Twitter has announced this morning updates to its six-year-old Amplify product, which enables advertisers to run pre-rolls and other in-feed sponsorship placements alongside premium video content furnished by 200 publisher partners like FOX Sports, NBCUniversal, Buzzfeed, Hearst, and more.
Going forward, Amplify will enable advertisers to buy against even more specifically Curated Categories of content than the 15 that Twitter previously offered.
Twitter says Curated Categories were conceived during the pandemic, as marketers were seeking to run ads against more light-hearted content, leading Twitter to devise a custom ‘light-hearted content’ option for Amplify pre-rolls.
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Today, Twitter is formally launching this concept at scale in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, and MENA. The new categories in the U.S. include football, basketball, baseball, soccer, gaming personalities, and esports teams. Globally, the new Curated Categories are: women’s lifestyle, men’s lifestyle, light-hearted content, footie fans (which is U.K.-specific), and Ramadan (MENA).
Previously, advertisers could buy against 15 standard categories as delineated by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and listed above. Twitter says that additional categories — as well as additional markets — are slated to arrive in the future.
In addition to the new categories, Twitter also shared in a blog post that it is redesigning Amplify — both on the back-end, in terms of how advertisers set up campaigns, as well as how pre-rolls are displayed to users.
Now, advertisers’ brand names and logos will be displayed prominently throughout the duration of an ad, with a new label clarifying that the ‘video will play after ad’, as well as a thumbnail of the video in question at the bottom right-hand corner.
And finally, in terms of setting up a campaign, advertisers will now be able to see all of the new content categories — including Curated Categories — as well as a breakdown of content volume, or how many monetized videos a publisher has had in the past month. Publishers’ Twitter avatars will also be shown as another way to make brand safety exclusions, Twitter said.
