Twitter Wants to Be Your TV!

rofitability doesn’t appear to be in Twitter’s (TWTR) future anytime soon. Losses are increasing, membership growth has slowed, and the company’s stock price is down 28 percent since the start of the year, amid a broader selloff in the Nasdaq(NDAQ). But there’s some good news: Twitter’s ad revenue is projected to reach $1.1 billion in 2014, an increase of 84 percent from the year before, according to researcher EMarketer. That’s due in no small part to Twitter Amplify, a year-old program that has allowed the company to snag a piece of the billions of dollars spent annually on TV ads.

Twitter aims to take advantage of the sales strength of media companies that have more established relationships with sponsors. Its salespeople approach advertisers alongside representatives from media companies such as the NFL, the NBA, andViacom (VIA). Together they present a unique proposition: Twitter will run video highlights from major live broadcasts, with advertisers’ names and messages playing before the clip.

After actor Zac Efron won the MTV Movie Award for “best shirtless performance” on April 13, MTV posted his minute-long acceptance speech on Twitter, preceded by a Revlon (REV) ad. The video and ad were viewed more than 100,000 times, the network says. In December the NFL posted on Twitter footage of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady awkwardly trying to high-five his teammates, who didn’t notice him. The footage, sponsored on Twitter by Verizon(VZ), racked up about 3,000 retweets. To attract more social media attention, “marketers are taking moments that would have been talked about at the water cooler and are allowing them to unfold live,” says Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue.

Many users watch TV with their phones and computers on their lap and tweet comments on shows. Twitter’s efforts to capitalize on that have started to take shape within the past two years. A division of 30 employees works with media companies to ensure that networks and their actors tweet during broadcasts and that Twitter hashtags and user names appear on the screen.