Twitter offers advertisers
more than 140 characters
Posted: Jun 11, 2012 7:32
AM PDT
Updated: Jun 11, 2012 8:44
AM PDT
Twitter's basic ad unit is
a tweet, which is why the company says it is having early success with mobile
ads. But advertisers want more than just 140 characters, and Twitter is happy
to help them out.
basic ad unit is a tweet,
which is why the company says it is having early success with mobile ads. But
advertisers want more than just 140 characters, and Twitter is happy to help
them out there, too.
That was the point of the
TV ads Twitter bought Sunday -- to showcase what marketers can do when they get
their hands on an actual Twitter webpage. And that is what Twitter hopes to
point out in high-profile ad campaigns to come.
Twitter's NASCAR campaign
shows what Twitter can do with a single keyword term -- and, presumably, what
an advertiser can do once they purchase that keyword for a day (or more?). But
Twitter has been steadily amping up what advertisers can do on Twitter.com for
a couple years.
First it overhauled the
site to make it easier to embed graphics and videos. The idea was to play up
the notion that you didn't have to write a thing to enjoy Twitter -- you could
just visit Twitter.com's "consumption environment" and look at the
cool stuff other people, and/or advertisers, put up.
Then late last year it
started offering brands their own pages, which made the message even clearer
for advertisers: You can use our site to do more than put up Tweets -- you can
stick videos on there, or even stuff that looks a whole lot like the big banner
ads everyone says are dead but everyone keeps spending a lot of money on,
anyway.
You'll see some
combination of this stuff used throughout the summer, in the big Pepsi
promotion that Twitter announced last month. It's also likely to come into play
with the ad campaigns Twitter is trying to sell in conjunction with ESPN.
All of this is important
to Twitter because while it hopes that the self-serve ads it launched earlier
this year become the equivalent of Google's AdWords engine, it also wants cool
stuff it can sell to the Pepsis of the world. Those guys want a whole lot more
than tweets -- they want big honking web ads, like the kind they can still get
at Yahoo or AOL -- but not at Facebook.
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