Twitter Huddling With Potential Advertisers for Thursday Night NFL Streams

Training camps haven’t even opened yet, but Twitter’s efforts to capitalize on its $10 million investment to stream National Football League games are in midseason form.

Kurt Wagner of Re/code reported that Twitter bigwigs including CEO Jack Dorsey and chief operating officer Adam Bain are at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France this week pitching ad packages for its NFL games.

A source told Wagner the packages are priced at $2 million to $8 million per advertiser, depending on ad quantity and placement (in-game versus pregame or postgame), and vice president of North American revenue and global revenue strategy Matt Derella told Wagner in an interview that Twitter aims to sell 10 to 15 of those ad packages.

Derella told Wagner 60 percent of Twitter’s NFL ad inventory has already been sold, with early commitments from brands including Ford Motor, Nestlé and Anheuser-Busch.

Twitter is offering the following ads to brands, according to Wagner:

• A limited number of local in-game ads, with Twitter boasting the ability to show different spots to different users based on its targeting data.
• Pre-roll ads ahead of a total of 90 highlights (up from 75 in 2015) from all NFL games, not just the ones included in Twitter’s streaming package. Two sources told Wagner Twitter made about $20 million from four pre-roll ad packages during the 2015 NFL season.
• Sponsorship of Periscope live-streams featuring pregame analysis and player footage. According to Wagner, advertisers will be able to add branding to these feeds.

Derella told Wagner Twitter’s game feeds will feature a stream of live tweets from experts and fans, adding:

We’re going to marry the best of Twitter (with the NFL stream), so that would be that live experience as it’s happening and that live conversation around Twitter. One flavor would be all the most authoritative analysts and players actually tweeting about the game, so that could be manually or algorithmically curated. Other users might just want the pure roar of the crowd and the unfiltered timeline. We’re going to experiment with what’s best.

Readers: Will you spend your Thursday nights with the NFL and Twitter?

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