Twitter pushes brand safety credentials as it expands advertising options and sports content deals
Twitter is expanding its advertising offerings on the back of a target to double the premium video content on the platform. The service has also signed a series of sports and entertainment content deals.
Twitter Australia’s head Suzy Nicoletti told Mumbrella brand safety will remain at the top its priority list.
Twitter Australia MD Suzi Nicoletti: “We’re in this really great postion.\”
Nicoletti, who was appointed to run Twitter’s Australian operations in 2016 following Karen Stocks stepping down, said the continuation of partnerships around live events along with features such as clickable video ads will be some of the biggest selling points for the service to advertisers this year.
“When we look at 2018, I think we’ve done a fantastic job of establishing ourselves in this market as the home of live and now we’re in this really great position where we have partners coming to us. We’re getting ambitious, we’re looking at doubling the amount of video content on Twitter.”
Last August, Twitter renewed its partnership with the Victoria Racing Club. The renewed partnership extended its deal with the racing body and the Seven Network to include additional races and live content with the service looking towards non-sports and niche events to provide more content.
“Right now we’re in the middle of planning for the Commonwealth Games, we’re are looking at events like the Sydney Mardis Gras, which gives a lot of different brands an opportunity to align with what they stand for,” Nicoletti said.
Other events the service has signed up over the past 12 months include the ARIAs, NSW Pro Surfing and Pitch Perfect.
#Auspol was the most tweeted hashtag last year, but Nicoletti believes social moments spurred by reality TV shows including My Kitchen Rules and Married At First Sight will diversify the platform’s audience and user base.
Brand safety, however, remains a concern as major advertisers worry about inappropriate content and poor behaviour by users, something that has damaged Twitter’s reputation with advertisers in the past.
“Brand safety is absolutely at the top of the mind for 2018,” Nicoletti said in response to questions about risks to brands on the platform. “There’s a couple of key things we’re facing on, first and foremost is technology so we’re trying to look at our filters from both a visual and tech space angle to make sure we keep the quality and safety at a premium.
“The second thing is it is enough of a focus for us as a business to be having manual review against content. The last thing is we do put the control in the hand of advertisers so they can control where their adverts can go.”
While Nicoletti declined to break out Twitter’s local user numbers, the service reported 330m monthly active users globally last quarter. This was an increase of 4% over the same period last year, although it was flat against the previous quarter.
This seems damn ironic when you still can’t even do native captions for videos you post on the platform.
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