Big sporting events usually create massive trending topics on Twitter, and in an effort to leverage that phenomenon, Twitter is teaming up with ESPN to offer advertisers custom campaigns.
The companies announced the first program, GameFace, at ESPN’s upfront Tuesday morning. GameFace will center on the NBA Finals and be promoted on Twitter with the #GameFace hashtag. The social-TV dimension calls for the hashtag and program to be promoted on-screen during ABC’s live broadcasts of the NBA Finals, as well as on ESPN’s NBA Tonight show.
The goal of this initial campaign is to get fans to tweet photos of their best “game face” accompanied by the dedicated hashtag. At the end of each game of the finals, “NBA Tonight” studio analysts will display some of the top contest photographs on air. Some photos will also get exposure at ESPN.com/NBA.
Twitter and ESPN will be co-selling the campaign – which includes promoted tweets and trends, as well as plugs on ESPN, ABC and ESPN.com – as a single package for each potential sponsor. It’s the first time Twitter has collaborated with a TV network to build custom sponsorship packages around major events.
Twitter and ESPN said it is too early to describe exactly how a brand will be integrated, as they haven’t sold the first deal. At a minimum, the GameFace sponsor’s brand will displayed within the on-screen promotion of the contest on ABC, most likely within a lower-third graphic. The sponsor’s brand is also expected to be tied into the Twitter page housing the GameFace photo entries. The companies declined to discuss pricing.
The second screen has become a fixture in many households, with 41% of U.S. smartphone owners and 45% of tablet owners using their devices at least daily while watching TV, according to a Nielsen study released in April. And they are using social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to have conversations about major events unfolding on the larger screen. Twitter, for example, reported that users posted an average of 10,000 tweets per second during the final three minutes of the Super Bowl this year.
The notion of incorporating Twitter into TV broadcasts isn’t new. The X Factor let viewers vote for contestants through tweets, for example, while FoxNews.com used Twitter to gauge viewer response during GOP presidential debates. But Twitter’s partnership with ESPN signals its intention to generate some revenue from a pop-culture phenomenon that it helped to create.
“Twitter’s already the second screen for TV, and we’ve already seen it’s like an EKG for attention,” said Joel Lunenfeld, VP-global brand strategy at Twitter, who said the microblogging site and ESPN had a co-selling arrangement during the 2011 Final Four but that it didn’t include TV inventory. “What we’re doing now is helping brands and content partners to explicitly connect that conversation between the first and second screen.”
Lunenfeld said that TV “tentpole” events like the Emmys and Grammys could represent opportunities for Twitter to forge similar partnerships with other media companies.
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