Last night at the GRAMMYs, more than just the best talent in music was on display; so was Twitter’s ad business and the brands that utilize Twitter’s products best.
There is a good reason why Twitter’s stock popped after announcing Q4 2014 earnings last week: they reported revenue of $479 million, a 97% increase year-over-year. Despite consistent revenue growth, investors have until now been chiefly concerned with the social network’s slow monthly active user (MAU) growth. Twitter added a mere four million users last quarter, but for the first time, investors respected that Twitter had done a great job monetizing its existing 288 million users.
Twitter’s choice in the past year to build products focusing on monetization has finally paid off, and now that it has that in place, it has released a slew of products in just the last few weeks that focus on growing its user base.
Last night, MasterCard and Patron took full advantage of Twitter’s suite of ad products, turning around promoted tweets quickly in real-time in reaction to what was taking place during the show. MasterCard and Patron most likely focused their spend on targeting the hashtag #GRAMMYS, and if you were following the conversation via the hashtag last night, you probably saw some of their ads.
At this point, there is no better platform for real-time marketing in conjunction with a live linear TV event than Twitter. Sure, I may have been narrowly targeted to based on factors like my location, Twitter preferences, etc. Still, I am surprised that I didn’t see more brands taking advantage of the marketing benefits Twitter affords (to be fair, I also saw ads for Sonos, Spotify, and the Tennessee Tourism Board). Below, a sampling of MasterCard’s and Patron’s promoted tweets.
