When I wrote Twitter is Finally Monetizing Through Text Ads I was pretty sure that I was the last person to know that Twitter was running text ads masquerading as witty and helpful links to useful Twitter apps and services. I ran with the story because it was new to me.  Tonight, ReadWriteWeb posted a story called Ads Spotted on Twitter.com – Did You Notice? and my post was linked to in this context, “It’s funny – the ads have been live for about a week now and no one but a few (me!) small, alert blogs has written about them. It was big news three months ago and we believe it’s still important.” Cool!  I feel vindicated!

Ads Spotted on Twitter.com – Did You Notice?

Three months ago we reported that Ads Had Come to Twitter and it was a pretty big deal – until Twitter promptly said the word “sponsored” was only appearing on the site in error. Now the “sponsored definitions” of certain Twitter “concepts” have appeared on the site again – and they sure look legit this time.

These first ads probably aren’t going to bring in enough cash to fuel a micro-app acquisition spree by Twitter, but this is the first clear public indication of one way the company is bringing in revenue. It’s funny – the ads have been live for about a week now and no one but a few small, alert blogs has written about them. It was big news three months ago and we believe it’s still important.

So far the only two sponsored links we’ve seen cycle through our sidebars have been to the ad network Federated Media‘s Microsoft microsite ExecTweets.com (aggregating Twitter messages from corporate executives) and Universal Studios‘ CinemaTweets.com, promoting the allegedly offensive forthcoming gay-face movie Bruno. The ads only appear on the home page of Twitter when a user is logged in, not when looking at another user’s profile page. Also included in the cycle is a link to a joint Twitter and Threadless.com microsite where visitors can buy Threadless t-shirts about Twitter. Apparently that doesn’t constitute a sponsored link, but presumably money is changing hands somewhere. The whole world of Twitter is a green-field when it comes to rules of disclosure.

Perhaps these sources of revenue will help Twitter remain a viable company long enough for all kinds of questions about this brand new medium to be explored.

Dave Winer argued this Spring that people want to know how Twitter is going to make money because they might not like it. He told a story about learning while in college that Domino’s Pizza used profits to fight Planned Parenthood. With all the time, energy and content people are investing in Twitter – many want to know how the company will monetize so they can decide whether it’s an organization they want to continue investing in.

And so it has begun. There are ads on Twitter. What do you think?

Disclosure: Federated Media is also the ad network for ReadWriteWeb.

There has been so much conjecture as to how Twitter will start monetizing.  Well, it looks like there have been a few baby steps in the form of “sponsored definitions” that cycle through right above the Home link on the navigation bar. It is very subtle and I didn’t notice it myself until today (Seth Simonds has been talking about this since June 23rd).

You won’t see these sponsored definitions every time as they’re interspersed with Twitter definitions that are not sponsored but simply informational or helpful, I guess.  An example of a sponsored definition is Exec Tweets and Cinema Tweets — essentially text ads in the guise of being factoids and links to useful apps and services.

According to a blog post I found on blog.twitter.com from back in March, it looks like Federated Media is handling the Twitter sponsored definitions, “It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you’re a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they’ll fix you up right,” which could be a real score for Federated.

Twitter has done a very good job of working this is organically — I never noticed it, as I said, until this morning.

Doing a cursory search, nobody is freaking out and there hasn’t been any direct reference to advertising on Twitter short of a coy post on May 20 — Does Twitter Hate Advertising?, “Do we hate advertising? Of course not. It’s a huge industry filled with creativity and inspiration. There’s also room for new innovation in advertising, marketing, and public relations and Twitter is already part of that.”

So, no direct mention of the “sponsored definition” campaign.  Very smooth and with zero blowback.

That said, if you have a Twitter app or service and want to get into the loop, I guess you should reach out to Federated Media, though I wonder if there might be a secret handshake or password to get yourself into an ad on Twitter.

And, to look at the Twitter-to-come, Seth Simonds also mentions that there are proper 185px ×185px image ads showing on Twitter Japan, which you can see for yourself, “You can see for yourself by visiting the account settings of your Twitter account and changing the language preference to Japanese.” — in this case, the ad is static and sells Windows 7 and Windows Vista from the Japanese Microsoft Store.

