Tumblr inks exclusive ad-content deal with Viacom

Steven Loeb · March 20, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/35cc

Viacom will create content that it promotes using Tumblr's suite of ad products

Television advertising seems to be the holy grail for social networks. Remember crazy Twitter went at the chance to become a second screen, and to get the big bucks from television advertisers, last year?

Now another social network has entered into the fray, swooping in and making a big deal with one of the medium's biggest conglomerates.

It was revealed on Thursday that Viacom has signed an exclusive partnership with Tumblr "to deliver co-branded content campaigns during the 2014 Upfront Season."

Through the deal, Viacom will create custom content developed for Tumblr's blogging platform that connects to shows and events on its networks, using Tumblr's suite of ad products. That will essentially turn Tumblr will become a second screen for Viacom’s portfolio.

Viacom is the parent company of channels that include MTV, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, TV Land, Spike and more. 

As such, the first effort between Viacom and Tumblr will be on April 13th for the 2014 MTV Movie Awards, where MTV will post images, videos, animated .gifs and other interactive content to Tumblr that connects to the show before, during and after the broadcast. Some of the content that will be highlight includes categories, presenters, nominees and winners, as well as buzzworthy moments and performances. 

The two companies will also be partnering during the "upfront season," the time when networks show upcoming lineup to advertisers, allowing them to buy ad space.

This is not the first time Viacom has used the Tumblr platform to reach its audience; in fact it has more than 40 blogs and 3 million followers across Tumblr already. This is the first time that Viacom and Tumblr have officially partnered for said content, though.

This is a big victory for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in May of last year and has spoken of it as a potential ad platform in that time. It should also help the company bolster its advertising revenue, which has recently begun falling.

In its last quarterly earnings report, the company revealed that display revenue ex-TAC was $1.7 billion for the full year of 2013, a 9 percent% compared to $1.9 billion for the prior year. Display ads account for 41% of Yahoo’s revenue.

In a statement, Lee Brown, Global Head of Brand Partnerships at Tumblr, called Viacom a "natural partner."

"They embraced our platform at an early stage and immediately got what we were all about: telling great stories and connecting with a super-engaged community of fans," he said. We are thrilled to extend our partnership during this year's Upfront to provide our users with even more compelling content to interact with and reblog."

Twitter's television efforts

Like I said at the beginning, Twitter has been courting television advertisers pretty hard over the last year. 

The company premiered its tv ad targeting software in beta mode in May of last year, and then expanded to to all U.S. advertisers that run national television spots in July.

The technology allows advertisers to engage directly with people on Twitter who have been exposed to their ads on live television.  It works by identifying Tweets that correspond with that television show. Because the person was engaged enough to tweet about it, the company figures that they watched the ads as well (which, in all honesty, is a bit of a leap. It is more likely they were sending the tweets in question while the ads were playing). Twitter will then push out promoted tweets that extend those advertisements.

Twitter also purchased real-time TV data company Trendrr to help make those ads more relevant.

In addition, Twitter strengthened its position with tv advertisers by showing them that tweets can drive higher ratings for tv shows, and that those shows caused a spike in tweets. TV and Twitter, it seems, have symbiotic relationship.

Twitter also began releasing weekly television reports, something that Facebook said it would trying as well.

(Image source: mydreamofalifetime.blogspot.com)

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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