TORONTO – Shaw Media will be the first Canadian media company to join forces with social networking giant Twitter to bring viewers in-Tweet video clips with the Twitter Amplify program.
Twitter Amplify, announced in late May, allows brands and their advertisers to include short video clips in their tweets – for example, five to ten second clips of weather reports, instant replays from sports games, or clips from a primetime show.
“We went about this partnership really thinking about how social and TV are inherently linked together,” Paul Burns Vice President of Digital Media for Shaw Media told Global News.
“We also realized that Twitter is the logical place by which conversations about TV are taking place in a social context.”
Twitter has already partnered with multiple U.S. media companies as part of the program, including A&E, Discovery, MLB.com, Time Inc. and New York Magazine.
Currently, the NBA and ESPN are bringing viewers instant replays from the 2013 NBA Finals, in partnership with Sony Pictures, Sprint and Taco Bell.
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The purpose of the program is to utilize Twitter’s unique ad products to bring a second-screen experience to viewers and gives advertisers an opportunity to reach a new and diverse audience through the media company’s Twitter audience.
“The premise is that we would work very closely with Twitter to package and bundle and effectively sell our content and media offerings to our brand partners. It could take a whole bunch of different forms,” said Burns.
Burns noted that the example of instant replays is just one example of how this type of advertising could manifest itself – however, it is unclear how Shaw will use Twitter Amplify for its programming and specialty channels such as the Food Network and HGTV.
“We have to figure out how it manifests in reality programming, in dramatic and factual programming, and in a lot of our other top tier programs including news,” said Burns.
Shaw Media is the parent company of Global News.
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