Here's how I think a Twitter Ad should be
Here's the thing. Twitter is going to reveal their advertising system to the world soon. The rumor out there is in March. Techcrunch has a written a whole bunch about this new ad system that Twitter will be launching. I think the Techcrunch post talks about the "conventional" way that a Twitter Ad will be like but Dick Costolo did promised everyone that Twitter Ads “will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it.”
Here's what I think the Twitter Ad system should be and if this is not, then Twitter should seriously take my advice. Twitter has pretty much embraced app developers from the beginning with their API approach. And I think that Twitter has the most "open", not as in standards, but a widely available and functional web API of any web/social sites. There are hundreds of Twitter applications/sites spawning every month and Twitter should absolutely leverage their great relationship with their developers and here's how I think they should do it.
If you think about a Twitter Ad, what sort of components can there be? It's really pretty straight forward since Twitter is just a really simple text messaging application and I think that's the beauty of Twitter. TEXT. No images, nothing. So an Ad unit on Twitter can really only be TEXT. So to cut the chase, here's my story.
Twitter will never show ads on their site, again the risk there is jeopadizing the user experience, blah blah blah. Twitter should pretty much distribute ads to their developers and this way developers are happy because they have a new way of monetizing their apps ( other than working with the shitty Google Adsense ). Think about it, all these Twitter client developers are currently monetizing ads in various way, AdMob (Google), Adsense (Google) and startup 101, Always be thinking of how you can grab that piece of pie from your competitor's mouth. So if the soon to launch Twitter Ad system does not have an API that developers can use to pull Ads into their applications, it's time to think about it, Dick.
So far I've just covered the Ad distribution part, but what about Ad format? How are Twitter ads going to look like? I've already dropped some hints on the simplicity of Twitter earlier, and so a Twitter Ad will comprise of the following - geolocations (to be query against), meta keywords (use to anchor urls), text and url's. Yes that's it. Developers will have the choice of implementing how they want a particular Ad to show. And I think that's the fasinating part of it. Giving that freedom of implementation to developers will put a layer of disguise over the Ad and it will probably help with gaining user acceptance.
What do you think? Am I on the right track? Fire your comments away!
