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Cable Technology Feature Article

August 30, 2013

Twitter Eyes TV Ad Opportunities with Trendrr Acquisition

By Tara Seals, TMCnet Contributor


Trendrr, the five-year-old data analysis company, is taking its expertise in tracking activity on social media sites to Twitter (News - Alert). The social service is acquiring Trendrr to better understand the intersection between television, Twitter engagement and activity, and advertising implications.

Trendrr analyzes data from social media sites for networks, television studios, brands and media agencies to give them insight into how second-screen behavior works. Company clients include ABC, MTV, Telemundo and Univision. Curatorr, the company’s Twitter-certified product, will continue to work with media companies, marketers and display ecosystem partners to focus on the real-time aspects of TV and media.

Joining up with Twitter will let the company “realize bigger opportunities that drive better experiences for users, media and marketers – across Twitter and around the globe,” said company CEO Mark Ghuneim in a blog.  He added that, while his company would honor existing partner contracts for Trendrr.TV, it doesn’t plan to establish new ones going forward.


Image via Shutterstock

Twitter confirmed the acquisition in a tweet, saying that the two were going to “build great tools for the rest of the TV ecosystem.”

Much has been made of the influence Twitter may or may not have in driving user engagement not just with TV programs but with advertisers and brands within the viewing experience. In May, Twitter announced the release of a new product for TV ad targeting, Twitter Amplify, which lets marketers extend TV advertising beyond the big screen in the living room to Twitter via promoted (sponsored) tweets aimed at targeted audiences.

The results of the beta test revealed that the impact of using Twitter in combination with TV advertising is significantly greater than that of using TV advertising alone, the company said.

“In our tests over the last few months with brands like Adidas, Holiday Inn Express, Jaguar, and Samsung (News - Alert), advertisers using TV ad targeting saw significant improvements to key brand metrics, such as message association and purchase intent,” it said. During a handful of studies, users that Twitter identified as being exposed to a campaign on TV who then engaged with a promoted tweet demonstrated a 95 percent stronger message association and 58 percent higher purchase intent compared to users identified as being exposed on TV alone.

Trendrr’s measurement capabilities can go a long way to expand Twitter’s TV engagement story to lure more advertising to the site. “Having sat at this intersection of TV and social media for years, we’ve analyzed data from lots of platforms,” Ghuneim said. “What makes Twitter uniquely compelling among these platforms is its connection to the live moment — people sharing what’s happening, when it’s happening, to the world. We think we can help amplify even stronger the power of that connection to the moment inside of Twitter.”

Nielsen research bears out Ghuneim’s gushiness. Nielsen’s Twitter Causation Study from earlier in the month included time series analysis to determine if Twitter activity drives increased tune-in rates for broadcast TV and if broadcast TV tune-in leads to increased Twitter activity.

Analyzing minute-to-minute trends in Nielsen’s Live TV Ratings and Tweets measurement for 221 broadcast primetime program episodes using Nielsen’s SocialGuide, the findings show that live TV ratings had a statistically significant impact in related tweets among 48 percent of the episodes sampled, and that the volume of tweets caused statistically significant changes in live TV ratings among 29 percent of the episodes.




Edited by Alisen Downey


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