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Twitter is still trying to persuade Madison Avenue to buy ads on its website and apps. So what’s it doing running a television ad?
Omid Ashtari, Twitter’s head of sports, noted that his company ran its first-ever television during today’s 2012 Pocono 400 Nascar race.
It features racer Brad Keselowski (who ended up placing 24th) snapping a photo with his iPhone. (Twitter features are built into Apple’s smartphones, thanks to a deal between the companies.
The ad also featured a very interesting URL:
TWITTER.COM/#NASCAR
Plenty of TV ads advertise hashtags—a pound sign followed by a keyword, which leads to a search-results page on Twitter for tweets which mention the same topic.
But hashtags in TV ads normally stand alone. They don’t form part of a Web address.
Maybe we missed it, but we’ve never seen that kind of hashtag URL before.
And it redirects to this page, which we definitely haven’t seen before:
Here’s Ashtari’s tweet and the television ad which ran today.
in case you missed, here is @Twitter‘s first ever TV spot during today’s #NASCAR race youtube.com/watch?v=nYz76M…
— Omid Ashtari (@omid) June 10, 2012