Twitter's Future: Commerce, Dinner Reservations and More TV Tie-Ins

As one ad exec noted, last week's Cannes Lions festival was a great advertising vehicle for both Facebook and Twitter, both of which dominated discussion this year. While both companies made pitches during the event, the consensus seemed to be that what Twitter lacked in scale, it made up for in agility.

In particular, the social network's ability to let marketers capitalize on real-time trends and conversation evoked some envy for its 1.1 billion users-strong rival. Twitter isn't resting on its laurels, though. The company is looking to both solidify its lead in real-time marketing and expand the functionality of tweets. Broadly, those two goals appear to present a roadmap for Twitter's growth over the next year or so.

Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter's VP of global brand strategy (pictured), discussed those initiatives with Mashable. (Twitter rep Will Stickney also joined in at one point.) Below are excerpts from the conversation.

Q&A With Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter

Mashable: It seems like people are tweeting in real time during live events like sports and awards shows, but what about during dramatic shows?

Lunenfeld: When you look at drama, reality, sports, movies also — replays of movies on TV — there's a very predictable pattern. For reality and sports, it's literally an EKG of what's happening that second. For drama, it's [high activity during] commercials, dead, commercials. So, like Mad Men, you look at that data week over week and it's very predictable. It's [during] commercials that people are tweeting about it.

So they're tweeting during commercial breaks about the commercials? Or about the segment they just saw?

Lunenfeld: Generally it's about the segment.

Does that mean they're ignoring the commercials?

Lunenfeld: It really depends on the commercial. Out of all the data we see about discussion about TV, roughly 10% is about the ads. The rest is about the content.

So what would be your pitch to, say, Bounty paper towels?

Lunenfeld: What we'd say to them is the same thing that works on TV, which is uncertain outcomes — user contributed stories, polling, voting — our TV team is bringing all those best practices over for brands. So we see [brands] like Mercedes giving an option with the YouDrive campaign with #evade and #hide and people voting on that. Similar storytelling methods that work for content works for brands.

So the TV ad would have a hashtag, a call to action.

Lunenfeld: Yeah, or simple things. We did something with Gillette around the NBA Finals last year, and they wanted to figure out a way to make their commercials more powerful and get people interested. So looking at the data, we saw that people were tweeting pictures of themselves getting dressed up for the games with #gameface, so we worked with them on that idea. Their call to action was "tweet your gameface."

And you don't even have to tweet to them — just use the hashtag and aggregate it. So [Gillette] chose the winner and NBA Tonight brought them on TV. A lot of the work that we're doing with agencies is advising them, even during the Upfronts, on what to ask for, how to negotiate tweets into your buy in a way that's not [in keeping] with what a celebrity would do. The other thing is the rights to use the hashtags. During the Oscars, Chobani yogurt didn't have rights, they weren't part of the broadcast — but they actually made fun of the fact, like, "We had all these great tweets but our legal wouldn't let us run them." It's about being real and being honest.

Does time-shifting viewing and full-season Netflix dumps hurt the second-screen phenomenon?

Lunenfeld: We think of Twitter as a force multiplier. If you could graph the time and attention and aggregation of viewing audiences over the years, it's just been going down and down and down. Something like House of Cards will not trend with the same velocity on Twitter because there's volume, but it's all disparate, so you get no multiplier effect. [Compare that] to Mad Men where 2,000 to 5,000 people start tweeting about it and it becomes this loop back from TV to their followers and it's a force multiplier.

So you don't see Netflix changing its approach of dumping a full season at once?

Lunenfeld: What we're hearing is [they may ] try to release it [serially] ... to see if they can get a bigger lift [that way]. (Note: A Netflix rep told Mashable that there are no such plans in the works.) But it's such a small percentage. It's really interesting, but when we think about our business plan for this, we're solving for the next few years. Ten years from now it will be a different story, but the next 18 months it's still going to be about trying to bring live viewing back.

What else are you focusing on in terms of Twitter's growth?

Lunenfeld: When you think about the way we rolled out our targeting, we kind of did the more difficult one first, which was interest-level targeting, inferring it by who you follow, who follows you and your interests, etc. And then we just released keyword targeting. We just had a meeting with an agency about this. The difference between search and Twitter keyword targeting is explicit versus implicit. We're seeing a lot of innovation trying to build a category and keyword-specific campaigns for always on.

Isn't that kind of dangerous, though? You could be targeting a term like "Boston Marathon."

Lunenfeld: Sure. I think one of the key things is context. Because it's a timeline format and there's no relation from one tweet to the next, we're not going to run into the trouble of a girl getting bit by a shark placed next to Shark Tank. It's literally a stream. So people are seeing an ad, and at best it's a serendipitous moment — but at worst, you just ignore it. What we're seeing is time matters. The first hour is important, and there's rapid decay after that. Trying to introduce "when" into media planning not just "who" and "what" is our next big thing. Trying to figure out always on campaigns that are relevant but you don't need an army of people waiting there.

It just seems like you need someone human there.

Lunenfeld: Yeah.

Stickney: That's why we have the negative keyword match. You may not want to target anything related to "this." But if it is a shark bite or something less disastrous.

That's tough, because no one could have predicted what happened.

Lunenfeld: Just like anything else, we blacklist terms in real time when something like that happens. It's also the advertiser's responsibility to turn things off when things like that are happening. We donated a trend the day after to raise awareness for the marathon and turned off an advertiser's trend that was supposed to be running.

What else are you focusing on?

Lunenfeld: The other big thing you'll start to see more of is our Card technology, the building blocks for doing more inside a tweet. It started with 140 characters, and then pictures and videos, summaries of articles and so forth. App downloads is really huge [...] The building blocks of doing more within a tweet is going to continue to expand, and you can imagine things like commerce directly from a tweet at the product level or reservations, voting or polling.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Jarle Naustvik