11 Apr 12 Twitter creative ad campaigns

Except for the last one, these aren’t campaigns that I have run myself but the below examples have come across my desk in the last few weeks and I wanted to share what I think are very cool creative concepts. These are international, across three verticals and have a mix of paid and un-paid media involved.

Here are three four (see update below) great creative executions on Twitter…creative directors and media folks alike, take note!

• smart car (Mercedes-Benz) Argentina made great use of three Twitter components to create a “video” composed of 140-character tweets. First, they took advantage of their Twitter Enhanced Profile Page. Second, they leveraged the fact that Twitter allows for helpful keyboard shortcuts to navigate the site. Third, they used infinite scrolling for Tweets to their advantage. The result is an experience reminiscent of a flip book. The animation moves down the screen of smart car’s Twitter profile page instead of through the pages of a flip book but the users can speed up or slow down the “video” by holding down or tapping less quickly on the j and k buttons to scroll through the tweets.

• Volkswagen Brasil in 2011 sponsored the Planeta Terra Festival (a big music festival in São Paulo). They had free tickets to give away and wanted to reward the biggest fans while also spreading the news about their newest car in the market, the Fox. They did this by turning the ticket experience into a scavenger hunt IRL. They dropped tickets in hidden locations throughout the city and then created a site with Google Maps’ locations of the tickets. With every tweet of the hashtag #foxatplanetaterra, the zoom on the map magnified and closed in on the location of the tickets. This was a great way to generate earned media and buzz while also creating a very compelling visual experience in a Mission Impossible or James Bond-esque map homing in on the locations.

•  O2 in the UK ran a cool campaign around the hashtag #myprioritymoment. O2 bought the Promoted Trend media placement which gave them the top spot on the list of Trending Topics in the UK for a full 24-hour period. The #myprioritymoment link took users to a Twitter search page where they were presented with a tweet offering up a hypothetical situation and a choice of two actions. When a user clicked on one of the actions (expressed in a clickable hashtag), they would see additional Tweets from O2 leading to more questions in a choose-your-own-adventure story.

• Kraft Mac N Cheese ran a fun Valentine’s Day campaign this year featuring Ted Williams, the man with the golden voice. Users would tweet their Valentine’s Day message for their sweetheart and append the hashtag #VoiceofLove and then Ted and Kraft would record a short :30s Valentine’s Day video with the user’s tweeted message. In all, they created nearly 300 of these videos — you can see all of them assembled on their YouTube here.

Update: Added in Kraft Mac N Cheese at the end so there are now four great examples shared here!

Tags: #myprioritymoment, animation, argentina, brand page, brasil, brazil, enhanced profile page, epp, flip book, google maps, hashtag, infinite scrolling, mb, mercedez-benz, o2 in the uk, planeta terra, promoted trend, smart car, smartcar, trending topic, twitter profile page, volkswagen