Twitter ‘sorry’ as mock ad backfires

tweetTwitter has been forced to apologise after it promoted a new advertising scheme – enabling brands to promote TV ads on the site – by seemingly hacking into real accounts and mocking up fake tweets to say how great the service is.
An image created for the campaign to promote the service featured three accounts praising an ad for US coffee chain Barista Bar, and was posted on the company’s blog page.
The social network giant now claims the gimmick was a “mistake”, rather than an attempt to hoodwink brand owners into believing the tweets were official.
A note on its webpage reads: “An earlier version of this blog post included an image with mock tweets from real users of our platform. This was not OK. Once we became aware of this mistake, we took it down immediately. We deeply apologise to the three users included in the earlier images.”
The blogpost, which was designed to promote advertising service, featured three posts from real Twitter users discussing the TV ads they had seen.
One read: “What is the song in the new @barristabar commercial? I love it!!” and another read: “The @barristabar ad is giving me the coffee shakes. Looks so good!”
But the tweets were all bogus and the Twitter users were unaware their profiles had been used.The company later tweeted the trio saying: “Hey @Neil_Gottlieb, @WilliamMazeo, @subhash_tewari – so sorry about the confusion earlier today. We’re fixing the problem now.”
@WilliamMazeo replied: “Don’t do this again,” while @Neil_Gottlieb added: “Still curious how it happened.”
Twitter claims that using tweets in combination with TV ads is much more effective than using TV alone. Tests with brands including Adidas, Holiday Inn Express, Jaguar and Samsung saw “significant improvements” to key brand metrics, including message association and purchase intent, the company said.

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