Very interesting.  What do you think? (Via Socialmedia.biz and Marketing Conversation)

I have always assumed that advertising networks were much more sophisticated than met the eye.  I made an assumption that the mixture of computing power; the ubiquitous nature of cookies and tracking code; and the broad coversage, cross-referencing and cross-pollination of the ad networks would result in a global Internet conspiracy of targeting so precise and so automated that I am seriously done for.

Well, if that is the case, then I am embroiled in a massive disinformation campaign here in the W hotel on Lexington Avenue in NYC:  digitday:TARGET.

I don’t believe this is a giant plot to chaff and flare the privacy advocates and conspiracy into a lull.  I really believe that no matter how brute the computing force, how savvy the algorithms, or how promiscuous the sharing might be behind the scenes, this is still an emerging market, not quite sure how to deliver the kind of one-to-one advertising and marketing targeting I had thought been commonplace since before Doubleclick was disbanded as being Evil.

Well, folks are discussing semantic advertising and targeting and all sorts of other cool stuff.  I wonder if there is better, more nefarious, ways of targeting using the kinds of data that these networks are smart enough to not use — meaning, if Google or Facebook were to start to deliver contextual ads for herpes therapy to people who have searched for and purchased anti-viral therapies or herpes medicine in the past, I guarantee you that these folks would freak.

Maybe the answer could be “yes, we in fact do have everything on you, we know all of your dirty detailed; however, we’re smart enough to realize that we can’t reveal our hand or the privacy advocated will take us down with extreme prejudice, just like they did in the past” — what do you think?

Anyway, I think this has been — is being — a very valuable conference.  I have to thank Dean Landsman for hooling me up with my only conference during New York Internet Week 2009.

I now have a lot of things to think about when it comes to what I do at Abraham Harrison LLC with our selection of social media marketing, earned media, blogger relations, social media engegement, Twittering strategies, and the like.

I also think that the next big thing will be the Reeces Pieces of the chocolate of Public Relations and the peanut butter of Advertising.  There needs to be a confluence — and that confluence doesn’t even need to include ad agencies — social media marketing and online advertising networks really need to make a baby.

Well, anyway, for now it seems like we’re still safe from being completely crushed by the J. Edgar Hoover-like extortion of people based on their choices, their interests, their vices, and their secrets.

That said, this is not a government-sponsored event, this is only a commercial event, focusing on business and publisher data and advertising. One thing nobody every addressed is whether all of this passive attention data is being shared and with whom?

If your attention data, search data, purchasing data, download data, and browsing data were to be made available for reasons of Homeland Security, would that be OK?  If your attention data can become part of a pattern-recognition campaign to track and hunt down terrorists, would that be permissible to you?

Anyway, let’s talk about this in the comments… I would love to hear what’s going on in your mind about this.  I am pretty new to online advertising, to ad networks, to new technologies in targeting and metrics and quantificaltion and qualification and what not, but I am really interested in learning.

This is complete speculation so bear with me.  Very recently, Twitter changed its email alert messages  from pithy text-only notices of new followers or direct messages to branded, graphical emails.

Well, Twitter has always been in a conundrum: if they monetize the sparse web interface, they’ll alienate their very touchy early-adopters and send people away in disgusted droves; however, if they place banners, contextual ads, or sponsored links into alert emails, then no harm, no foul.

I don’t know if you have every looked in your settings recently, but there is a lot of opportunity to set up your Twitter account to send you a lot of alerts and warnings, letting you know when you receive a direct message or when you score a new follower — especially if you’re someone like me, adding an additional 200-followers-per-day!

So, what do you think?  Instead of Twitter shopping itself around to Google and Microsoft, maybe Twitter is shopping its inline advertising opportunity within the endless email alerts that it send me and many of you every hour of every day.

Do you think this is possible or probable?  Please let me know in the comments. Via Marketing Conversation.

Does the above advertisement ring of eugenics?  I am fascinated by the obsession that this nation — and Great Britain and Europe — had with “discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits” during the late 1800s through to World War II, when it disappeared for obvious reasons (see above).  In fact, when it comes to eugenics, America has a very dark secret.  We Americans, anyway, have an obsession with better, smarter, and stronger.

I hate eugenics and I don’t think it is funny.

