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Twitter’s April buys demonstrate TV ambitions

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By Tony Walford | Founder

April 11, 2014 | 6 min read

First Facebook, and now Twitter: social media’s encroachment into marcomms territory continues apace with the microblogger’s acquisition last week of not one but two firms (both for an undisclosed sum).

Twitter’s April buys demonstrate TV ambitions, writes Tony Walford

First up was French firm Mesagraph, then SecondSync, a UK firm with offices in Bristol and London. What’s particularly interesting about these acquisitions is that they both operate in a similar space, and that they both give a strong indication of where Twitter sees at least part of its future.

One of the ways in which Twitter has really caught the imaginations of its 250 million or so regular users is as an accompaniment to TV, or, in industry-speak, as a “second screen”. Twitter really comes alive during big TV events – live sports matches, big shows like X-Factor, soaps or compelling dramas as people communicate with friends and follow their reactions to unfolding events as they watch.

Potentially there’s an enormous amount of data here that would be extremely interesting to advertisers, and which goes beyond the simple “this many people watched in such-and-such a place” approach of audience measurement services like BARB or Nielsen. This is real-time data, unprompted, from potentially millions of viewers. There’s also the possibility of advertisers or brands being able to get in on the conversations.

So it comes as no surprise that Twitter might be seeking to monetise both its information on, and its access to, these conversations – and thus no surprise that both last week’s acquisitions operate in the “social TV analytics” sphere.

Twitter has strong synergies with SecondSync (which was founded just three years ago), which analyses conversations around TV shows here in the UK; interestingly, the company has received investment in the past from WPP’s market research arm Kantar, which itself announced a new partnership with Twitter to expand a joint “TV ratings” service to the Nordics, Russia, parts of Africa and Southeast Asia.

Mesagraph, meanwhile, runs a web-based platform called Meaningly, which “gives users the ability to pull meaningful insights” around specific topics based on what’s being tweeted in near real-time. The Mesagraph TV API then builds on that by offering custom streams and analytics based around live TV shows.

That expertise could come in handy for Twitter, but it’ll also be eyeing up the partnerships Mesagraph already has with French TV networks such as Canal+ and France Télévisions M6, and TF1. These are the broadcasters that Twitter wants to target with its ad services and Twitter Amplify program, which was launched last year and which gives brands the ability to publish in-Tweet clips and other exclusive content.

So, this is what seems to be happening: Twitter appears to know, like Facebook, that the digital world shifts quickly, and that unless services can adapt to users’ changing needs and interests, they will go the way of MySpace and Bebo. If it is to be with us in 10 years’ time and importantly, now it’s a public company, Twitter needs to be much more than just a messaging service.

With these new acquisitions, Amplify and its strong relationships with US broadcasters, Twitter is revealing its global TV ambitions – as a provider of real-time granular data to broadcasters and advertisers; and as a provider of exclusive content (such as replays during football matches, to give but one example).

And there’s one more twist to the story. SecondSync has a strong relationship with Facebook: back in January the two companies announced that they would work together to help marketers understand how people are using the social network (ie, Facebook) to talk about topics such as TV. The partnership was a big deal because it meant Facebook’s social TV data on US and UK programmes would be made available outside the company for the first time.

Twitter and Facebook have never been particularly close, and the services are at present poorly integrated with each other – hardly surprising, as the two are in many ways in competition. What this new deal will do to the SecondSync-Facebook partnership is anyone’s guess, and the lips of all parties are currently sealed. But I suspect that advertisers and broadcasters would be disappointed if it came to an end: Facebook has vast amounts of data about users’ reactions to TV, going back many years.

Finally, on a slightly different note, there were intriguing noises from new(ish) Havas boss Yannick Bolloré at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London last week. In a packed session, Bolloré said while there were “up to six acquisitions” in the pipeline, Havas was already "not too far from the ideal scale" because it was "big enough and at the same time, not too big to adapt".

Bolloré said: "When we think about buying a company, our strategy is not to be the bigger group in terms of scale – it’s to be the best company for connecting people with brands [and] the best company at providing insights and communication strategies to our clients.

"So the question when we look on an acquisition is: what will it bring to our clients? Will it bring new technology? Will it bring a new footprint? Will it bring new people, with new knowledge?

"For now, we have four to six acquisitions in the pipeline and all of these acquisitions participate in the same way, which is to bring additional knowledge or footprint to Havas."

What exactly this means, or who Bolloré has his eye on, we don’t yet know. But Havas does need to get bigger – scale is everything in media and Havas is by some estimates just a tenth of the size of WPP and Publicis-Omnicom’s media empires. What happens next, we may be about to find out…

Tony Walford is a partner at Green Square, corporate finance advisors to the media and marketing sector.

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