Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ink Twitter Deal

Twitter and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment have entered into a long-term agreement under the social media network’s Amplify program.

Since launching Amplify in May, adiposity Twitter has entered partnerships with television networks like A&E, along with the NBA, the NFL and Major League Baseball. But this deal is the first Amplify partnership involving individual teams.

“I don’t know that they’ll become the norm, but as soon as the NFL deal happened you see the trigger effect in other leagues,” says Kirstine Stewart, head of Twitter Canada. “This is so very new right now but people understand how quickly the digital space is moving. These things start a spark and we’ll see how high the flames go.”

For Twitter, the Amplify platform helps answer questions that percolated both before and after the company’s initial public offering, about how it would generate revenue from an audience that spans 232 million active users who access the service for free.

And for MLSE the deal provides an opportunity to tap into the conversations that sprout on Twitter during live sports events. The Leafs, Raptors and other teams can then inject an advertising message and measure feedback in real time via replies, retweets and video views.

“No-one has cracked the code on monetizing social (media), and we’ve made our first sale,” says Dave Hopkinson, MLSE’s chief commercial officer. “We’re underway. The future is very bright.”