Twitter has announced a new expansion of its Amplify pre-roll ads, which enable brands to position their promotions alongside Twitter’s premium video content.
Twitter’s video partnerships facilitate direct access to video updates posted by FOX Sports, NBCUniversal, Buzzfeed, Hearst, and many more. In total, Twitter says that it now has over 200 video content partnerships, providing a broad range of placement opportunities for brand promotions.
And now, Twitter’s providing more control tools on this front.
First off, Twitter’s adding new ‘Curated Categories’, which will make it easier for brands to place their video ads with relevant content.
As explained by Twitter:
“Our Curated Categories include niche topics like light-hearted content, football, basketball, soccer, or gaming personalities and allow advertisers to run their pre-roll against video content from publishers covering the topic of choice. The publishers included in each of our Curated Categories are always hand-selected by Twitter teams for their relevance and conversation driving ability within their category’s topic, ensuring a deeper level of contextual alignment for brands.”
As you can see in this listing, in addition to the 15 IAB standard video content categories (which Twitter has offered for some time), Twitter’s now also launching 11 more, with further niche-specific audience reach to help hone-in your campaigns.
That’ll provide more opportunities to tap into several highly engaged conversation groups on Twitter, with sports, in particular, providing a lot of opportunity. Twitter recently shared stats on the rising conversation around the NBA and NCAA, for example, which showed double-digit increases in mentions year-over-year for the NBA All-Star game – though I’m not entirely sure that UK football fans will be happy with the ‘footie’ label listed here.
‘Light-hearted content’ and the new eSports categories could also provide significant opportunity to tap into highly engaged Twitter elements. Twitter saw a 75% increase in gaming-related tweets in 2020.
The new Curated Categories will be made available to advertisers in the US, UK, Brazil, and MENA over the coming weeks, with more markets to follow.
In addition to this, Twitter’s also launching a new format for Amplify pre-roll ads, which provide additional branding and UI enhancements.
As you can see in this example, the new format will now feature the brand name and logo during the ad playback, while there will be additional explainer notes.
Twitter says that these updates will both improve clarity and drive better brand metrics.
“Our testing with these subtle upgrades showed an increase ad recall by 10% and brand favorability by 7%, compared to our previous pre-roll design.”
And lastly, Twitter’s also launching updates to the Amplify campaign set-up process, which will make it easier for advertisers to target the right categories.
As you can see here, advertisers will now be able to view the full listing of available content categories within targeting set-up, along with a listing of ‘monetized videos last month’ under each to provide some scope of potential reach volume for each.
With video consumption on the rise on Twitter – as it is with pretty much every platform – its Amplify pre-roll offering has proven increasingly popular over time, and has been generating good results, according to Twitter’s stats:
“We’ve found that ads paired with premium video served in-feed deliver 2.2X brand favorability and 1.7X purchase intent compared to the same ads in a non-feed environment.”
Being able to pair your ads with premium content will increase the likelihood of them being seen, while having more specific categories for such will also provide more ways to reach the right audience for your brand.
The updates are rolling out to relevant regions from this week.
