14 DAY TRIAL // As the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity kicks off, Twitter has unveiled a new account dubbed @dronie.
As the name suggests, the Internet company will be sharing selfies throughout the rest of the week. Twitter will be using a drone to make the recording with the help of a camera mounted to its undercarriage. Mixing this with Twitter’s video service Vine results in a lot of videos published to the site, although you shouldn’t worry about being flooded with such content.
The first dronie captured by Twitter features famous actor Sir Patrick Stewart and Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter’s vice president for global brand strategy.
The former even took the stage and held a presentation based on how Twitter is changing the world of entertainment and how it’s helped shift perception of him from a serious actor to a funny and entertaining guy. After all, his bromance with Ian McKellen landed on front pages around the world mainly thanks to the messages he posted on the social network, often accompanied by pictures of the pair taking over the world.
The Dronie account seems to have been built as a marketing gimmick for the next few days, as Twitter tries to blend in with the other participants at the Cannes Lions, trying to show off its own creative communications skills.
And with our first official #dronie from #CannesLions, a new bromance is born! cc @SirPatStew @joell https://t.co/ZL5PthcRkh
— Dronie (@dronie) June 15, 2014The account itself was created by Twitter Advertising and comes as a larger effort from this department to stress the importance of live coverage at this type of events, and more so, to point out just how important Twitter can be on such occasions.
In the past few years, Twitter has solidified its role as the perfect tool to break out news, but also to comment on the popular shows on TV. In fact, the company has grown so much in this latter role that it started helping out with creating TV ratings with Nielsen.
The Dronie experiment seems to be quite a smart way for Twitter to promote itself, especially since it doesn’t just present the microblogging platform, but also Vine, which is usually ignored in such situations.
Mixing in the fact that the entire video is shot with the help of a drone, which is also a very popular topic, makes for a success story.
The Dronie account already has over 1,700 followers and has posted three messages so far. Aside from the Vine with Sir Patrick Stewart, there are a couple more with Twitter execs from all over the world.