How Wild Card Creative Group cut their comment analysis time in half
About Wild Card Creative Group
Industry
Entertainment Marketing
Founded
2007
Headquarters
Culver City, CA
Before Siftsy
Manual comment research alongside a quantitative reporting tool
4 hours
Saved while producing daily launch reports
50%+
Less time spent on trailer comment analysis
4 workflows
Now running on Siftsy
How a lean strategy team at an entertainment marketing agency turned hours of comment scrolling into same-morning client reports, each one backed by real audience comments.
Challenge
Comment research was slow, manual, and hard to prove
Rebecca Baroukh leads Strategy and Insights at Wild Card, a team that works across both sides of the agency. It handles campaign and quarterly reporting, influencer sourcing and strategy, creative briefs, pitch strategy, and platform playbooks, and it answers questions from the audio-visual (AV) team that cuts the trailers.
Ari Santana, an integrated marketing strategist on the team, runs much of the influencer sourcing and reporting and supports research for both sides of the agency.
The goal across everything is to understand what audiences are, in Rebecca’s words, “thinking, feeling, desiring,” which often means reading between the lines of fandom.
Before Siftsy, Wild Card already had a strong quantitative tool for reporting, but it showed how posts performed, not what people were actually saying about them.
For that, the team did what Rebecca calls laptop research. Someone opened the relevant posts and read through the Instagram comments, YouTube threads, Reddit discussions, and fan forums. They formed a rough sense of how people felt and sorted reactions into informal buckets, which Rebecca summed up as people feeling “like this, this, and this.” Then they went back through everything to find comments and take screenshots that supported each point.
Nothing was formally tagged, and depending on how many posts and comments were involved, one analysis could take anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple of hours.
Even then, the team also only saw what each platform chose to show them. The top replies were often from verified accounts, and scrolling past them didn’t guarantee a full view of the conversation. Wild Card’s social managers knew their communities and passed along observations and screenshots, but those were anecdotal and hard to present to a client as evidence. When the work moved between people, it moved as a summary and a handful of screenshots.
The volume made all of this harder. A single post can have tens of thousands of comments, and one campaign might span 20 influencers and seven partners. For a lean team, Ari says, spending 20 or more hours scrolling through comments wasn’t an option. Premieres were the hardest. For the first week or two of a season launch, entertainment clients expect a daily report on how the conversation is going, and they expect it early.
Because each analysis took so long, the team had to pick and choose their battles. Trailer feedback for the AV team was a typical workflow, but it took far longer than it should have. And for internal briefs and quick questions, the team usually skipped comment analysis altogether.
Influencer reporting had its own gap. Wild Card’s influencer platform reports how many posts a creator made, estimated reach, and earned media value. But it doesn’t show what the comments are about. A lot of influencer content has no link or call to action, and Wild Card doesn’t run affiliate programs, so it can’t tie a post to sales. Brand clients still want to know whether the spend is working, and Wild Card had no way to show them.
None of this meant their research was weak. The team was looking in the right place, but getting from the conversation to evidence a client could see took far too long.
Solution
Comment research moved into Siftsy
Wild Card started using Siftsy at the beginning of 2026. It kept its quantitative reporting tool for performance data, and Siftsy took over the comment research the team had been doing by hand.
Instead of opening each post and scrolling through the comments, the team now adds the links to the social posts to Siftsy. From there, Siftsy pulls in the comments and groups them by sentiment and topic, so nobody has to sort reactions by hand. When the team needs something specific, like reactions to one character, they search by keyword and see the top comments for that thread of conversation. Because Siftsy works from public links, this also covers content Wild Card made that was published on clients’ and partners’ accounts, where the team might not have access to the social data.
The biggest change, in Rebecca’s view, is that the supporting comments are already there. Before, the team would form a view, then go back to find comments that backed it up. Now every topic and sentiment reading in Siftsy links to the exact comments behind it, ready to screenshot for a report.
The work also stays in one place. Ari can start an analysis and Rebecca can open it and see the same comments, instead of what Ari calls a game of telephone with a summary and some screenshots. They can also refresh an analysis later to see how the conversation changed between multiple reports.
