Twitter – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Advertisers Fight the Filters: The Battle Continues

For years, consumers have sought ways to avoid and filter out advertising. And advertisers have fought back with ways over, around and through the filters. Here are two recent developments in the battle:

Product placement: as TIVO has damaged television advertising by allowing viewers to fast-forward past commercials, product placement has become an increasingly important source of revenue for broadcasters. Allesandra Stanley of The New York Times, tongue perhaps slightly in cheek, suggests an Emmy for the Product Placement category, and rates many recent efforts to integrate products into shows.

Twitter Advertising: meanwhile, Tech.blorge points to an AdWeek report that Pay-Per-Tweet is coming to Twitter. According to AdWeek:

Izea, formerly called Pay Per Post, is readying a Twitter ad platform called Sponsored Tweets that will offer Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages about brands and products. Twitterers will get paid based either on the number of clicks they receive or on a flat fee per Tweet.

In a test campaign, Blockbuster tweets carried the hashtag #spon to indicate a sponsored message. Tech.blorge points out that this may give Twitter users a way to filter the messages right back out again:

Twitter users have been notoriously fickle about spam entering the site, but so long as the Tweets carry a hashtag, there will be solutions beyond simply unfollowing the user putting out the messages. Thanks to third-party services such as TweetDeck, a method for users to read the messages on their desktop, you can set up filters to hide any messages with specified hashtags that you want. It’s easy to imagine that the #spon posts will quickly get filtered out by the majority of users, which leads one to believe the system will either be a failure, or users will just conveniently forget to include the tag.

Someone, no doubt, is working on a way to beat the filters. And so it goes.

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New Era Makes a Marketing Challenge Go Away… Almost

The Sunday New York Times has a look at American Idol contestant Adam Lambert. Lambert is…

1. Widely rumored to be gay, and

2. Widely considered a favorite to win the competition

Homosexuality has always had a significant place in the arts, but because the vast majority of the marketplace is straight, those in charge of marketing gay artists have often tried to hide those artists’ sexual identity. The article, while focusing on the “is he or isn’t he” speculation, also shows how far we’ve come from the days when

…studios forced Rock Hudson into bogus relationships with women and obliged gay actors “to lie from morning to night.”

In 1959 Liberace, the camp artifact best known, as one critic wrote, “for beating Romantic music to death on a piano decorated with a candelabra,” sued an English newspaper for libel for implying in print that he was gay… When asked on the witness stand whether he was homosexual, Liberace emphatically told a judge: “No, sir! I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society.” He won the suit and damages and then, much later, was named in a $113 million palimony suit by his partner Scott Thorson.

It’s worth noting the Boston Red Sox did not field a black player until that same year: 1959. Fifty years later, race doesn’t even register when the Most Valuable Player results are announced — but we still haven’t seen a gay Major League Baseball player come out during his playing career.

A previous American Idol runner-up, Clay Aiken, came out publicly — several years after his turn on the show was over. A half century after Liberace’s lawsuit, Adam Lambert can compete effectively in the most mainstream music competition imaginable, and allow the media to speculate as much as it wishes.

But he won’t quite let himself take the final step. The choice may be his, or his handlers’, or the show’s.

We’ll know that sexuality has ceased to be viewed as a marketing problem when a contestant comes out before the votes are cast — and the New York Times doesn’t care.

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The Great Twitter Challenge: A Review

The Great Portland – Vancouver Twitter Challenge is now history. When I started working on this, I wanted to see if Twitter could work as a marketing and promotions tool.

My conclusion: yes, but it’s not ready to play a major role in most companies’ marketing plans.

The negative: numbers, and tracking.

Numbers first — there just aren’t that many people using Twitter right now. Most of my co-workers don’t use it. To the best of my knowledge, none of my customers use it. And, based on the conversations I’ve had with them, they don’t see why they should. When I started promoting the contest, I saw a significant increase in the number of people following me — but I started with 40 followers, and wound up with 147. Until Twitter becomes much more widely used, it can’t be more than a tiny blip in a marketing campaign.

It’s also not particularly trackable. Although I know I had 147 followers, there was no way for me to tell how many of those 147 were actually looking when I sent out each question. There are no “page view” or “click-through” stats to examine.

In some cases, I’d get an answer back right away — the VanderVeer Center skin care products went in two minutes, as did the Oregon Athletic Club membership and the Portland Nursery stoneware pot. Other prizes took longer; in one case, I received an answer back two hours after sending out the question. All of this makes sense — if, say, twenty of the 147 were on Twitter at any given moment, and none of those twenty had any need for what I was offering at that moment, the question would be ignored. Which makes it like any other advertising medium.

The positive: the promotionwas easy to set up, and didn’t cost a dime. A Twitter account is free, and once I installed Tweetdeck (also free), it was simple to administer. I found nine local merchants who were delighted to provide some great prizes. It was also easy for people to enter. There were a few challenges in coming up with questions that I could communicate in 140 characters, but eventually I got the hang of it.

I don’t have access to the sponsors’ web stats, but I’m guessing they got some extra viewers, too — and some of those may turn into customers. I do know that this blog got nearly double its usual Friday traffic.

The network of people who know Phil Bernstein’s name has grown by 107 in the past ten days. That can’t be a bad thing.

If you participated in the contest, or just lurked as it went by on Twitter, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave me a comment below, or send me a tweet.

Special thanks to Tara Bloom for inspiring this. And thank you to Awakening Business Solutions, Green Lubrication Solutions, Market Accelerators, Maternitique, Organizers Northwest, Oregon Athletic Clubs, Portland Nursery, Shindaiwa, and VanderVeer Center for being part of the First Annual Great Portland – Vancouver Twitter Challenge.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.