There is enough threat of breeding ourselves like Race Horses already through partner-selection and so forth, that I really don’t find the implication of this ad campaign at all.

I have been seeing this all over my news feed but thanks to AdFreak for finally saying something smart on the subject, Use a condom, thwart that evil Hitler sperm:

Do condom ads reflect the mind-sets of nations? In the U.S., we get faux-patriotism and soft-core porn, while the French have safe sex on the beach. Now, from Germany, comes a dour dose of angst via Grey in a campaign for Doc Morris Pharmacies. The message: Use a condom, and be sure you’re not bringing the next Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler or Mao Zedong into the world. Of course, you’d have to sleep with one of those three to risk that—and I imagine most would abstain, especially in the case of Hitler, since he’s been dead for almost 65 years. Or maybe the ads are just generally likening sperm to invaders and terrorists. The bad hairdos should be enough to frighten anyone away. Via Ads of the World.

I tell anyone who will listen to me that the current crop of advertisement methods is too short-lived. The moment you spend the money and your ad runs, that is the moment it is either gone to the grave or becomes a patient existing on life support. Either you’re smart and willing to keep it alive, in conversation, online on YouTube for the spots, or on a blog somewhere for the print work — or you feel compelled to keep on throwing money at it ad infinitum, because contextual ads, banner ads, etc, only last as long as you write checks.

What my specialty is is online conversation marketing, online public relations, and online earned media. When you earn peoples’ attention and when they choose to speak about you, your clients, and your services, then you have a gift that keeps on giving — this is content that lasts well past the campaign and into the future. This is both the sort of thing that Google loves — it is SEO catnip — and it is just the sort of content that flows, both upstream to A-list bloggers and to mainstream media and down to your readers, aggregators, and to other bloggers and other blogs.

If you want to see some examples of powerfully successful blogger outreaches, check out International Medical Corps (IMC) 2008, Survivor Corps Operation Survivor 2008, and Fresh Air Fund Summer 2008, Jerry White’s I Will Not Be Broken book promotion. In many cases, these campaigns are close to a year old, yet they still still live in hundreds and hundreds of blogs and feed Google’s index until all of these blogs are taken down. It is really amazing how effective this sort of “advertising” promotion works. What’s better, when the campaign is over and the client “turns off” our tap, the content continues living and isn’t just shut off like it is with banners, buttons, and contextual advertising. Very interesting, very cool, and powerfully effective.

Remember how much fun Communication Arts is to page through? — CA is intoxicating! Well, every ad you make can be as interesting, as long as you’re willing to come out of your art department and share your process, share your experience, share your steps. Keeping those ephemera alive through narrative, sharing, conversation, and story, is what social media is, it is what customer service is, it is surely what branding should be.

Anyway, There is a lot of opportunity in this time of chaos, of this time of transition. The same sort of transition (and opportunity) happened when PCs came online, replacing the IBM Selectric II; when the Internet changed E-Commerce, threatening to eviscerate bricks and mortar stores, and it is happening now, more than ever, with advertising, marketing, and PR.

I call it white knuckle syndrome: holding on to the handholds you have, frozen on the face of the cliff, because you don’t know where the handholds of the future are. This chaos is pretty amazing to watch as the economy pitches and GM bails on Super Bowl.

Advertising knows it needs to jump off the locomotive before it pitches into the gorge (the bridge is out!) but reaching out to the proffered hand of the guy in the helicopter seems pretty risky too. But, as the current handholds become chalky and you start to feel them crumble under your weight, you’ll need to find somewhere else to go, and quick!

To me, Chris Brogan said it best the other day on Twitter, “customer service is the new PR.*” Looking at what @comcastcares has been able to do, customer service is the new PR, the new marketing, and the new advertising.

So, as those handholds start to get chalk and begin to crumble, it is important to at least set your eyes on a new handhold — or maybe a helping hand — before your original handhold turns to powder.

And for you who have yet to do the reading, please check out Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversation.

According to Jonathan Trenn, over at Marketing Conversation — Bob Garfield’s “Chaos Scenario” may start locally — the world of advertising is in a place of chaos — spanning the dead zone between traditional advertising methods and new media advertising.