Once this step got faster, the team started using comments in more of its workflows.
Workflow 1: Daily reporting for premieres and season launches
For the first week or two after a premiere or season launch, Wild Card sends some entertainment clients a daily report on sentiment and conversation. Ari collects the links to the latest posts, adds them to Siftsy, and builds the report from the themes and the comments behind them. Clients want to see examples, so screenshots of real comments go in next to the themes. Broader conversation data from Wild Card’s other listening tools sits on top.
Ari estimates a daily report used to take up to six hours from start to finish. Now it takes about two. The analysis and the strategy still take time, but collecting and sorting the comments no longer does.
Workflow 2: Trailer feedback for the AV team
When a trailer goes live, Rebecca’s team adds the Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok posts to Siftsy. They look at overall sentiment, what people are talking about, and which characters come up most. The findings go to the creative directors and editors who worked on the trailer and can shape the next assets in the campaign.
Wild Card did this kind of listening before Siftsy, but it took much longer. Rebecca estimates it now takes at least 50% less time. Someone still has to read the results and decide what they mean, but the team no longer has to find and sort the comments by hand.
For example, on one trailer, a lot of the comments were about the music. Wild Card’s editors think carefully about the music in every trailer, but in Rebecca’s experience audiences don’t often mention it. So when they did, the team passed it to the client, and it gave direction for later assets that leaned more on music.
On another project, the client had asked Wild Card not to focus too much on one part of the story. However, when the team looked at the trailer comments, that part of the story was exactly what audiences were talking about. The client actually already knew this from its own data, but Wild Card didn’t have access to it. By surfacing the comments in Siftsy, they found it on their own and came into the room knowing it too.
Workflow 3: Influencer reporting for brand campaigns
Wild Card is rolling out a creator program for a footwear retailer. For each creator post, the team adds the link to Siftsy and looks at how much of the conversation is about the brand and how positive it is, compared with comments about the creator themselves. As Ari puts it, people in a comment section often start talking about something else entirely.
That changes how creator spend gets decided. A smaller creator might not reach 50,000 people, but if their audience talks about the brand more, and more positively, Wild Card can show the client that the creator is worth working with more often and is worth their fee. When a larger creator shows the same pattern, the team has the evidence to ask the client for more budget. Without it, Ari says, the client usually says no.
These findings now go into Wild Card’s influencer reports next to the reach and engagement numbers.
Workflow 4: Research for briefs and pitches
Rebecca’s team writes creative briefs for ongoing campaigns and new-business pitches. Before Siftsy, comment research was often left out of that work.
Now, before a new season of a show or a sequel to a film, the team runs topic searches on posts from the previous campaign to see what audiences responded to. In the comments on a finale promo, that might be reactions to a character’s death, a casting choice, or a review. This is especially useful when the studio hasn’t shared any of its own audience data.
For pitches, the team does the same with a genre fan page or a handful of comparable releases, to see which conversations come up most.
For new titles, the team looks at what fans expect. When Wild Card’s AV team wanted to understand what audiences were anticipating for an upcoming DC universe film, Ari added the most engaged YouTube videos speculating about the film to Siftsy. Without watching every video or reading through 100,000 comments, she could see how fans pictured the character, much of it shaped by his history in DC comics.
Each analysis adds only 15 to 20 minutes to Rebecca’s work, and she gets insight into the audience she wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Results
Reports are more robust and less anecdotal
The change Rebecca and Ari both point to is in what Wild Card hands its clients. Themes from Siftsy now run through the team’s report write-ups, each backed by comments the client can read. Ari says this has built trust with clients, who now give the team more room to make decisions for the brand without as much oversight.
The work has also spread beyond the two of them. When Ari took a couple of weeks off, she explained Siftsy to her team as “sentiment reporting for dummies”: copy the link, paste it in, and Siftsy does the rest.
Wild Card’s other tools depend on writing queries, which most of the team isn’t trained in. With Siftsy, they can walk into client meetings with specific proof points instead of a sense of how things feel.
Rebecca thinks of 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. Asked to describe Siftsy in one word, Ari chose “approachable.” Rebecca chose two: “clean” for the interface, and “human” for the data, because the real comments are never far from the insight.
