Wild Card Creative Group is an independent entertainment marketing agency based in Culver City. Its AV team cuts trailers, TV spots and promos for studios and streamers, and its digital and social team runs the campaigns and influencer programs around them.

Sitting between the two is a lean Strategy and Insights team led by Rebecca Baroukh, with marketing strategist Ari Santana running much of the research and reporting. Their job, in Rebecca’s words, is to understand what audiences are “thinking, feeling, desiring.” In entertainment, that usually means reading between the lines of fandom.

For a long time, that happened through what Rebecca calls laptop research. Someone would open the posts, read through the comments, YouTube threads and fan forums, sort reactions into rough buckets, then go back for screenshots to support each one. One analysis could take anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple of hours, so the team had to pick its battles.

Since the start of 2026, that research has run through Siftsy. Here’s how it shows up across their work.

When Wild Card’s AV team wanted to know what audiences were anticipating from an upcoming DC film, Ari took the most-engaged YouTube videos speculating about it and ran them through Siftsy. Without having to watch every video or read through 100,000 comments, she could see how fans pictured the character, and how much of that came from his history in the comics.

The team now does the same before a new season or a sequel, running topic searches on posts from the previous campaign.

When a trailer goes live, the team pulls in the Instagram, YouTube and TikTok posts and looks at sentiment, topics and which characters come up most. The findings go to the creative directors and editors working on the next assets, and Rebecca estimates the process now takes at least 50% less time.

Sometimes the comments surface something nobody planned for. On one trailer, a lot of people were talking about the music, which in Rebecca’s experience audiences rarely mention. The team flagged it, and it gave direction for later assets that leaned more on the music.

For the first week or two of a launch, some entertainment clients expect a daily report on how the conversation is going. As Ari puts it, “You have to get that over to the client within the first two hours of the day.”

Each morning, Ari adds the latest post links to Siftsy and builds the report from the themes, with screenshots of real comments next to each one. A daily report used to take up to six hours from start to finish, and now takes about two. The analysis and strategy still take time, but finding and sorting the comments no longer does.

Because Siftsy works from public links, Wild Card can analyse content it made that lives on clients’ and partners’ accounts, where the team doesn’t have access to the data.

That matters for influencer work too. For a footwear retailer’s creator program, the team looks at how much of each creator’s comment section is about the brand, and how positive it is. A smaller creator whose audience talks about the brand more, and more warmly, can be worth working with more often, even without the biggest reach.

Rebecca describes the comment section as a second screen, where audiences talk to each other, often about something other than what the post was meant to be about.

The biggest change at Wild Card has been in the proof rather than the speed. Every theme in their reports now comes with the comments behind it, and Ari says that has built enough trust that clients give the team more room to make decisions for the brand.

For any social team, the takeaway is that comments are useful long before the wrap report, from the first brief to the morning after launch, and an insight carries more weight when the client can read the evidence for themselves.

What the Siftsy team has been reading, saving, and talking about this week.