Mindshare’s Jarett Fienman, Director, Digital Investment, gives us the scoop on last night’s Twitter NewFront.
- The big talent onstage:
- Unfortunately Jack Dorsey was not in attendance this year, but there was a wide variety of other guests, including Jorge Ramos (Univison news anchor), Ian Rapaport (NFL Insider), Kay Adams (NFL Host) Golden Tate (NFL Player), and Maddison Beer (Musician), just to name a few.
2. The announcements that caught your eye:
Twitter continues to grow its video capabilities, as more publishers continue to view the platform as a means for premium content distribution. They announced an expanded effort for more live video surrounding key sporting, music, and entertainment events, as well as news.
- Sports: New or extended partnerships with the NFL, ESPN, Bleacher Report, The Player’s Tribune, and MLS to create content through live interactive shows, and expanded coverage of live games that can be streamed through the platform. This also expands into eSports, announcing a partnership with Activation Blizzard to provide a behind-the-scenes look into some of the top gaming tournaments, including Blizzcon 2019.
- Music: A key partnership with Live Nation that will enable users to live stream ten shows over ten weeks, while also producing live content of key tentpole music festivals such as Lollapalooza and Governors Ball. They’re also partnering with MTV to provide more interactive live content of the VMAs with the launch of “Stan Cam.”
- News: New or extended partnerships with credible news organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, TIME, and Univison, who will be producing live news coverage as well as content surrounding key political and newsworthy events throughout the year.
3. Implications for marketers:
- As Twitter continues to expand their video opportunities by partnering with key content providers, we have the ability to insert our brands into the conversation for key moments throughout the year. Since part of that expansion includes how they’re evolving buying parameters that are more in line with how other premium video is purchased (on-demo guarantees, viewability, etc.), they should definitely be considered as a part of your omnichannel video strategy.
4. Challenges for the publisher:
- Twitter continues to be a polarizing platform given today’s political climate, and how it can be used to spread negative rhetoric from national leaders and politicians. Twitter and other social networks continue to face political pressure from both sides of the aisle. On the one hand, rules and regulations must be set in place to prevent hate speech, fake news, and online bullying. On the other hand, they must protect free speech.
- Twitter has historically relied on users to report hateful and hurtful speech, but has made a significant investment in technology that can review and flag this type of content – which is then audited by humans on whether that content should be removed from the platform.
- Fake user accounts continue to plague Twitter and other social platforms, which can inflate total users and the interaction rates that publishers tout when using it for ad purposes. These fake user profiles can be used to increase the rates publishers charge to clients for larger audiences which may not be real.
- To help combat fake users, Twitter has shifted to use daily users as a metric of their audience size vs. monthly visitors, which they say will be a more accurate way to measure true audience size.
In a week filled with lots of content, sales pitches, and very little sleep, Mindshare is bringing you a debrief on some of the biggest NewFront events – the implications for marketers, the challenges for publishers, and more. Check back every day for more debriefs, including the earlier one for Viacom.
