Dive Brief:

• Ross Hofffman, director of global brand strategy for Twitter, took center stage at Cannes Lions and talked about real-time event marketing on the platform, with the goal of helping marketers better take advantage of those tools.
• "The No. 1 question we get asked from marketers still, and I've been here for five years, is 'What do we tweet about? How often do we tweet? What should the content be?'" Hoffman told AdWeek.
• Other news from Twitter at Cannes included a new live events offering, a “Twitter Studio” device that shoots Twitter-friendly formats such as Vines and GIFs.

Dive Insight:

Even though the company is in the midst of high-level transition with an ongoing CEO search, Twitter’s director of global brand strategy was active at Cannes Lions offering brands advice on how to conduct real-time marketing campaigns to take advantage of events such as the Super Bowl or World Cup where Twitter becomes a popular destination for conversations.

Hoffman’s role at Twitter includes helping advertisers plan campaigns on the micro-blogging site. Taking cues from his Twitter role, he explained how even though campaigns around large events seem like “serendipitous, cool moments” that brands share with consumers, those campaign are actually involved and take months of planning.

His aim is to help brands get traction on all of Twitter’s parts including Vine and Periscope. Hoffman’s team also helps marketers take advantage of events such as product launches, and even just target specific times of day such as campaigns based around breakfast.

Twitter also used the Cannes Lions event to show off its new live events device, a portable Twitter Studio that that shoots platform-friendly formats such as Vines and GIFs, as well as a Periscope machine that directly streams to the app. Twitter Studio also made an appearance at March’s SXSW Interactive event.