Our portfolio company Recount Media, which I have blogged about here before, recently launched an interesting partnership between Recount, Twitter, and brand marketers. They are calling this partnership “Real-Time Recount.”
Recount is a news organization which publishes short-form video news on their owned and operated web and mobile apps, and also on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
These short-form videos are particularly popular in social media platforms like Twitter.
What Real-Time Recount allows marketers to do is associate with a branded news organization while also taking advantage of the scale and hyper-targeting available on the scaled social platforms.
Ad Age has a good story today about this partnership (behind paywall) and Recount CEO John Battelle has a good post on his blog about it as well.
I like how John summarizes this opportunity at the start of his post:
It’s time to get back to the work marketers used to be really good at: Deciding on the appropriate context in which to engage your audience. And it’s time to pull back from a habit most of you have fallen into: Letting the machines choose your audience for you. Thanks to new approaches which fuse at-scale ad targeting with high-quality editorial product, you can step into this renewed role without sacrificing the reach, precision, and targeting afforded by the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their kin.
https://battellemedia.com/archives/2020/06/marketers-have-given-up-on-context-and-our-national-discourse-is-suffering
Since the AdAge article is behind a paywall, I will pull a quote from yours truly to wrap up this blog post:
It won’t be for all advertisers in the beginning, but the ones who are courageous and can think about how to do it in a way that is consistent with their brand and their values, I think they’re going to be rewarded because they will get a lot of audience. They will get it in a [scaled] way, with high frequency and high quality. So, I think that’s one of the opportunities and challenges for The Recount is to bring advertisers along with us. Advertisers are used to being in cable news and linear television. They understand what that is. We’ve got to educate them on how to do it in social platforms, to do it in a way they can be comfortable with.
