Omnicom, Twitter Enter Into Mobile Ad Deal

Less than a month after the proposed $35 billion Omnicom-Publicis merger was called off, Omnicom has brokered a two-year ad deal with Twitter, with a price tag of $230 million.

Under the agreement, Omnicom will integrate its programmatic agency Accuen into Twitter’s mobile ad inventory manager MoPub. In addition, Omnicom networks will receive benefits like favorable ad rates from Twitter, as well as access to the microblogging service’s new ad products.

This is the first time the social media platform has partnered with an ad holding company on the mobile ad exchange side, according to Adam Bain, president of global revenue at Twitter. One of the goals of the partnership, he says, is that Twitter wants to allow marketers to conduct programmatic buys on its own site, rather than just in the MoPub network.

Although in a different way, Twitter has partnered with media companies before. Last year, Twitter signed a major ad deal with Publicis’ Starcom Mediavest Group, as well as entered into a global strategic partnership with WPP.

“[These were] similar deals in that they got first access to lots of data [that] others would have to manually scrape together as advertisers, and access to Twitter’s internal teams,” says Ron Schott, director of professional services at Simply Measured, a provider of social media analytics and measurement.

But different from previous ad deals, the Omnicom-Twitter partnership will “focus on the tech part of how ads will be delivered,” Bain told the The Wall Street Journal.

The Omnicom-Twitter pact is the first ad deal Omnicom has announced after its Publicis merger failed earlier this month. The news seems to show that both parties have now moved on from their breakup, as a Publicis-Facebook partnership was announced just last week.