New York -- Twitter is extending its two-screen sponsorships
from sports to other broadcast categories, on Thursday announcing partnerships
with three new television brands at 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.
