#Marketing in the Moment - Ali Jafari

Thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me here today. My name is Ali Jafari and I oversee the direct sales business for Europe across EMEA. It's a pleasure being here with you guys today. And what I'd like to talk to you about today is Twitter as a marketing tool and a PR tool. And what I'll talk about and what I'll give context on is how we think about Twitter, where we see Twitter's place in the world today, and ways in which marketers have been leveraging Twitter over the course of the past year to drive value. And as most of you, I'm sure, know, the hashtag for the conference is #ICTSpring. I've seen a lot of tweets already on Twitter with prior speakers. Feel free to use that hashtag to follow along or to send out tweets. So where I'd like to begin is to talk about the core of Twitter, which is the tweet, which is made up of 140 characters of text. And what we oftentimes hear is, is that a rich enough canvas, or is that enough space to be able to tell a rich story? But throughout history, some of the most memorable quotes have been told in 140 characters or less. Be the change that you wish to see in the world. 48 characters, Mahatma Gandhi. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. Albert Einstein, 117 characters. And if you can't feed 100 people, then feed just one. Mother Teresa, 58 characters. But the beauty of Twitter is anyone can spark a conversation. If you have a Twitter account, you can interact with anyone, and anyone can interact with you. And recently, David Cameron sent out a tweet about the situation in the Ukraine, and Sir Patrick Stewart and other people on Twitter piled on, and I'll let Sir Patrick Stewart describe what happened on Twitter.

I got this call from my wife saying, "I've just seen this tweet, you must look at this right away." David Cameron tweeted a photograph of himself holding a telephone to his ear and looking serious. The brilliant Rob Delaney tweeted a photograph of him with a tube of toothpaste in his hand instead of a telephone. I looked around and there was a tube of wet wipes. Well, it exploded. I think there is a hunger for this in-the-moment excitement. It connects them to events, connects them to people instantly.

Whether it's the news, TV, film, politics, or brands, they're all trying to do the same thing: react to the speed and pace and change of culture. So we have to lose that idea that we are more creative than consumers.

We have to respect that they're equals now.

I really love the idea of putting things out there and then mining how people are reacting to that thing.

When Harry killed Sally!

Publishing a story used to kind of be an endpoint. In many ways, publishing a story today is really the beginning. It's so much more than a transaction. It is a conversation. And all those conversations are coming together in a way that makes it so much bigger. There's something really provocative about the idea that you can connect to somebody in the moment when it's most relevant.

Relevant to them.

Fortune will favor the bold. Fortune will favor the brands, the people, the writers, the directors, the craftsmen and women who can obviously embrace this. But ultimately, the way we think about Twitter is that it brings you closer. It brings you closer to whatever your interests are, whether it's sports or politics or entertainment. It's where news breaks. This is a photograph of John F. Kennedy in his home on election night in 1960 awaiting the election results. It was taken by their family photographer Jacques Lowe. The photograph wasn't discovered until recently when Jacques Lowe passed away and his family went through his archive of photos and released all of the photographs that he had taken. So really iconic moment of a former president in his home, which wasn't captured until many years later. So what the world didn't see until now has been condensed to a matter of moments. So fast forward to the 2012 election when Barack Obama was elected into his second term and sent out this iconic photo of himself embracing his wife and what the world saw, what the world didn't discover until many years later is now discovered in the moment. Let's take a look at a more recent example. At the top you have the 2005 papal conclave, and you can see a sea of people basically standing around and consuming the information. And if you flash forward to 2013, you see a sea of people with smartphones and tablets capturing the moment. So in just a span of 8 years, we've gone from a world where people simply stand around to consume information to a world where people can capture the moment and share it via social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This is a photograph of the Pope signing up for their first Twitter account in 2009, one of the most institutional organizations in the world taking to social media to connect with people. This is the very first rendering of Twitter by one of our founders, Jack Dorsey. He saw Twitter as a simple communication tool that allowed anyone to share their status real-time. So what started out as a simple communication tool is now something that connects the world. The very first tweet sent out by Jack Dorsey, which read, "Just setting up my Twitter," to a recent exchange he had with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, where he asked Rouhani, President Rouhani, if the citizens of Iran were able to read his tweets, and Rouhani responded in the affirmative. A global conversation that we all have a front row seat to. But let's take a look at a more local example. There's a municipality in the province of Granada called Jun, and it's a city with a population of 5,000, and the entire city is run on Twitter. So city workers wear their Twitter handles on their uniforms, and Twitter handles are painted onto the police car, and the citizens of the city are encouraged to interact via Twitter. So here's an example of a citizen noticing exposed telephone wires around where children are playing, and he immediately takes a photo and sends a tweet to the mayor. The mayor adds in the city electrician, and the electrician arrives to fix the problem and sends a photo of the problem being fixed. A really efficient way of a community coming together and leveraging Twitter to solve their problems. So let's talk about Twitter by the numbers today. We have 255 million active users, monthly active users. A monthly active user is anyone who logs on to Twitter at least once a month via mobile or web. We see 1 billion tweets composed every 2 days. Just a massive amount of content on topics ranging from politics to sports to entertainment. And 80% of our Twitter users are mobile users. So the majority of our usage is on mobile. We were born as a mobile product. All of our product development starts with mobile. And mobile computing is a trend that's here to stay and Twitter is at the forefront of that. And Twitter is the live medium. It's where news breaks. So over 50% of our users say that Twitter gives them the latest news faster than any other source. And we've seen the evolution of what we call citizen journalists, everyday people who are able to capture newsworthy moments and post them on Twitter and beat traditional news organizations, who oftentimes go to Twitter to see what's happening around the world. And that, of course, extends to real-time events as well. So In the most recent broadcast of the Oscars, the Academy Awards in February, we saw 19.1 million tweets with the hashtag #Oscar, which had a reach of 3.4 billion and was viewed by 37 million people. And of course was capped by the famous selfie that Ellen took.