Bob Garfield’s “Chaos Scenario” may start locally

If you haven’t read Bob Garfield’s presentations of how advertising will evolve over the next few years (Part 1 and Part 2), then you should. He calls this the “Chaos Scenario”…a perfect metaphor for what he describes. In it, he argues that traditional advertising is dying out as media usage and consumer behavior are changing. Much of the change has its roots in the rise of the internet as a marketing vehicle. But, Garfield points out, new methods and practices have yet to fully pan out. And many companies haven;t come to grips with this new and show no signs of doing it any time soon. This is going to cause (my interpretation) chaos as traditional media outlets struggle to get advertisers while these advertisers struggle to figure out how to advertise effectively with their limited knowledge.

For the most part, I agree with his thesis. Most major traditional marketing-oriented mediums are becoming less effective as promotional vehicles. Media usage is more dispersed, more personal, and thus, more controlled by the end user. And many times those end users today are choosing to ignore or avoid the advertising messages that are send their way. Whether it ends up being as dire as Garfield suggests, I have no idea, but changes are coming and neither the advertising mediums nor the advertisers themselves are ready for it.

And I think local is where we’ll see it first. I see this happening one the local level over the next three years. Goldman Sachs is predicting that traditional local advertising vehicles – local TV, newspapers and radio stations – are going to get hit particularly hard during this recession. I’m going to agree, and the key world there is “particularly”. That’s because local advertising is hurting anyway as advertisers have already been pulling back because it doesn’t work like it used to. Add to that further cuts in ad spend and you could get a serious amount of casualties on the local media market.

In the above graphs, we can see that newspaper get hit the hardest. Readership is down in the first place. That’s permanent. People have stopped buying newspapers for whatever reason – a lack of interest in news, having news available online, and getting quick news capsules in other mediums. A poor economy has little or no effect on newspaper buying. We won’t be seeing a rebound once the economy bounce back.

The collapse of players in the local ad market will reduce the options for advertisers. Yet the demand will probably still meet the supply. So we’ll see further erosion. Craigslist, satellite radio, and cable TV will make this so.

One of the alternatives will be local online advertising. But I don’t see many local advertisers ready for this. I still see most local companies that are likely to advertise having little more than brochureware websites. I see very little use of local Google Adsense coming from traditional businesses. And, again, the websites are neither optimized for online search nor are they set up with the correct landing pages for potential ads. Local businesses SHOULD be developing internet strategies, but the decision makers in them don’t go to our conferences, they don’t read our blogs, they’re not on Twitter. Nor are they probably on Facebook or MySpace. They’re far from it.

So while they’ll be temporarily holding back ad dollars during tough economic times, they’ll be likely losing some of their traditional advertising choices. And they won’t be ready or equipped to start marketing on new media – because they’ve chosen to not take the time to learn it. The end result? Chaos.

I call it white knuckle syndrome: holding on to the handholds you have, frozen on the face of the cliff, because you don’t know where the handholds of the future are. This chaos is pretty amazing to watch as the economy pitches and GM bails on Super Bowl.

Advertising knows it needs to jump off the locomotive before it pitches into the gorge (the bridge is out!) but reaching out to the proffered hand of the guy in the helicopter seems pretty risky too. But, as the current handholds become chalky and you start to feel them crumble under your weight, you’ll need to find somewhere else to go, and quick!

I tell anyone who will listen to me that the current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral. The moment you spend the money and your ad runs is the moment it is either gone to the grave — unless you’re smart and willing to keep it alive, in conversation, online on YouTube for the spots or on a blog somewhere for the print work — or you will feel compelled to keep on throwing money at it ad infinitum, because contextual ads, banner ads, etc, only last as long as you write checks.

What my specialty is is online conversation marketing, online public relations, and online earned media. When you earn peoples’ attention and when they choose to speak about you, your clients, and your services, then you have a gift that keeps on giving — this is content that lasts well past the campaign and into the future. This is both the sort of thing that Google loves — it is SEO catnip — and it is just the sort of content that flows, both upstream to A-list bloggers and to mainstream media and down to your readers, aggregators, and to other bloggers and other blogs. If you want to see some examples of powerfully successful blogger outreaches, check out International Medical Corps (IMC) 2008, Survivor Corps Operation Survivor 2008, and Fresh Air Fund Summer 2008, Jerry White’s I Will Not Be Broken book promotion. In many cases, these campaigns are close to a year old, yet they still still live in hundreds and hundreds of blogs and feed Google’s index until all of these blogs are taken down. It is really amazing how effective this sort of “advertising” promotion works. What’s better, when the campaign is over and the client “turns off” our tap, the content continues living and isn’t just shut off like it is with banners, buttons, and contextual advertising. Very interesting, very cool, and powerfully effective.

