There are few departments more crucial to Twitter’s growth than media. I mean, just look at how much time and effort the company put into developing its relationship with television advertisers last year! Given that ddvertising makes up virtually all of Twitter’s revenue, developing those relationships, and consequently getting more of them on board with Twitter’s ad platform, is incredibly important.
Sadly for Twitter, it recently lost its liason to global media companies when Chloe Sladden left the company last month. Happily, though, it had someone waiting in the wings who could easily step into the role.
Twitter had promoted Katie Stanton, its VP of International Strategy, as its VP of global media, according to a report from Variety. Stanton also updated her Twitter profile with the new position.
Stanton has quite an impressive resume, with experience in a multitude of different sectors, including both tech and government. She ranks at number 56 in Forbes’ list of Power Women, worked for the Yahoo from 1999 to 2002 as Group Production Manager. Specifically, Stanton was the driving force behind Yahoo Finance, the main trump card Yahoo has had over Google.
She also helped develop Google Finance when she worked at Google from 2003 to 2009.
After her stints with Google and Yahoo, Stanton went on to work for the State Department, where she worked with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to develop the mobile donation campaign Text Haiti, following the devastating earthquake in Haiti. She was also the White House’s first Director of Citizen Participation and was responsible for getting the White House on Twitter.
She has been with Twitter since mid-2010, where she develoloped relationships with media companies such as the BBC and Brazil’s Globo.
In her new role, Stanton will be working with media companies around the world, in an effort to court TV networks, Hollywood studios and other media companies onto the Twitter advertising platform.
Stanton currently works out of Paris, but will be returning to the company’s San Francisco office. She will report to Gabriel Stricker, who was recently promoted to the head of media after the departure of Twitter COO Ali Rowghani in June.
Twitter media
To understand how important media is to Twitter, all you have to do is look at its efforts to ingratiate itself to television over the last year.
Twitter 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.
In addition, Twitter strengthened its position with TV advertisers by showing them, in a Nielsen study released in August of 2013, that tweets can drive higher ratings for their shows, and that those shows caused a spike in tweets. TV and Twitter, it seems, have something of a symbiotic relationship.
Twitter also made a number of acquisitions in this space as well.
It purchased real-time TV data company Trendrr to help make those ads more relevant. Then, in March of this year, it made two more social television purchases: Mesagraph, a French real-time search and discovery platform for social media; and SecondSync, a provider of social TV analytics solutions to the UK TV and Advertising industries.
Most recently it bought SnappyTV, whih offers a suite of tools that enable organizations to edit, share, and archive live video and TV programming completely within the cloud.
VatorNews has reached out to Twitter for confirmation on Stanton’s appointment, but the company would not comment.
(Image source: allthingsd.com)
