Call it a #fail for Twitter‘s advertising efforts. Its “QuickBar” feature, which debuted last week in a mobile app, was heavily criticized by users who disliked seeing one of the company’s ad products – Promoted Trends – placed over their news feeds.
In the end, CEO Dick Costolo removed “QuickBar” – widely dubbed #dickbar in the Twittersphere – from the app. “After testing a feature and evaluating its merits, if we learn it doesn’t improve the user experience or serve our mission, we’ll remove that feature,” the company wrote in a blog post.
But the kerfuffle points to a central challenge for Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey, who is head of product development: where and when to interrupt the flow of tweets to introduce relevant ad messages without annoying users.
At this point, plenty of marketers big and small have tried out Twitter’s two ad products, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends, and both are selling well. But as ads on Twitter grow up and the experimental phase ends, marketers are starting to ask for the kind of basics they get from other marketing partners – namely, better targeting and analytics.
“If Twitter was to integrate targeting, it would be a game changer,” said Shiv Singh, PepsiCo‘s head of digital who uses Twitter frequently in his campaigns. “As soon as Twitter learns to do that, the business opportunity will explode.”
Plenty of big publishers and social networks, from CNN to MTV to Facebook, allow precise targeting of consumers, which doesn’t exist on Twitter. Singh’s wish list for targeting included location targeting. “If I buy a promoted tweet and [want to target] 20-something males who live in urban areas — I can’t do that today,” he said.
In addition, more research needs to be done on the impact and value of retweets, the amplification effect that gets marketers so excited about Twitter. Marketers have spent the past few years scrambling for “likes” on Facebook, but the retweet is potentially more powerful.
“They aren’t completely monetizing the value of their ad product because they don’t know how to count and predict the influence of the retweets, of the long tail,” Shiv said.
Part of the difficulty of targeting on Twitter is that Twitter doesn’t actually know much about its users. Profiles are typically short, a quick bio blurb and sometimes a location or name, but definitely not the kind of granular information people give Facebook.
Another aspect of geo-targeting that’s on the wishlist for some is the ability to send tweets to consumers in different time zones. Adidas, a brand that uses competitor Facebook often, had this very request for Dorsey.
“From a global perspective, geo-targeting tweets would be a huge plus for Adidas and something we would love to see,” said Gabriel Jaffe, head of global digital communications.
To read the full story in Advertising Age, click here.
