Action Rocket at the IAB Twitter #VideoIsHappening event

On Tuesday I attended The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Upfronts event for Twitter in London, with a whole range of hosts and speakers including a couple of celebrities!

The topics covered the way the platform considers video content, benefits for brands using Twitter, Twitter audience related to TV viewing, and future partnerships between Twitter and brands. Lee LeBorge also highlighted the high level of Twitter engagement around football, the #1 tweeted topic in 2018. He explained how reactive social platforms can be, people don’t have to wait for work to talk about their favourite TV shows.Our main takeaway from the event drew from the conversation around real time audience engagement. This was mainly linked to the conversations users take to Twitter to discuss trending topics. A good example of this was explained by Monica Manoras (Twitter), who gave us some amazing statistics on this years popular Love Island TV show.

  • There were 2.5bn video views of the show on Twitter
  • Users posted 11.2m tweets about #LoveIsland

This gave Love Island and ITV2 a great opportunity to interact with these users whilst they were fully engaged. They did this well by conversing and teasing with cliff-hangers during breaks. This is a perfect example of creating shared moments with an audience, to know that fans of the show are enjoying the same collective experience – ultimately this created a strong and loyal community. To be the topic of conversation not only in the real world but on digital platforms is key for brands, Manoras explained the importance of creating unique and eye-catching content to gain users attention. So how can we apply this to email? Well when an email is sent what is the one thing it is being sent for? Engagement! We are living in a society where everyone is fighting for users attention, engagement is sought after and brands need to do all they can to be at the forefront of the customers mind. Conversations are happening in real time, and when recipients receive a good (or bad) email they aren’t afraid to tell the world.

We were lucky enough to receive a brief for Blue Planet II this year, and the success of the whole campaign came to life through users social engagement. We were able to measure a lot of the emails performance through the positive feedback received through Twitter.

The event space was located at Victoria House in Holborn, which was a nice venue. Not the all singing all dancing Twitter HQ I was expecting, but they had made the most of the open space downstairs. Quite a dark venue as it’s underground but they had lit the space up to project blue lighting which worked well for the Twitter theme!

Events coming up:
EIS – Millie, Elliot – 17th October
Figaro – Millie, Elliot – 25th October
The Dotties – 1st November

Know of one we should be at? Let us know in the comments.

Bex Highfield
Marketing Manager @ Action Rocket