online video intelligence and that’s where Tubular comes in. Democratization of video content creation is an especially interesting trend. Not only is there video platform proliferation, there’s creator proliferation. There’s 2.5 million publishers on YouTube with at least one thousand subscribers, and 1,268 of those publishers have at least 1 million subscribers. We live in an age where anyone can be a media company, and what does that mean for traditional media companies and brands Every video platform is different and requires a different strategy to succeed. If you’re interested to read Tubular’s advice, you can find it in our cross-platform video white paper.

“We live in an age where anyone can be a media company, and what does that mean for traditional media companies and brands ” In your mind, how can a brand get the most out of the platform creator?

Tubular empowers brands to succeed at video marketing by boosting their audience, content, and ecosystem intelligence. Specifically, brands use Tubular to track official and UGC brand video content across 30+ platforms; identify video trends and uncover content creation opportunities; identify and partner with aligned influencers and fans; architect a cross-platform video distribution strategy; and execute and optimize paid media promotion to the right audience. Ultimately, Tubular video intelligence gives brands the insights they need to maximize reach and engagement. Tubular works with Pepsi, Mattel, Warner Bros., GE, Activision, and so many of the world’s top brands and media companies. If you’re interested to get a small taste of Tubular’s data, please explore our free Creator Profiles.

What are brands doing right in terms of video In what areas are you seeing room for improvement?

There are 20,000 brand channels on YouTube. 132 of them have 1 million+ subscribers. Excluding media brands, LEGO is the #1 brand in online video. In July it had 94 million cross-platform video views. The secret to success for brands is for them to think like creators – it’s about building and connecting with an audience. If you’re a brand, think about creating a cohesive content strategy, uploading consistently, partnering with influencers, and engaging with fans.