Twitter Tempts Hollywood Studios With Targeted Ads

As part of its broader ad-targeting ambitions, Twitter wants to help Hollywood studios reach moviegoers at precisely the right moments.

With a soon-to-debut service, studios should be able to serve ads to those Twitter users who have followed the accounts of specific movies, as well as those users who have tweeted about particular movies in the past.   

In many respects, the new service will parallel another that Twitter already offers TV networks to help them reach unique fan bases across its microblogging network. 

The initiative -- first reported by the Hollywood Reporter on Thursday -- is also just the latest effort by Twitter to help marketers get a bigger bang for their ad dollars.

Last week, Twitter began inviting advertisers to create new list audiences -- and manage existing audiences on ads.twitter.com -- all through a new audience manager tool.

With the change, advertisers were invited to use their customer information to build audiences using mobile phone numbers, as well as email addresses. By supporting Apple iOS and Google Android mobile advertising IDs, marketers can also create audiences of users with their apps installed, or who take certain actions like viewing a product or achieving a level of game play in those apps.

Meanwhile, a new “look-alike-only targeting” ability allows advertisers to target only those users that are similar to their tailored audiences.

Per the changes, Twitter also added the ability to exclude tailored audiences, based on Web site visitors from campaigns using interest, keyword, TV and other tailored audiences.

Twitter first debuted its tailored audience tools late last year. The tools require that brands share with Twitter browser-related information, such as browser cookie IDs, through an advertising network partner. Twitter then matches that information to the user's account to serve a Promoted Tweet.

Among other media efforts, Twitter continues to encourage TV networks and studios to promote their shows and movies across its community. To that end, the company just released an internal study, which found that networks that live-tweet during TV programming can significantly increase followers and mentions on Twitter.

Despite surging ad revenue and better-than-expected user growth, some Twitter watchers continue to criticize the company’s management. Last week, venture capitalist Peter Thiel made headlines after calling Twitter “a horribly mismanaged company” -- and with “probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there,” no less.

Yet “it's such a solid franchise it may even work with all that,” the early Facebook investor added during a televised “Squawk Box” interview, last week.

Twitter declined to discuss its new targeting service, on Friday.

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