Twitter Next announces new APAC heads

Twitter Next, the platform’s brand strategy team, has named Daniela Bogoricin as APAC director and Felix Cheng as Greater China head. Bogoricin and Cheng—both of whom will be based in Singapore—will lead the team to provide brand strategy and creative approaches for brands via data-driven insights and tech, according to the company.

At its core, Next provides campaign and content strategy services, brand voice consultations as well as partners with large advertisers. The team also studies hundreds of millions of Tweets per day to understand user behaviours and engagement trends.

After leading Twitter Next Brazil for three years, Bogoricin moved to APAC for her new role. She also has over two decades in advertising including previous stints at WMcCann and Young & Rubicam.

Meanwhile, Cheng previously worked at IDEO Shanghai with extensive experience in analysing consumer insights and advertising. Her past workplaces include Grey Group, JWT Worldwide, and AKQA.

“Through data-driven experimentation, Twitter Next’s new lab has already stewarded more than 200 custom programmes in 2019, with advertisers across all industries globally,” Bogoricin told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

“From Twitter-powered knitting machines, to vast experiments with Twitter’s API to produce new and engaging experiences, this team focuses on re-imagining the technological possibilities of Twitter.”

Bogoricin said that the pandemic has shifted how brands should think about their social media strategy. Prior to COVID-19, the most effective campaigns on Twitter across a variety of metrics—including conversation velocity, share of conversation, engagement, and brand sentiment—were predominantly campaigns that were either launching something new, or connecting to an event, occasion or trend in culture.

“However, as we all know things are shifting to slightly different directions this year following the pandemic. Twitter has emphasised since the beginning that this is not a 'marketing opportunity' to capitalise on, and we do not recommend that brands opportunistically link themselves to it. But this is a new reality which businesses must thoughtfully navigate,” said Bogoricin.

“Before doing anything, brands should understand what is appropriate for them," she added. "Internally, brands must understand the role they play in people’s lives. Externally, brands must be fully aware of the conversations they are entering, whether it’s the latest happenings, adjusting their tone to reflect new developments, or anticipating changes in customer behaviour to new developments.”

Some key themes that have emerged among brands on Twitter during COVID-19 are accurate and reliable information, customer service and support, distraction and levity, and community and positivity.

Brands that Twitter Next has worked with include Spotify, Microsoft Xbox, OnePlus and Uber.