Twitter Expands Pre-Roll Video Ad Marketplace

While an increasing number of PR pros regularly interact with their advertising counterparts—whether at the corporate or agency levels—there are still plenty of brands and organizations whose marketing executives operate in silos. But as the paid-earned-owned media equation starts to coalesce, operating in silos may not be sustainable.

Perhaps Twitter’s latest move will give communicators a little push to better coordinate their programming with ad execs: a new feature enabling marketers to place pre-roll ads in video content across its platform.

The new option, part of Twitter’s Amplify program, enables marketers to automatically place six-second ads before videos from a range of publishers without having existing relationships with those publishers.

Publishers that have agreed to participate in the beta version of the marketplace include AOL, BuzzFeed, Fox, MTV, Time, Mashable, Tech Crunch and USA Today. But Twitter said it is open to working with other publishers and content producers as well.

“With this new offering, it’s never been easier to monetize and sponsor videos on Twitter,” said David Regan, senior product manager, video, in a blog post. “Publishers simply upload their videos to video.twitter.com to start monetizing their content, and are then paid the majority of the ad revenue through automated rev-share payments. Advertisers can select categories of video content they want to run pre-roll with and can layer on additional audience targeting.”

The rollout comes just a few days after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was tapped as the company’s CEO. Dorsey is on the hook to reverse Twitter’s declining stock price and revive the platform’s user base, which has started to stagnate.

According to Motley Fool, Twitter ended the second quarter of 2015 with 66 million users in the U.S.; the number was flat compared to the first quarter.

During Twitter’s earnings conference call for the last quarter, Dorsey said the company needs to improve its messaging to the marketplace (read: better PR).

“We need to do three things. One, we need to ensure a more disciplined execution. Two, we need to simplify our service to deliver Twitter's value faster,” Dorsey said. “And three, we need to better communicate our value.”