Twitter Pushes Video for Newly Expanded Mobile Ad Network

Twitter is taking a page from Facebook’s playbook by opening its mobile ad network to a larger group of marketers. Whereas Twitter’s service was formerly restricted to a small group of clients that could buy ad campaigns running on its own service and third party apps in its MoPub mobile advertising exchange, now all advertisers with dedicated Twitter account managers can widen their campaigns beyond Twitter. Newly renamed “Twitter Audience Platform,” the product will also feature more video ads.

twitter6“On our owned and operated property, video is our fastest-growing format,” said Ameet Ranadive, Twitter senior director of revenue products. “There’s a lot of demand for it, so we’re making sure we can extend that.”

His comments are based on the success Twitter has had in improving ad offerings. In July, Twitter’s Q2 revenues rose 61 percent to $502.4 million, notes The Wall Street Journal, compared with $312.2 million the previous year.

The Twitter Audience Platform takes promoted tweets, promoted videos and the company’s mobile app promotion products into the world outside of Twitter, according to Twitter executive Adam Bain. “It’s one click to take a Twitter campaign and scale it across all our partners,” he said.

Twitter states that the platform is expected to reach 700 million monthly users, of which 300 million are on Twitter and the rest across partner apps.

Twitter’s move to take its mobile ad product wide follows a similar move by Facebook in 2014, with its Facebook Audience Network. Facebook, however, just announced its introduction of auto-play video ads, which Twitter already did earlier this year. Those auto-play ads are “performing well,” says WSJ, “and Twitter hopes to see similar results with video across its ad network.”

Information about users will target ads across partner apps where possible, says Twitter, but the information will also be used to build “lookalike” audiences to better target ads. Ranadive reports that Twitter plans to “further develop its formats and targeting and tracking capabilities.”

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