Amex and JBL Harman Sign On As Sponsors For Twitter’s Original Live Shows

What Happened
Twitter has found two brand sponsors for its upcoming original live shows. Brand messages from American Express and JBL Harman will appear in and around The Starters and The Warmup, which are both athletic-minded shows produced by Twitter partner Turner Sports in conjunction with the NBA. The shows were first announced in July and will be broadcasted weekly via their designated Twitter pages as well as the NBA’s Twitter page.

What Brands Should Do
This announcement underscores Twitter’s aim to monetize its live video content and attracting sports fans who are also cord-cutters. As more and more consumers choose time-shifted viewing over linear TV, brands should follow the viewers and work with content creators to explore new TV ad formats on connected TV devices and engage with the audience in their living rooms.

According to a new report from eMarketer (paywall), US connected TV users is projected to reach 202.1 million in 2020, up from 181.8 million this year. To read more on how brands can reach viewers on OTT platforms with ads and branded content, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 


Source: AdWeek

JBL Converts Your Tweets To Music

As part of a new “Tweet Music” campaign, the audio electronics company will turn your tweets into sound if you tweet at them. It works through JBL’s Tweet Music algorithm, which takes words and assigns sounds to them. It has pre-assigned sound clips for certain letters, and so there are nearly 13 billion possible combinations. Users who enter into the campaign by tweeting at them will also be entered into an expenses-paid trip to the 2015 Grammy’s. JBL is pairing the campaign with physical, experiential kiosks outside of the Grammy’s this year so listeners can interact with their custom music before tweeting it out. In the first week, they’ve received 2,600 mentions with their @JBLaudio handle, and have added 3,100 new followers this week; 1,200 songs have been generated with 3,500 listens. It’s a clever ploy by the company, one that, though a tad gimmicky, is technologically interesting enough to hold Twitter’s attention.