Starcom, the media buying and planning agency part of Publicis Groupe, the world’s third-biggest advertising company, will work with Twitter Inc. on how to make money out of the micro-blogging service’s audience, Starcom’s CEO Maurice Levy told Bloomberg.
Twitter and Starcom MediaVest Group have reached a multi-hundred-million-dollar deal for advertising on the social network, the Financial Times reports. The deal is for “special access” to advertising slots, as well as research data and new, as-yet-unannounced advertising products, in return for which Starcom has committed to spend $200 million — or more — of its clients’ money. Full financial details were not released.
Publicis’s Starcom MediaVest Group “will find the way to monetize their audience,” Levy added in an interview on Bloomberg Television . “This could be pop- ups, this could be video, this could be new formats so we are working very hard with Twitter to find the right way to commercialize their space.” Levy also stated:
The company has been experimenting, testing, and learning on Twitter for a year and a half, Starcom CEO Laura Desmond said. Which means that Starcom believes Twitter ads are driving real, measurable ROI for its clients. Lisa Weinstein, president of global digital, data and analytics at SMG, likened the deal to the practice of buying television inventory in advance.
The deal is not tied to specific SMG clients. Rather, SMG guaranteed that its Starcom, Mediavest and Spark agencies will spend a certain amount on Twitter ad inventory and other projects over a certain number of years—with that inventory being available to all clients across SMG. In exchange, SMG is expects to get better access to Twitter research, like analyses of tweets around TV shows from the tech platform’s recent acquisition of Bluefin Labs.
The deal also calls for Twitter and SMG to work together on new products, like custom surveys querying Twitter users on mobile devices.