In March 2022, I flew to London to meet with Aaron, Sam, and Jordan — the founders of Arcade.Media, a company dedicated to managing Europe's biggest creator collective: the Sidemen. The Sidemen, who began on YouTube in the early 2010s as a group of friends sharing content about soccer, video games, and other popular topics, have since grown into a YouTube empire. With over 130 million subscribers and millions more followers across other social media platforms, they have an immense reach and a massive audience that engages with them on many layers.
During my visit, Aaron and Jordan expressed the need for a data-focused approach to better manage this vast audience. They were also looking for someone to lead digital experience projects for the new ventures Arcade was creating for the Sidemen, like Side+, a streaming service exclusively for Sidemen content. I joined the company as the first "techie," diving into some exciting initiatives and the Sidemen universe.
My initial focus was on taking inventory — identifying the existing platforms and accounts, and understanding where customer data was stored. Side+ quickly became the focus as it was already a big revenue contributor, having been initiated only a few months prior. I quickly realized that the current tools for audience engagement and marketing were insufficient. Subscribers of Side+ or customers who purchased the Sidemen card game were grouped into static emailing lists on Klaviyo, leading to duplicate contacts and no clear understanding of each audience member’s interactions with our touchpoints.
Because of that, I decided to begin the integration of a professional customer data platform, in this case Segment. The goal was to unify data from all our different projects and brands — Side+, Sides, Sidecards, Charity Match, etc. — into one platform. This would allow us to create comprehensive profiles for each follower, enabling more precise and effective communication, like targeted emails, while also providing our content teams with insights into how users engaged with our content across various channels.
Integrating all data sources wasn't easy: Despite a pre-existing integration from our OTT provider to Segment I still had to create a ton of web services that listened to webhooks, were fed by manual exports or called other APIs to then feed the data into Segment. All of these web services were orchestrated on Google Cloud Platform, and were simple containerized web servers running on Cloud Run, allowing them to scale independently based on their incoming traffic. This was important as especially during peak hours, the web services processing Side+ data would see up to 350req/s, while others usually never had to handle more than a few requests per second.
Once all data sources were integrated, I mapped the incoming data to ensure accurate creation of personas and profiles within Segment, working closely together with the CRM and marketing team to ensure everything satisfied their requirements. We also needed to export Side+ data to our own analytics engine, as the content team required more detailed insights into user behavior on Side+ than what our OTT provider could offer. To meet this need, I built a data pipeline on GCP that ingested Side+ action data in real-time and stored it in a Postgres database. A reporting script running on a weekly basis then queried and aggregated this data, providing the content team with the analytics they needed.
The benefits of the integration were immediate. CRM and marketing campaigns became significantly more effective. With targeted win-back and re-engagement emails, we successfully re-converted many canceled Side+ subscribers and kept them engaged with personalized content updates. For example, if a user frequently watched a specific show on Side+, we could now inform them directly when a new season was released.
For the Sidemen Charity Match 2023, we managed to sell out a 68,000 seat stadium within 90 minutes thanks to a >60% open rate and ~21% click rate on our email communication, which was achieved mainly by targeting parents of fans separately from those who were old enough to purchase tickets themselves, something that became possible only through the segmentation provided by the new platform.
The analytics service also brought major improvements, allowing the content teams to identify top-performing content and understand better what users were searching for on Side+. This project was far from a "one-and-done" — the next expansions of the system are already underway, and we keep iterating and improving on the existing structures to ensure we keep getting better at understanding the Sidemen fans and what they want.
