Twitter launched its long-awaited curated news product, Moments, today without any advertising component, but that lack of commercial messaging won’t last long.
A Twitter spokesperson told us that the company is talking to brand partners about Promoted Moments and that it would start testing them soon, in “weeks, not months.”
“Moments is entirely focused on helping people find and digest great content and stories, on any topic,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “This experience reflects many of the same fundamental attributes that make Twitter so powerful for marketers today — reaching an audience of people who are in a mindset to discover new information, ideas, and stories. With the immersive media canvas within Moments, we believe there will be many opportunities for brands to integrate content and stories in the future.”
Promoted Moments will give brands the opportunity to tell complete stories in the multimedia format, which is especially immersive on mobile devices. They will be tested in a range of topics, including real-time events, seasonally relevant stories and “authentic narratives around a brand’s values.” Promoted Moments will be given prominent placement within the guide of the day’s top Moments and run for 24 hours — similar to the way the Promoted Trend is placed within the Trending Topics list.
“We’re just beginning to test this with brands — so we expect to learn a lot from these tests and understand how consumers react,” the spokesperson added. “This means things may change. There are so many possibilities for brands here — but we’re starting slowly to ensure we learn from what users like best in this environment.”
Postscript: AdWeek is reporting that Twitter plans to run only one Promoted Moment at a time to start and that the promoted content will appear on all the category lists (which at the moment are News, Sports, Entertainment and Fun). Promoted Moments will have all the same functionality as standard Moments, including the option for users to retweet and favorite Moments and the tweets within them. Like normal Moments, Promoted Moments will be able to be updated during their 24-hour lifespans; they also can be embedded in third-party websites.
From AdAge:
“What it’s actually going to be is a dedicated piece of real estate within the moments guide where a brand can curate a series of different tweets or Vines to actually tell their story,” [Twitter VP of Sales Matt] Derella said. How brands use their promoted moments would be up to them, but examples could include a film studio creating a moment from tweets related to an upcoming movie release or a brand curating a moment out of tweets posted at a music festival it sponsors. “This is going to be very different than a search text ad. This is going to be videos, images, and should provide a canvas for brands to move people and shift their hearts and minds,” Mr. Derella said.
Comments