WHAT: Viacom and Twitter have inked a multiple-year pact for Twitter Amplify, a social video ad platform that will help on-air advertisers at networks like MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and Spike leverage their media buys to include more targeted tweets. Kicking off this partnership is MTV’s Video Music Awards, where Pepsi, Degree and three additional clients will enhance their VMA activity by sponsoring any video tweeted from an MTV-affiliated account with timely content. So if MTV tweets a clip from Lady Gaga’s opening performance of “Applause,” Degree could sponsor that video as a promoted tweet to reach MTV’s followers based on users’ geography, operating system, device or publicly shared interests. Branding in the videos themselves can take the form of anything from a pre-roll to a clickable overlay ad to a post-roll ad, with ad lengths often varying from three to five seconds.
WHY: Viacom’s programming is among the most talked-about online, and often overindexes on platforms like Twitter at high multiples. Case in point: The 2011 VMAs broke a then-record for most tweets-per-second when Beyoncé patted her baby bump at the end of her performance, helping result in the largest audience for the awards with 12.4 million viewers and a 10.8 rating among MTV’s core audience of 12- to 34-year-olds, according to Nielsen. So bringing more value to sponsors looking to reach those consumers is top of mind for Jeff Lucas, head of sales for Viacom Media Networks’ music and entertainment divisions. “We have topical events, and the VMAs is our Super Bowl,” he says. For Twitter, platforms like Amplify, which often involve a revenue split as high as 50/50 among partners, should help the company reach what eMarketer recently predicted to be $583 million in ad revenue by the end of 2013-only to more than double to $1 billion-plus in 2014.
WHO: Twitter Amplify head Glenn Brown started the program earlier this year to help timely properties in sports, news and publishing achieve better, targeted results for clients. Early Amplify media partners include ESPN, the NCAA’s March Madness and the NBA Finals with sponsors like Coca-Cola, AT&T and Taco Bell. The Viacom deal marks Amplify’s 13th program so far. Brown cites an early program with ESPN as a benchmark-through promoted tweets, sponsors’ ads were embedded into 7 million video views across 150 clips that received a total of 130 retweets. “We always get some great data behind each one to feed back into the system to make the programs even better,” he says.
IF: Being able to bring more muscle from Twitter can help upsell clients who might otherwise pause at Viacom’s ratings. The 2012 VMAs, for example, had a 50% drop in ratings from 2011’s record numbers, yet generated more than 15 million tweets, an increase from the prior year and enough to make it one of the most talked-about events of 2012 on Twitter. That’s why this year’s VMAs was already “the biggest show we’ve ever had, from a sales point of view,” Lucas says. Plus, Twitter Amplify allows Viacom to “tap into new buckets” of ad budgets by going to market with the social network. “If you’re going to make a mark in social media, you need great content.”