I thought we would try to break another record right now with the most retweets of a photo. So right now, I'm going to take a picture of us, and then we'll see if we can break the record for the most retweets. And then— yeah, you should get in here too, Julia. No, lean in. Channing, if you can get in also.

Channing.

Bradley, will you come down while you're in it? Jennifer, come in also. Brad, get in here. No, I'm doing it.

Angie.

No, Merrill, please. Can you take it, Merrill? Merrill, can you take it? I can't get everybody in here. Okay, you're all right, Merrill. All right. Okay.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Bradley Cooper to the rescue, and the tweet exploded and was captured by every major news organization worldwide. To this day, it's the most famous tweet of all time with 3.4 million retweets and 2.1 million favorites. Brands piled on. LEGO sent out a very similar tweet. The Simpsons piled on with their version of a selfie as well. The way that we frame Twitter, and this is where we think it's a very unique platform, is that it's live, it's public, and it's conversational. You can follow anyone on Twitter and anyone can follow you, and there's no filter, and you can have a conversation with anyone, and any piece of content that you publish on Twitter by definition is live. And nowhere has that been more evident than the current World Cup. This was a tweet that was sent out by the US Ambassador to the UK Matthew Barzun to the Belgian ambassador to the UK, Guy Traveroy, saying that if the US beat Belgium, he would have to come to the embassy in the UK and make him waffles. But if Belgium beat the US, he would travel to Belgium to make him pancakes. And this is how the match, of course, played out on Twitter the night before last. So the match began at 5 PM, and you can see the activity of tweets around the world, with the majority of the activity being contained to the US and Europe. It was nil-nil heading into the end of the game, and of course it went into extra time. Belgium scored the first goal. US followed with a— Belgium scored a second goal, and the US scored a goal. And you see the activity of tweets, the volume of tweets light up when those things happen. So Matthew Barzun has to go to Belgium to now make pancakes for the Belgium ambassador. And of course, a week ago, Luis Suárez unfortunately bit Giorgio Chiellini during a match between Uruguay and Italy. And we saw 3.3 million tweets the instant, the moment that happened. It was picked up by major news organizations. Brands piled on with very funny tweets encouraging people to sample their food or their snacks rather than taking bites out of humans. And news organizations, of course, picked up the story as well. And this is what we call earned media in social media, where if you do a good campaign that's topical, that's in the moment, it can get picked up by media organizations and drive the conversation off Twitter. And then it was capped by Luis Suárez himself sending out a tweet to Cellini apologizing for what he had done. He included a letter in the tweet explaining that his actions were unacceptable. A really human moment on Twitter. Somebody recognizing that they had done something wrong and taking to the platform to say that they were sorry. So we've talked a little bit about events, but it's also important to recognize that everyday conversations represent marketing moments on Twitter. So we have a ton of data on the platform, it's all public, and we're able to measure patterns. So this is conversation volume around the keyword "hungry" on Twitter. Conversation volume around "me tired." And conversation volume around running, which unfortunately tails off as you work your way through the week. And this is an example of a good tweet from Nike, which simply reads, "Miles, eat them for breakfast," with an iconic photo of somebody running in the early morning. They sent this out at 6:00 AM. As you can see on the timestamp, and it's really intended to appeal to people, to athletes who get up in the morning, go out for a run. I woke up this morning and was lucky enough to be able to go out for a run, and it's a really, really good way of Nike recognizing that people have conversations about this topic every day and reaching them with a message like this. But they go even further. They have conversations with people This is a tweet from an everyday user talking about completing a race and Nike responding in a personalized way, one-to-one, and congratulating them on finishing the race. So they not only take the time to use Twitter as a marketing platform, they listen and have conversations. So let's talk about Twitter and TV. One of the trends that we've seen evolve on Twitter over time time is that Twitter has become the second screen. Because it's live and it's public and it's conversational, it's a great way to take something that's traditionally been contained in the living room. We all like to sit in the living room, watch a television show and discuss what's happening, or watch a sporting event and what's happening. And Twitter's taken that and has extended it to the hundreds of thousands of people or the millions of people who are experiencing that same event at the exact same time as you are. So TV programs are also your marketing moments. Uh, 64% of our mobile users, uh, use Twitter while watching TV. And, uh, 40% of traffic around peak time, uh, is about TV. And 95% of all public conversation about TV occurs on Twitter. And advertisers and brands have of course taken note of this and have integrated hashtags into television commercials. And not surprisingly, we see much higher engagement with those hashtags when they're integrated into TV commercials. So what's distinct or known about a television event? This is a graphic around conversation volume for the film Titanic. Two different airings. The blue line is the first airing and the white line is the second airing, and you see an identical pattern in the conversation volume. So we're able to take this and translate it into our analytics and give anyone who's interested in targeting those audiences a visibility into the amount of volume around a television program, a sporting event, a movie, and the audiences they want to target. So let's talk about the next phase of Twitter and TV and what that means for marketers and specifically what products we've developed to help them with that. But I want to start by showing a photo of Stanley Milgram, a famous sociologist in the 1900s who had a theory that the attention of people is steered by the visible crowd, and the way that he measured this is he went out into the streets of New York City and he asked people to look up at the sky, and then he measured the probability that passerbys would look up at the sky based on the number of people looking up. So if you're walking down the street and nobody's looking up at the sky, the probability that you'll look up is zero. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] But if just 5 people are looking up at the sky, the probability increases to 80%. So this plays on the notion of the attention being steered by the visible crowd, and we see this play out every night with television programs on Twitter. Let me show you an example of that. This is an airing of The X Factor in the UK. And you have a sea of people that represent the human population. And you have one user who's watching the television show and sends out a tweet about the program. And we know it's about the program because it contains the hashtag and it's sent out during the airing of the show. And that tweet travels and reaches one of the followers of that user. And throughout the rest of the program, the tweet reaches more of that person's followers. Some of them might be tuned into X Factor, some of them might not be. And even after the airing, the tweet reaches even more people depending on when they log on to Twitter. So if you take that one example and translate it to the hundreds of thousands of people who are watching X Factor and sending out tweets about the program, you see this exponential effect. Of millions and millions of impressions reaching millions and millions of people. And we measured this in this particular airing of The X Factor, which again was in the UK. Here's what we saw. So this represents impression volumes, and we saw 18 million impressions, the majority of which occurred occurred during the 8 to 9 PM window, during the live viewing window. So we've gone from a place where television has motivated people to go to Twitter to a place where Twitter is actually motivating people to tune in. A very common behavior, and I do this myself, is you'll go on Twitter and you'll see people talking about a sporting event or a television program, and it'll actually motivate you to pick up your remote control and tune in. And networks love that because it actually means that people are watching television commercials again, rather than recording something and fast-forwarding through that. So Twitter and TV lets you reinforce, re-engage, and re-market. And this is the product that we've developed for marketers that's available worldwide that lets them do that. So across the bottom here, you have the sea of television programs that are available to you on any given night. And across the top, you have the total viewing population as described in the prior slide. So let's take a look at one show, the television show Glee. And the tweet volume that occurs during the program. And underneath that, you have the hundreds of advertisers who are running television spots. And the way television buying works is, as an advertiser, you don't actually know which programs you're running against. You're buying spot buys, and in some cases, you may run against a program that you want. But in most cases, it's actually on a spot basis. So let's take a look at one advertiser, the advertiser Volkswagen, who ran a television commercial against the program Glee on that night. Marketing the new Volkswagen Beetle. And all of the people who are tuned in to Glee are presumably watching this commercial, and we know which ones are on Twitter and watching Glee at the same time because they're tweeting about it. So what we can do is we can tell Volkswagen that you can reach people who just saw your television commercial and who are watching Glee and following along the conversation on their mobile phones with an additional message. So true cross-platform cross-marketing for the first time. And as marketing becomes more and more fragmented, as more and more of our mindshare is distributed across multiple devices, this becomes really, really important. And if you take that example and apply it to the the hundreds of advertisers who are buying across hundreds of television shows, you get millions and millions of remarketing impressions. So the key question is, does it work? You know, does this stuff ultimately help drive the metrics that brands care about? So we've measured this, and what we've seen is that there's a 95% lift in message association and a 58% lift in purchase intent, the metric that brands ultimately care about most. And to close out the presentation, I want to talk about the way that tweets have evolved over time. They've gone from 140 characters of text to a rich canvas where you can embed photos and videos and Vines, which is the 6-second video player that we purchased to actually embedding the entire website into your tweet. We call this our Cards platform. That's available to consumers and brands. Anyone can use this. And so you're able to embed richer images into tweets. You're able to embed animated GIFs into tweets. Vines, which are, of course, a very creative way to tell your story in 6 seconds. It's sort of a video version of the 140 characters of text. And then video. We think video is going to do for Twitter what photos did for Facebook. And you're now able to embed videos directly into our own player and allow users to view videos right off of the tweet. And we've seen a tremendous lift in click-through rates and engagement rates with tweets that include videos. The way it works is if there's a tweet with a video, it's pre-expanded and you click on it and it plays right on your phone. This is Nike's pre-World Cup commercial. It's actually 4.5 minutes in length and it drove a 15% engagement rate on Twitter, and the completion rate was 90%. So 9 out of 10 people took the time to watch a 4.5-minute video on Twitter because the content was so good and because it played right off of the tweet. [SPEAKING SPANISH] So native player, auto-expanded, one-click inline playback, and all of the analytics that go along with it. We think that condensing the funnel and allowing people to take actions right off of the tweet versus sending them off to mobile web landing pages, which haven't quite caught up to where mobile computing is, is a really important element of continuing to drive growth on Twitter. And then media hashtags. Hashtags are a very important way to integrate and organize conversations on Twitter. We also want to motivate people to post more videos, and so hashtags that are associated with videos like movie trailers or in Adidas' case, #AllOrNothing, which is, which is their hashtag for the World Cup. Every time you enter the hashtag into your tweet, you have the option of automatically embedding the video. It actually allows advertisers to leverage people to be on message when they're sending out brand messages. And then ultimately commerce. All of this is centered around closing the loop or closing the gap between e-commerce companies being able to drive sales right off of the tweets. And we recently announced something with Amazon that allows people to add things directly into their carts by simply adding the hashtag #AmazonCart. Here's how it works.

