Twitter Eyes Media Partnerships in AsiaPac, MidEast

SINGAPORE: Twitter is making a push to expand its media partnerships across the Asia Pacific and Middle East for the news, politics, sports, TV and entertainment verticals.

As part of these efforts, the company has promoted Rishi Jaitly to VP of media for the Asia Pacific and Middle East, to lead the business strategy and build up the partnerships in these regions. Jaitly and his team will work with publishers to prioritize Twitter as their first platform for engaging with a mobile audience across the company's live public platform, including Twitter, Vine and Periscope apps.

Jaitly will be based in Singapore. He will be growing his teams in major digital markets such as Australia, India, and Japan, while expanding into new markets in Greater China and Southeast Asia. For example, his new team in Singapore recently completed the TV partnership deal with MediaCorp to use Twitter's SnappyTV platform to exclusively provide high-quality video clips of the country's 50th National Day Parade via Tweets during the live event.

Katie Stanton, the VP of global media at Twitter, said, "Since joining Twitter in the fall of 2012, Rishi has done a tremendous job of evangelizing the power of Twitter's platform for our users, influencers and content partners in India and Southeast Asia, including several of our largest and fastest growing markets in the world. By promoting Rishi to lead our function across the Asia Pacific and Middle East, we can quickly expand into new markets with a winning playbook, build up our strategic alliances and audience engagement in major markets, and attract the best talent for our team that brings the best content in the world onto Twitter's live, public platform."

Jaitly added, "The Asia Pacific and Middle East regions account for over half of the world's Internet, mobile and social media users today, so this is an exciting opportunity to connect with content partners to drive the global digital revolution from these markets. As many of our largest user markets are in these regions, my strategic priorities are to enable our content partners to grow their audience on Twitter, increase our engagement with emerging talent and digital natives, and bring more premium non-English content onto Twitter. Our goal is to make Twitter the first and best way to show you what's happening in your world right now."