The Super Bowl has meant cheaper ad rates on Twitter. Is this enough to persuade major marketers to jump back onto the wobbly platform?
The San Francisco-based company has been ramping up its Super Bowl pitch to advertisers, offering a last-minute deal on one of its most high-profile, big-game ad packages, according to an email viewed by The Wall Street Journal. It is also telling advertisers that the number of conversations on its platform about the Super Bowl and the National Football League is up significantly from a year earlier, according to other emails sent to advertisers and ad agencies.
Since Musk’s $44 billion takeover, Twitter’s reputation has gone downhill for a multitude of reasons (check out our previous blogs for details). But the Super Bowl might be Twitter’s best shot yet to persuade advertisers to return to the platform because it is one of the few times of the year that brands depend heavily on Twitter to help generate buzz.
“It’s Twitter’s moment. It’s the one weekend where they are the platform that all the attention is shifting to,” said Nick Miaritis, executive vice president at VaynerMedia. “It is the water cooler for the world.”
From a brand perspective, the Super Bowl means cheaper ad rates and the release of a new tool that allows advertisers to create a list of up to 1,000 keywords and avoid having their ads appear above or below tweets containing those words, ad buyers said.
Twitter recently began offering a three-day Super Bowl Weekend ad package for $250,000, a deal the company called a “fire sale,” according to one of the emails viewed by the Wall Street Journal.
In recent years, Super Bowl weekend, which includes Saturday, Sunday and Monday, has brought in roughly $35 million in U.S. ad revenue for Twitter, with Sunday accounting for the majority of the total, said people familiar with Twitter’s finances.
We can’t write this article without nodding to the Twitter incentive dangled to advertisers in January that offered free ad space on promoted tweet ad campaigns, a deal that was previously reported by the Journal. The incentive was an attempt to lure some advertisers back in, including Pfizer Inc., United Airlines Holdings Inc. and General Motors Co., paused on Twitter ad spending after Mr. Musk took over in October.
Twitter has been telling some brands that advertisers are returning to the platform. “For those that paused post-acquisition, we have seen a 30%+ return,” according to an email from a few weeks ago that was viewed by the Journal. More than 70 of Twitter’s top 100 ad spenders from before Mr. Musk’s takeover wasn’t spending on the platform as of the week ended on 29th January, according to an analysis of data from the research firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower.
This time around arguably has more of a chance to seduce marketers than January’s incentive. Twitter “is not a must-buy for most of the year, but when it gets to Super Bowl time, it’s suddenly of great interest” to advertisers, said Jeff Goodby, co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
Twitter is “intrinsic to the experience,” said Mike Raffensperger, FanDuel’s chief commercial officer. “Everybody’s been watching the game, and you go on Twitter to see what people are talking about.”
Only time will tell.
