Twitter as anti-ad platform

Motrin knows their customers - people with pain. And they know their subgroups, like baby-toting-moms. What they don't know, apparently, is how to advertise to them. Motrin had an ad campaign targeting moms who carried babies in slings or baby backpacks (why not dads too?!). But they blew it in their text, sounding like moms carry their babies as fashion statements, with first-person statements in their ads like it "Waring your baby is in fashion... [it] totally makes me look like an official mom". Consumers hated it, and Twitter gave them an outlet. In fact, there were so many rants against the Motrin ad machine on Twitter that Motrin halted the campaign.

While I would say Motrin blew it, I must applaud them for listening to their consumers, and keeping their ears on the social media machine. A bad campaign perhaps, but not a total loss. Three cheers for Twitter, and at least one for Motrin.

Twitter Spam

BeAMagpie.com is the first business that I have found to figure out a way to use Twitter for ads. The money model, interspersing ads into your tweet stream, isn't original, but I haven't seen anyone else actually do it yet.

I like the way it gets set up: people set their own keywords, and then get ads based on their use of those keywords in their tweets and the number of followers they have. At regular intervals BeAMagpie will insert a tweet in your stream that all your followers see. Simple enough, and gives control to both the user and the advertiser.

However, I really don't like the idea of forcing others to see ads when there is no opt-in. True, they are always allowed to opt-out by blocking your feed, but then you've both lost a friend.

I'm curious to see how people react to these sorts of streams. I'm guessing it will be successful, but I'm not sure I'm glad.

Twitter Ads?

Twitter has a delicious problem on its hand. It needs money, well, at least the investors want money. The problem is that they aren't making any yet. But it's so easy to taste so many ways they could. Their current challenge is to choose one (or so).

What concerns me is the impact their model could have on the consumers. For instance, Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo), posted a few ideas. Two of them, at least, had to do with ads. He opines that people wouldn't mind getting a sponsored tweet every so often. While his final advice to Twitter is spot-on ("An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money."), I was left wondering about the "intermittent ad" proposal in general.

Imagine getting a sponsored message every so often in your:

• Your Twitter feed
• Your email
• Your phone calls or answering service
• Your mail

How often (e.g. every 200 messages, once a day, ...) would you be willing to get a sponsored ad if it kept the service free? In what ways would you be willing to get more ads in exchange for free premium services?