New York -- Twitter is extending its two-screen sponsorships from sports to other broadcast categories, as it announced partnerships with three new television brands during Internet Week.
A&E, Bloomberg TV and Discovery Communications are joining previously announced partners BBC America, Fox, Fuse and The Weather Channel in the partnership program now called Twitter Amplify.
Twitter has already been running in-Tweet video clips with sports properties: ESPN providing instant replays in tweets during college football bowl games; March Madness offering real-time highlights throughout the tournament; and the NBA pushing rapid replays from TV through a tweet to users' mobile phones. The sports notifications will now be extended for other TV applications like tune-in reminders, trailers, bonus content and location-based weather maps.
The company also announced the launch of a new television ad-targeting product to allow marketers to engage directly with people on Twitter who have watched their commercials on TV.
Borne out of Twitter's acquisition of Bluefin Labs in February, the technology uses video fingerprinting to automatically detect where and when a brand's commercials are airing on TV (without the advertiser having to provide any media plan details) and identify Twitter users who tweeted about the program where the ad ran.
The technology will create "a new canvas for engaging with people in the audience," said Deb Roy, chief media scientist at Twitter.
TV ad targeting for Promoted Tweets is available now in limited beta to select partners running national TV commercials in the U.S. In conjunction with the new product, Twitter has launched a new TV Ads dashboard for its clients to show when their specific brand's TV ads have aired.
