Twitter has lost little time bringing the fruits of its Bluefin Labs acquisition to market in its increasingly intense competition with Facebook in targeted advertising around TV in social media. Founded in 2008, Bluefin Labs’ blossomed in the Twitter ecosystem, offering software tracking how users are tweeting about brands and TV shows. It attracted attention from Twitter itself, which swooped to acquire Bluefin in February 2013 for an undisclosed fee we think was not far shy of $100 million. This made it Twitter’s biggest acquisition so far and its most significant because it could steal a march on Facebook, having been trailing in its wake on the targeted ad front.
Until now Facebook has been clearly ahead in overall ad analytics and data matching, with its custom audience tracking tool enabling advertisers to access the Datalogix database of customer information. Based in Denver, Datalogix is a 250 employee start up deemed by many to be pivotal in the future of online advertising because it has built a comprehensive database of offline purchase data that enables brands and service providers of various kinds to target ads and measure whether they boost consumer spending. Facebook has become dependent on this ROI data, and this in turn helped Datalogix to raise a $25 million Series B funding. An acquisition by Facebook could be forthcoming.
Meanwhile Twitter has so far been confined largely to keyword targeting. This has meant that if a brand wanted to advertise on Twitter it could do no more than target either words that people had tweeted or the followers of accounts that are related to the relevant products or services. That of course has some utility, but cannot target customers specifically as Facebook can. This is because Twitter accounts are associated just with email addresses and aliases that do not need to match the user’s real name.
But Twitter does have one trump card, which is that many people have acquired the habit of tweeting while they are watching TV. The Bluefin technology taps into this by enabling advertisers to run TV ad campaigns and elicit tweets generated and promoted by Twitter itself simultaneously. Called Twitter TV Ad Targeting, it is based on the already virtually proven tendency for TV advertising to be more effective if there is simultaneous conversation via Twitter.
As Twitter stated in its release, ‘We are giving advertisers a new TV Ads dashboard, which shows when that specific brand’s TV ads have aired. This will help digital teams align not only with what’s shown on TV and when, but give insight into how Promoted Tweets can be crafted in the most effective ways to build upon broader marketing themes. Whenever a commercial airs during a TV show, Twitter not only determines where and when it ran, but can identify users on Twitter who tweeted about the program where the ad aired during that program. We believe a user engaged enough with a TV show to tweet about it very likely saw the commercials as well.’ The system has so far been tested in beta with GE, McDonald’s and Microsoft.
Separately Twitter is also believed to be working on a “custom audiences” function to close the gap on Facebook there. This would allow a retailer to bring its own list of customer email addresses to Twitter, which would then serve ads against any user with a matching email address. By doing so the retailer could compare the performance of ads targeting its own customers with those not doing so, to see which perform best. While not catching up with the power Facebook has through the Datalogix database, it brings Twitter some of the same ROI analytics capability.
While Twitter was engaged in its TV Ad Targeting launch, Facebook was served a reminder of the risks associated with online advertising in the relatively uncontrolled domain of social media when major advertisers including Nissan and Nationwide suspended their Facebook marketing campaigns after their ads appeared alongside offensive posts. This ironically followed complaints on Twitter over the publication of misogynistic content, including images of abused women, on Facebook.
This is something that both Facebook and Twitter will have to address, presumably through similar technology to what Google has been developing to identify content that potentially infringes rules over probity or libel laws for example. They will certainly be re-evaluating their algorithms for ad placement, as Google itself has been doing in the case of YouTube especially.