The media news sections are alive with chatter today following another company being bought up by that 140-character social network. Far from a simple business deal, mind, the repercussions and changes this move could bring about are significant enough that any brand with a handle to call its own needs to be aware.
So Twitter has acquired MoPub, a U.S. ‘ad exchange’ firm that reportedly overseas some 3billion advertising auctions every day. For those unfamiliar with Real Time Bidding (RTB) in the modern marketing mix, in short this allows companies to specifically target consumers based on shared attributes. From the perspective of an Internet user, this means that when you visit a website linked to such a system, you should see commercials for relevant good, services, properties and more.
The ‘big idea’ here is to integrate this system within the current Twitter advertising offering, much in the same way Facebook made headlines by doing a little while ago. The difference being, according to this article on Guardian.co.uk, that the new deal could mean Twitter now has a greater advertising value than Facebook, despite its membership being  far smaller. A claim that may perplex people, and given it’s late in the day we won’t attempt a fudged explanation.
Instead, if this area of advertising affects you, it’s probably more useful for us to point out a few items for the reading list, which should get you up to speed with exactly how this news could mean an improvement to your results when advertising on Twitter. The Drum, for example- one of our regular points of reference, has an interesting string of ‘interviews’ with high profile digital ad people from firms including Amnet UK, ZenithOptimedia, and Bite- take a look at the full story here.
Meanwhile, Mashable quotes Kevin Weil, VP of revenue and product at Twitter, who offered some re-assuring words for anyone concerned about how this could negatively impact on the network’s strong reputation for running ads at the right times, and in the right places. “We’ll maintain the same high quality standards that define our platform today. Our approach is to show an ad when we think it will be useful or interesting to a user, and that isn’t changing.” For the full lowdown from that perspective, click here.
From our perspective, an increased focus on RTB is certainly a good thing on paper. One of the most frequent complaints about digital advertising is irrelevancy, and when you consider the boost such practices could give to the digital publishing sector’s advertising value, simply by offering firms better targeted display opportunities and, hopefully, more tangible results, clearly there’s a lot of good that