Challenge

Twitter is a unique platform to discover what’s happening, anywhere in the world, in real-time. Every day, news stories break, gifs go viral, and someone, somewhere, breaks the internet. Twitter covers all of these, with the latest news, reactions and conversations. The fast-paced nature of the platform poses an issue for our marketing strategy: how do we predict the big news stories of any given day and serve these to users, showing Twitter to be the best source for live content, no matter your interest?

To do this, we needed to work with Twitter to build a solution to make their marketing as real-time as Twitter itself. We needed to reach new users and drive up active users on the platform.

Solution

We developed a proof of concept within Paid Search to tackle this problem. Using Twitter’s API and machine learning to create search ads in real-time based on Twitter trends. It performed extremely well, so we began developing the prototype into a full, multi-channel campaign management tool, using AI to drive personalised, coherent user experiences across the user journey, based on high-quality conversations happening on Twitter. We call this tool Magpie.

Magpie identifies the best trending content on Twitter and uses machine learning to analyse it and build creative and write messaging on the fly to serve to users interested in the content on other channels. For each user, it creates a curated experience by serving a collection of ads, across channels on topics that are of interest to them, based on their unique interests, behaviours and demographics.

All of this happens in near real-time, meaning Magpie is running an always-on, multi-channel campaign that creates and serves thousands of personalised ads every day, creating personalised user experiences at scale, with minimal human intervention. This is the first time AI and user-generated content has been used to run a real-time digital campaign before. At any given moment, the conversations happening on Twitter are powering a campaign that’s reaching new users off-platform and engaging with them.

Results

This is the first use of bespoke AI to fully automate a multi-channel digital campaign end-to-end. Pulling together user-generated content with machine learning and custom integrations with multiple media partners has led to a far more reactive, real-time strategy. When a new trend or story breaks, Twitter has relevant ads across multiple search and display networks within 15 minutes.

Magpie also aligns Twitter’s marketing strategy with their core brand values of being an open, real-time source of news where anyone can find content relevant to them. No matter a user’s interest, Magpie’s scalability means we can serve niche topics to the right users in a personalised way.

From a direct response perspective, Magpie has surpassed all expectations, looking at our performance marketing campaigns year on year:

• 33% increase in conversion rate

• 212% percent increase in conversions

• 51% decrease in cost per conversion

Overall, we hugely exceeded our target and drove significant year on year improvements on active user volumes for the client.

We truly believe this is a global first that represents a leap forward in terms of what it means to run a digital marketing campaign, by creating a unique and industry-leading piece of ad tech.