Montreal-based social media ad service Seevibes is opening up an office in Toronto as it evolves its product and has hired a new executive to head up its next push into the North American market.
Franz Fontaine, previously at Mediative, brings 12 years of media agency experience to his new role at Seevibes. The Toronto location will be the third office for the firm, which has an office in Paris, and its original Montreal headquarters founded in 2011. Seevibes is also in the planning stages for a U.S. office, but nothing concrete as of yet, Fontaine says.
“We’ve been getting some requests to be more present in the U.S., we’re in the planning stages right now,” he says. “Toronto is a very important market.”
Seevibes does social media monitoring to identify conversations about television shows taking place. Through this so-called “second-screen” data, Seevibes analyzes more than 1 million interactions a day made by social media users that are engaging with both TV shows and specific brands.
“At least 50 per cent of all conversation on social media, Facebook and Twitter included is around television shows,” Fontaine explains. “People also engage certain brands and the idea is to find the common ground to serve them ads that will be relevant and pertinent to them.”
In a white paper it published last September, Seevibes demonstrated the relationship between social media users engaged with auto-maker Ford and television shows. It turns out those people were most likely to watch NASCAR and least likely to watch Shipping Wars. Seevibes positions itself as one that can cater to broadcasters looking to make money off the social conversations taking place around their content, and the agencies and brands that want to target those audiences.
Now the firm is looking to evolve its product from analysis alone to ad targeting. Seevibes is focused on its recently-launched Tailored Audience tool. The self-serve web platform allows brands to optimize their Twitter ad targeting by segmenting the target audience based on Seevibes data.
“We construct psychographic personaes in function of intent, interest, brands and TV affinities,” Fontaine says. It’s a complementary tool to Twitter’s own Tailored Audience service.
“Brands are still investing in television, they want to be associated with quality content and they want to be associated with this content on other channels,” he adds.
As an example, a brand that has bought advertising blocks during a specific TV show might also want to place ads on Twitter while that show airs, targeting the fans of the show that are discussing it.
