Twitter attempts to attract ad agencies

NEW YORK: Twitter, the microblog, is enhancing its efforts to engage advertising agencies, having made this objective a "huge priority" in a bid to increase uptake of its various services for brands.

Speaking to DigiDay, Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter's vice president, global brand strategy, stated that forging stronger ties with this audience was a crucial goal for the organisation.

"Twitter's relationships with major holding companies have been and will continue to be a huge priority for the company as we build out our team and the Promoted Products suite," he said. 

"As we grow globally, it's especially important for Twitter to continue to have as many transparent conversations with our partners to understand how brands in each market think about our Promoted suite of products."

Currently, Twitter provides three main offerings for marketers, in the form of promoted tweets, trends and accounts. It also recently launched a tool allowing brands to target their activity by gender.

In an attempt to boost interest levels in these products, it has formed a new team tasked with furthering its knowledge of marketers' priorities.

This unit will be led by Matt Derella, who is taking up the position of director of agency development. He previously served as director of agency business development at Google, the search giant.

"Matt has amazing relationships with some of the world's largest holding companies, and we brought him on board to work directly with agencies to understand the questions they and their clients have on the best ways to use Twitter within all of their marketing efforts," Lunenfeld said.

According to Derella, the global agency development team will be based in San Francisco and London. Looking more broadly, Japan also constitutes a "very interesting" market, he told AdAge.

"Twitter understands that agencies are going to be a really important part of the Twitter advertising ecosystem, and they understand that we need to invest in our agency partners," he added.

"If there are agencies out there who are unsure about Twitter, part of my job will be to understand what those concerns are and hopefully bring out some facts and some case studies and some examples for why we believe it's an amazing platform for brands to connect with consumers."

Twitter has found that 33% of US users are fans of between one and five brands, while 36% follow more than six and less 20. A further 12% of members in the US follow 21–30 brands, and 7% surpass this total.

Data sourced from DigiDay/AdAge; additional content by Warc staff, 29 October 2012

SIMILAR NEWS