Twitter Expands Pre-Roll Ad Program To Creators; Flipboard Offers Programmatic Ads

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Pre-Roll Take Flight

Twitter will expand its pre-roll video ad program to individual content creators, Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports. Twitter has sold skippable pre-roll ads to top publishers and media companies since 2013. Now it wants to help so-called influencers make money by cutting them in on ad revenue. Twitter has the raw material to make it work, considering last year it bought the influencer network Niche and its 35,000 creators to make branded content. Read more. The pre-roll expansion might provide an incremental revenue bump for Twitter, but getting its monthly active user count up is still priority one [AdExchanger coverage].

Flipping The Switch

Flipboard has joined the ranks of programmatic media sellers. The personalized news aggregator, which has 90 million monthly users and generates 300 million impressions in the US each month, tapped Rubicon Project to create a private marketplace for its native and display ad supply. The app previously transacted only in direct deals. Now the 10,000 or so advertisers on Rubicon’s exchange can buy that inventory too, and Flipboard hopes its interest-based targeting will differentiate its supply. More at Adweek.

Love Is Blind

Amazon’s complex pricing system may be “coming into conflict with consumer expectations of a traditional subscription,” writes Brian Chen at The New York Times. If you have a newspaper or Netflix subscription, you pay the same amount every month, but Amazon’s consumer subscription (which re-ups purchases on things like household goods and groceries) looks more like Uber surge pricing. Lysol wipes vary from $9 to $18, while Folger’s coffee went from $6.64 in June to more than $21 in mid-August before dropping back below $10. There are deals to be had, but mostly for those who wait and buy in the low swing of an Amazon price cycle. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali supposes Amazon is testing the price bounds of loyal customers (which is not a great way to treat loyal customers). More.

Social Patrol

Social may be mature by digital standards, but it’s still the Wild West to the FTC. The regulator has wrapped some brands on the knuckles for inadequate disclosure [AdExchanger coverage], but lots of “influencer” marketing lives in a gray zone. Twitter and Instagram have been flooded by posts with #ad or #sponsored labels, but those posts perform significantly worse than unlabeled posts, as The New York Times notes. And there are still plenty of ways to boost a sponsor without a formal ad deal. Does thanking a brand for a freebie qualify as disclosure? Does that even require disclosure? How do you distinguish a well-intentioned shout-out or something as innocuous as an errant brand label in an Instagram photo from promotional content? Nobody seems to know.

But Wait, There’s More!