Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Twitter Begins Integrating with Outside Ad Buying Platforms


It looks like Twitter is about to make a bold move in a play to become even more relevant in the social media advertising scene.

Until this point, all of the large social media platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat have operated their own automated advertising platforms that are segregated from the rest of the digital advertising technology ecosystem. This gives the platforms greater control over things like pricing, data and fraud prevention. The platforms can demand that brands use their closed-wall systems because the audiences that they reach are so valuable. The platforms have a lot of leverage over the advertisers.

Starting soon, Twitter is going to be giving up some of their control in order to return to growth. Twitter is currently testing a system that seamlessly integrates with agency trading desks and demand-side platforms. By tearing down the walls, Twitter hopes to become more attractive to marketers who want better control over how to programmatically spend their ad dollars.

As a Marketer, I love this move by Twitter. By “opening its pipes” to other agencies and demand platforms like WPP, Dentsu Aegis and Omnicom, Twitter will be helping me to programmatically buy the audience that I want across a number of different media platforms. I will be able to much more easily automate my ad spending since a single pool of ad spend can cross multiple platforms to reach the customers that I am looking for. This certainly makes Twitter more attractive for me. The big question, then, is will this put any meaningful pressure on the other big social media platforms to follow in Twitter’s footsteps? The real win for marketers will be when all of these platforms are interconnected so that ad spend can seamlessly shift between them to meet my needs.

While this move could certainly attract more marketers to using Twitter, it also makes it very easy for the advertisers to shift their dollars away from Twitter if they are not seeing the results that they want. For Twitter to have made this move, they must be confident in their ability to deliver good value to customers moving forward.

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