Twitter Cuddles Up to TV with the Tweet of the Week: "We're a Bridge Not an island" - Matthew Kearney

The quote – “We’re a bridge not an island” – is from Twitter CRO Adam Bain, announcing Twitter Amplify and Twitter’s new TV-ad targeting program. The products were launched at Internet Week New York last Thursday. Bain is stating that Twitter – and maybe all social media – can be regarded as a link to TV, not a separate alternative.

Playing nice is a smart approach but not a novel one. When you are in the early stages of monetizing your new disruptive technology, be modest, be polite and claim you’re not a competitor but "complementary" to where the dollars currently are.

Give your product a nice TV friendly name, such as "Enhancer," "Accelerator" or in Twitter's case "Amplify" and then go pitch your story to TV advertisers, congratulating them for being smart to focus on such a powerful medium. But quietly prey on their fears. Point out TV’s ever-increasing frailty and that we're all spending way more time now posting, tweeting, blogging, DVR-ing and fast forwarding, rather than actually watching TV advertising.

It is much more sensible than trying to tackle TV head on, claiming that you're a better platform and having endless futile meetings in which advertisers sense you're calling them dumb for buying TV in the first place.

The first product announced, Amplify, appears to be a distribution platform for video, Twitter style. If you have the rights to the content, the video clip of the blizzard coming, the news event, the shot on goal, a branded content short, then Amplify is for you. At core it is an alternative way to broadcast video content.

The second product, Twitter TV ad targeting, is a monitoring service that "listens" for tweets about a TV show whilst a show is airing, and simultaneously tracks the ads aired in the commercial breaks.

You can then use Amplify to tweet the tweeters with the ad they missed while they were tweeting to tweeters during the ads. I hope you’re following…

If I were a creative exec, I could get excited about this. Here’s a way to track and reach an audience with my message. If I were Twitter I would be excited by this. Twitter is still quite small in revenue terms and a means to tap into advertising dollars is welcome.

But if I were a TV ad sales exec I’m not sure. I might want to tell Amplify to go back over its bridge to Twitter Island.

Matthew Kearney has been working in the media in London and New York, in TV, cinema and in online for nearly 20 years. He joined the Daily Mail's leading news site MailOnline last year. Matthew can be reached atmatthewjkearney@gmail.com.

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