This week marks the beginning of Internet Week New York, a "week-long festival celebrating Internet business and culture and will attract more than 45,000 Internet professionals, working across all sectors, attending 250+ events produced by IWNY and 150+ citywide event partners." On Monday, MediaPost hosted a full day of OMMA Social, with sessions of respected panelists discussing everything from real-time marketing to social intelligence to social retail experiences.
The day's keynote was delivered by Guy Yalif, Head of Global Product Marketing at Twitter. Titled "Creativity in 140 Characters", Yalif described the state of the Twittersphere and described now as a time that creatives, agencies, and brands could create content at scale that reached millions at almost impossibly low costs. As of today, Twitter sees 200 million plus monthly active users globally, and 120 million plus active mobile users monthly. Together they're tweeting a billion tweets every two and a half days, but it's the kinds of tweets that Yalif described to the audience that mattered, not the volume.
For example, in 2012 the publishers for the Smart Car Twitter account in Argentina created this award-winning ad using only ASCII characters in tweets:
And Yalif pointed to this picture, by itself seemingly boring and simple:
But when it came from director Ron Howard's Twitter account and identified the man as Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz looking through the storylines for the show's comeback, a simple picture that literally cost just a few seconds was retweeted thousands of times.
More stats that Yalif went over are found below, but the point he tried to usher home was this: 140 characters can be a challenge for everyone to overcome every day, but within those constraints there's more opportunity for creativity than Biz and Ev could have even dreamed.
From Twitter.com/TwitterAds: