Why advertisers should shift display budgets to Twitter’s video

thedrum.com

Marketers are siphoning budgets from display campaigns on Twitter to its video ads, which when synchronised with TV media buys can lead to a 10 per cent lift in their return-on-investment from the legacy medium.

The business claims this combination leads to an uplift in campaign KPI’s on Twitter, but also strong TV ROI. It’s always been an opportunity for the micro-blogging site but what’s different now is that marketers have more budget to explore how they can boost the incremental reach of their TV campaigns.
In addition, there’s still a ton of underperforming display advertising out in the world, Twitter’s chief operating officer Adam Bain told analysts on its earnings call yesterday evening (26 April).

“And so what we see happening is money is moving out of display advertising, traditional display advertising into categories like this. And so marketers ultimately are lining up their Twitter spend with their TV spend… we have done a bunch of research across multiple categories, whether it would be auto or consumer packaged goods, to show when advertisers lineup their buys in that way, it actually lead to in some cases over a 10 per cent lift in their TV ROI.”

Like YouTube, Twitter believes its video charge will prosper if more brands use the two channels together rather than doing so with its competitors. That and rather than or argument has been previously stressed by YouTube, which continues to talk up the efficacy of its ads over those appearing on traditional TVs.

To propel its own video offering, Twitter is working on features such as demographic targeting and validation, gross rating point and target rating point as well as reporting.

“We believe that we can tap into incremental video budgets when we put those features in place,” revealed Bain.

“The features are actually in production - are in development right now and are going to be timed to launch with our NFL deal and our live streaming strategy for this fall. And as I mentioned, we are already seeing good response from the market by the fact that advertisers are funding, for example, the NFL deal with the video side of the house instead of where we typically pull money from the online ad budget.”

On the NFL deal to live-stream three hours of the sport on Thursday nights, Bain opened up about what it means for advertisers. It’s pitched as the same live, premium content for logged in, logged out and syndicated users, meaning that brands can use the same ads and the same analytics to open up those audiences.

"We are focused on live premium content in all sports, news and politics as well as entertainment to bring together for our users what they are already talking about, what they already care about," added Bain. 

The company will be hoping live streaming help lift its monthly active users. It’s been an ongoing problem for the social network and while it moved up slightly in the quarter, up to 310 million compared to 305 million in the previous one, growth has been fairly stagnant for the last year.

Revenue for the business was more encouraging, hitting $595m in the quarter, a 36 per cent jump year-on-year. Ad revenue jumped 37 per cent to $531 in the period, with around 88 per cent coming from mobile.