Back in May, Twitter announced its new TV ad targeting capabilities for advertisers. On Tuesday, the offering officially left beta as Twitter announced general availability in the U.S., along with some new analytics to go with it.
This is an image of the dashboard that Twitter shared in its announcement:
Twitter used three tweets from users in the image to show the effectiveness of its offering. As you can see, those tweets were:
@subhash_tewari: The @baristabar ad is giving e the coffee shakes. Looks so good!
@WilliamMazeo: I wish I could make fancy lattes like in the @baristabar commercial
@Neil_Gottlieb: What is the song in the new @baristabar commercial? I love it!
Okay, just regular Twitter users talking about a commercial right? Wrong.
They are regular Twitter users, but as Jeff Elder at SF Gate discovered with a little digging, they tweeted no such things, and Twitter had to apologize to them and change the image once the users found out Twitter was putting words in their mouths to promote their new product.
Hey @Neil_Gottlieb, @WilliamMazeo, @subhash_tewari – so sorry about the confusion earlier today. We're fixing the problem now.
— Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) July 23, 2013
@JeffElder The heck? I don't even use the word "fancy" D:
— William Mazeo (@WilliamMazeo) July 23, 2013
@TwitterAds -_-" don't do this again.
— William Mazeo (@WilliamMazeo) July 23, 2013
Like to know how @twitter decided to use my image and fake posting to promote their TV Commercial-Tweet integration. @cnn @NBCPhiladelphia
— Neil Gottlieb (@Neil_Gottlieb) July 23, 2013
@TwitterAds @WilliamMazeo @subhash_tewari Appreciate the attention to this. Still curious how it happened
— Neil Gottlieb (@Neil_Gottlieb) July 23, 2013
@JeffElder From Twitter: Hey @Neil_Gottlieb– so sorry about the confusion earlier today. We're fixing the problem now." Confusion? Hmmm
— Neil Gottlieb (@Neil_Gottlieb) July 24, 2013
@subhash_tewari doesn’t appear to have been on Twitter for a couple days, so nothing so far from that account.
Twitter has replaced the image with this:
All the people in the new version work at Twitter. Hmm. Not quite as convincing.
