U.S. Open, Twitter Savor ‘Instant Highlights’ #LiveTV

NEW YORK -- The two-year promotional partnership of Twitter and tennis’s U.S. Open had helped spread word of the tournament via “instant highlights,” something the overseers want to continue.

“I think you will see instant highlights continue, and it’ll just be a matter of what form or fashion that takes,” Nicole Jeter West, senior director, ticketing and digital strategy for the United States Tennis Association, said at a session during The Business of Live Television Summit Tuesday in New York City. “But we are all committed to the fact that this is working for us, it’s working for our fans and our partners.”

In 2013, an epic rally between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic in the men’s final was a milestone moment in the USTA and Twitter’s efforts to send almost real-time video snippets out via promoted tweets, in an effort to get people to tune into the broadcast and expose them to a sponsor’s message (in this case Heineken) just by opening up a tweet targeted to them.

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Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.