Over the last two years, we saw how many advertisers – deterred by an increasingly down-beat news agenda – were turning their dollars away from news itself, with some buyers even blacklisting news sites.
Now the publishers are getting more vocal, however. In recent months, we have heard from the likes of BBC News, News Corp and The Economist and now Vice Media protest that news is actually a great place to be seen.
And Twitter is happy to fight in the publishers’ corner. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Twitter head of US news partnerships Nick Sallon says: “News organizations in general … create a tonof high-quality journalism … and that represents a large volume of content on our platform from the news organizations that we work with.
“I see it as an opportunity for brands to associate themselves with really great news content and target Twitter audiences at scale.”
Twitter sees itself as a platform that allows advertisers, as well as consumers and news organizations, to engage with breaking events at the speed of culture.
And Sallon made his pitch for why marketers should take part in the conversation.
“It’s an incredibly important time for news organizations to have options to build sustainable revenue and business model,” he said. “The combination of user engagement, users coming to discover, talk about what’s happening in the public sphere, combined with a really compelling model for news organizations to make money sustainably, that combination, I think is an important ingredient in the world today.”
Twitter’s Sarah Personette also recently told Beet.TV her social network “created over 950 content deals with unique publishers around the world over the course of the last year”.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
