What’s NEXT at Twitter?

Twitter revamped its brand strategy team under the banner Twitter NEXT on September 23, 2019, positioning themselves as leaders with a fancy new industry jargon – brand voice consultants.

The Twitter NEXT team will offer brands their campaign and content strategy services, brand voice consultations, and a newly formed lab of strategists, planners, creatives, technologists and data scientists.

Their mission is ‘to collaborate with brands, agencies & partners to create human-centric ideas worth talking about’.

Leading Twitter NEXT in India will be Rishabh Sharma, who was previously leading the brand strategy team in the country. Sharma has been associated with Twitter since October 2017.

At a press meet on November 8, Twitter presented its new publication, ‘The Participation Playbook’, in partnership with Contagious, which provides content intelligence, advisory and marketing solutions. They went through 1,856 Twitter centric campaigns entered at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to glean insights which will become the backbone of Twitter NEXT’s strategy.

Twitter illustrated the learnings from The Participation Playbook with famous examples in advertising – ranging from International House of Pancakes’ (IHOP) controversial name change, Nike’s Kapernick campaign, Wendy’s refrigerator bashing in Fortnite and Burger King’s Whopper detour.

The fundamental point that they were trying to convey was that advertising has shifted from product to people.

Alex Josephson, Head of Twitter NEXT Global, said, “As the industry has shifted, so have the needs of marketers who want to break through the clutter and drive conversations about their campaigns, products and messages.”

Katrina Dodd, Head of Trends, Contagious, explained, “We think there is an important distinction here between creating advertising messages and creating and participating in conversations.”

Pedro Porto, Director Brand Strategy – Latin America and Asia Pacific at Twitter, added here, “We are here to help you understand the technical possibilities of Twitter to do real meaningful innovation. To help consumers participate and chat about your client, service, product and embrace your problems. To ensure that what we help create is worth talking about.”