After unveiling a full lineup of programming at this year’s Newfronts, Twitter continues to bolster its offerings for its legion of gaming and esports fans. Among the announcements are content dedicated to Call of Duty World League, The Game Awards, Gamespot, IEM, and IGN. Cynopsis asked Rishi Chadha, head of gaming content partnerships at Twitter, about the company’s approach to gaming, content and advertisers.
Chadha on Twitter’s approach to gaming: Gaming and Twitter go hand-in-hand. The audience is here talking about everything and that’s only been solidified as time goes on. So to drive the narrative, the four key verticals we are working on here at Twitter are: esports; editorial (with folks like IGN and Gamespot); communities, whether it is content creators or esports teams; and lastly publishers and developers. That’s the way we are shaping all of our content deals and how we are framing partnerships now. You may fall in one or many of those buckets, but those are the distinct verticals we are supporting now. Lastly, while the audience may Tweet about games very well, there are products we offer that they haven’t really utilized yet. I think that is the big focus for me now is educating our partners on that front. Of course, there is still a lot of room for education for advertisers and I think we at Twitter have a very unique opportunity to provide that education because we already have existing relationships around traditional content.
On content: We are unique in the sense that we don’t show just one type of content on our platform. Our deals allow us to be a little more flexible in terms of what we can support. We want to play to the strengths of all of our partners.
On activating through Twitter: Advertisers are still learning that we have this huge audience for gaming. Year-to-date, we have had over 200 million Tweets associated with gaming and there is a huge conversation happening on the platform that I don’t think people are recognizing. The other thing is that looking at other platforms, especially other video platforms, there is more of a “lean back” experience for the user. For us, it is more “lean in” in that people are coming to have more meaningful conversations.
On Call of Duty World League: One of the big deals we announced at the Newfront presentation was the partnership with Activision Blizzard for Call of Duty World League where we will be carrying Call of Duty World League Anaheim, the season two playoffs as well as the World Championships in August. We will have all the clips associated with that and will also bring the shoulder programming that they will be streaming on the platform. There is a huge Call of Duty audience on the platform so this deal made a lot of sense because the content lends itself well to the platform and added to the conversation that was already happening.
On programming: In addition to that, we announced our partnerships with IGN and Gamespot for E3 as well as San Diego Comic-Con. Same thing here, as there was already a lot of chatter happening around those two big event and IGN and Gamespot are leaders and we wanted to work with them. We also announced our renewal with Intel Extreme Masters, extending the partnership we have had with them. Separate from that is our new Esports All-Access Program , where he are working with a lot of the world’s best teams to help them monetize their content and share their content from their perspective, whether it is tournament clips or gameplay.