These folks have a new favorite hashtag, #AmazonCart. Once your account is enabled, you can add millions of Amazon products to your cart without leaving your Twitter feed. With #AmazonCart, whenever you see a tweet with an Amazon product link, just hit reply and add #AmazonCart. And it will be waiting in your cart the next time you visit Amazon. Add it now, buy it later. It's that simple. Enjoying your Twitter feed but don't want to forget to purchase something important? Now Amazon lets you add items to your cart directly from Twitter. Reply with #AmazonCart to save an item for later and finish shopping when you're ready. No more switching apps. Typing passwords, or trying to remember items you saw on Twitter. Save it to your cart now and check out later when it's more convenient for you.

#AmazonCart.

Add it now, buy it later.

We see this as the future of e-commerce, and you can see a world where you're able to actually make purchases right off of the tweet rather than than just simply adding things into your cart. And then ultimately, Twitter's all about having conversations. What we've talked about, the examples that we've given, are ultimately intended at driving engagements. So whether it's a personal tweet that I sent out a couple years ago to the airline JetBlue, thanking them for their in-flight entertainment, and JetBlue taking the time to respond to me, or one of our favorite interactions which is an everyday user sending out a tweet talking about how much she likes chocolate and highlighting Oreo and Kit Kat, two of the most socially engaged brands on the platform. And Kit Kat taking the time to respond and saying that the fight for this user's affection begins with a tic-tac-toe match with Oreo. Oreo was also listening and responded and didn't take the challenge. They actually took a bite out of the Kit Kat. A really, really great way to not only demonstrate to users that you're listening, but to give a really human voice to your brand. And I'll close by showing one last video that demonstrates Twitter as a bridge and something that can help brands connect their messages on Twitter with everything that they do they do offline. Adidas ran a campaign about a year ago where they invited people into a photo booth to take photos and email out their photos using their hashtag, and when they arrived, they had a surprise waiting for them.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Inspector, this is so exciting!

Wow! That was wonderful!

I know you can hear me, I want to go on. God, yeah!

Thank you, Inspector.

Thank you, Bruce.