CW network launches live Twitter feed ad in ‘Entertainment Weekly’

This is pretty damn cool. In the latest edition of Entertainment Weekly, the CW Television Network has taken out an innovative new ad. The company famed for shows like Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries and Supernatural has decided to take live tweets to print.

Who said print was dead? Well CW does not agreed. The insert in the weekly magazine contains a small LCD screen that shows a short video of an upcoming show “Emily Owens, M.D.” and the latest tweets from @CW_Network account underneath the words, “Follow Us Now.”

This bold new ad campaign only appears in 1 000 copies distributed across New York and Los Angeles. According to Mashable’s report, the ad is powered by a custom-built, “smartphone-like Android device” that has an LED screen with 3G connectivity. The device is enclosed in two thick, stiff sheets inside the magazine.

“We’re always trying to look at things that are first to market, that are really going to let people know that we are a digital network and that digital media is part of our DNA,” Rick Haskins, executive vice president of marketing and digital programs at the CW, to Mashable in an interview.

According to the report, the network’s media agency, OMD (a division of Omnicom Media Group), pitched the idea to CW, and then Twitter was brought on board to help execute it.

Twitter’s vice president for brand strategy, Joel Lunenfeld, to the New York Times that more television networks are using the platform to introduce new programmes to get the audience familiar with it before it runs on television. Fox used Twitter to preview the season premiere of “Raising Hope”. Lunenfeld argues that seeing something on Twitter helps the chances of people turning on their televisions to watch.

“I think we saw a lot of that activity during the Olympics this year,” he told NYT. “People are seeing things unfold on Twitter, engaging with it and then tuning in to watch it happening.”