Remember how much fun Communication Arts is to page through? — CA is intoxicating! Well, every ad you make can be as interesting, as long as you’re willing to come out of your art department and share your process, share your experience, share your steps. Keeping those ephemera alive through narrative, sharing, conversation, and story, is what social media is, it is what customer service is, it is surely what branding should be.

Anyway, There is a lot of opportunity in this time of chaos, of this time of transition. The same sort of transition (and opportunity) happened when PCs came online, replacing the IBM Selectric II; when the Internet changed E-Commerce, threatening to eviscerate bricks and mortar stores, and it is happening now, more than ever, with advertising, marketing, and PR.

To me, Chris Brogan said it best the other day on Twitter, “customer service is the new PR.*” Looking at what @comcastcares has been able to do, customer service is the new PR, the new marketing, and the new advertising.

So, as those handholds start to get chalk and begin to crumble, it is important to at least set your eyes on a new handhold — or maybe a helping hand — before your original handhold turns to powder.

I know there is so much money — huge buckets of hot cash — in TV commercials (and you’re still all stoked from your experience — and profit — from the presidential campaign) but you need to diversify! You need to start spreading your weight over a number of holds: left and right foot, left and right hand — and hopefully a belay man and some crampons and a few anchors and camming devices… as much as you can do.

This is a time of chaos, and your mistakes will all be gentle and you will be admired for doing cool stuff, so it is a perfect time to make the leap. Right now, SEO, SEM, affiliate and marketing firms, PR firms, and social media consultants are doing ad buys, are learning advertising, are becoming severely profitable.

They drink your milkshake.

But it is not too late. It is a time of chaos, it is a time to take risks. Learn from what has happened to your cousins, PR and main stream media. Evolve or perish. Yes, these will be interesting times for Madison Avenue and around the world.

And for you who have yet to do the reading, please check out Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversation.

Oh, and no, I have not read Bob Garfield’s original presentations of how advertising will evolve over the next few years (Part 1 and Part 2); however, I plan to — and I plan to say more after I do. I merely intended to cross-post Trenn’s article from Marketing Conversation — I just didn’t realize I had such a strong opinion on the issue until I started writing my standard introduction and analysis paragraph.

* I can’t find the quote that Chris Brogan made, however, I can find my quoting of him on Twitter — maybe someone can help me find his original Tweet.

Here’s some fresh news from AdAdge that Barack Obama has been awarded the AdAge Marketer of the Year award, edging out Apple and Zappos. 36.1% of all votes went to Obama, compared toApple’s 27.3% and Zappo’s 14.1%. (Via Marketing Conversation)

Just weeks before he demonstrates whether his campaign’s blend of grass-roots appeal and big media-budget know-how has converted the American electorate, Sen. Barack Obama has shown he’s already won over the nation’s brand builders. He’s been named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008.

Mr. Obama won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered here at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference. He edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. The rest of the shortlist, selected by Ad Age’s editorial staff, was rounded out by megabrand Nike, turnaround story Coors and Mr. Obama’s rival, Sen. John McCain.

I don’t know but this all sounds like “grassroots” campaigning and politics to me; that said, the Barack Obama campaign has a certain level of religiosity and passion that might just have welled into campaigning, using AdAge as a platform.

I wonder.  I might be wrong.

It’s just a little fishy. Sounds a little bit of memetic engineering mixed in with a high passion base rolled into a high probability that modern ad men and ad women are urban liberals and might use the awards to make a vocal statement.

Again, I might be wrong.

Mind you, if this is a conspiracy of Barack Obama campaigning and pro-Obama activation, then the success in fact proves and reinforces the award as rightfully — and with passion — belonging to the Obama/Biden ticket.

What do you think?

I just caught this commercial on TV and laughed by ass off when a ram, our of nowhere, butted some gum-chewing guy on a cell phone in the belly.