Twitter has signed up BBC Global News to its in-stream video TV ad targeting program, Amplify, its first partnership with a global news organisation. Last month it added CBS to the Amplify roster. Original launch partners for the program included BBC America, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel.
The Amplify program, first announced in May, allows broadcasters to embed short video clips in their tweets in near real-time. Those clips are then sponsored by an advertiser, which both promotes the tweet and runs a short pre-roll ad before the video.
“This new collaboration harnesses our global reach and newsgathering capabilities to bring our advertising partners clever and impressive products,” said James Montgomery, Director of Digital & Technology at BBC Global News Ltd in a statement. “Building on the efforts of BBC America’s partnership with Twitter, we’re thrilled to bring our ad partners with us at the cutting edge of news.”
The partnership will see BBC Global News video clip content being surfaced on Twitter. From the BBC’s point of view, it said the partnership gives it a way to make its content reach new audiences.
As part of the partnership, BBC.com is producing a new in-tweet broadcast, called #BBCTrending. This will take the form of a series of short form video broadcasts, presented by Anne-Marie Tomchak (@AMTomchak) that will dig into the latest “trending phenomena” on social media each day, using the BBC’s newsgathering.
#BBCTrending is due to launch later this fall, distributed to the 4.8 million followers of the BBC international news Twitter handle, @BBCWorld, as well as being promoted via Twitter Amplify.
“On Trending, we’re tapping the most powerful internal insight tools and the massive BBC international newsgathering and language operations to decipher why and how trends are happening on social media around the world,” said Tomchak in a statement.
Earlier this month, Twitter’s Deb Roy (co-founder of TV social impact analytics firm Bluefin Labs, acquired by Twitter earlier this year as it continues building out its social TV tools arsenal), described TV as “central” to its business. In August, Twitter also acquired Trendrr — a social media engagement tracker content company, focused on TV.
Roy, who was speaking at a conference in London about how he has been applying his former research focus of semiotics to Twitter’s interest in mapping social activity generated by broadcasts, went on to say that Twitter’s bigger opportunity is around re-injecting the social element back into any kind of so-called “broadcast” experience — expanding this out to mean things like “meal streaming” or watching a sunset, not just turning on the TV to watch the news.
The suggestion is that while Twitter’s current focus is on TV, its ambitions are much bigger than that the current crop of broadcasts we associate with the box.