As with Google ads, Twitter ad rates will be determined by advertisers bidding on search terms. Twitter to launch political advertising

Trying to capitalize its status as a hub of the national political conversation, the social networking giant Twitter is beginning for the first time this week to sell political advertising, executives told POLITICO.

Twitter began moving cautiously into the ad business last year, and has been ramping up its commercial advertising business in a scramble to make revenues match its prominence and popularity. Now, the company has poached a top political marketing executive from Google and is hoping to win as share of the lucrative 2012 campaigns, including a presidential campaign expected to cost well over $1 billion.


“We’ve had five years to watch and observe how people are using the platform organically and we know politicians are active on the platform, and we know that consumers enjoy the messages from those politicians,” Twitter’s president of global revenue, Adam Bain, said in an interview. “We’re excited about the election cycle, and we think that ads both in the timeline and in search are a huge opportunity.”

He said Twitter’s political advertising will begin with a splash, with early clients including five presidential campaigns. Though Bain declined to name the first campaigns to sign on, a source said Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are among the early advertisers.

As with Google ads, rates are determined by advertisers bidding on search terms.

Twitter is not, however, offering campaign ads inserted directly in users “timelines” – the streams of short updates from the group of people each user chooses to follow, though the company has begun cautiously to experiment with that model for commercial advertising.

They’re instead offering three less obtrusive products: Promoted tweets, which look like non-commercial tweets except for a small logo and disclaimer, and which appear when a certain term is searched for and will appear in a campaign’s follower’s timelines no matter when the log in; promoted trends, which allow an advertiser to appear atop popular lists of “trending topics”; and promoted accounts, in which the campaign’s account is suggested to Twitter users who appear to have similar interests.

The search function, Bain said, may be particularly useful to campaigns.

“People are literally searching for topics and ideas as much as they are for names of campaigns,” he said.

Twitter’s cultural centrality hasn’t been matched, so far, by revenues, and the privately-held company has been wary of appearing to cash in on its massive popularity and cultural cachet.

“We should think of revenue like breathing — it’s necessary for life, but it’s not the purpose of life,” CEO Dick Costolo said recently.

And Bain said that political advertising fits into the company’s strategy, which has had it focused on specific industries, like entertainment tech, and automobiles.

“Political campaigns and advertising campaigns share a lot in common,” Bain said.

“The motivation… to connect and talk and create a dialogue between consumers and whatever the products that the marketers are driving for are not dissimilar to how campaigns think of the dialogue between the citizen themselves and campaigns.”

Twitter has sought to distinguish political and commercial advertising however. Sponsored political tweets will carry a small purple check-mark.

Political campaigns often skirt advertising disclosure requirements on online products, which fall into a legal category that also covers pens, skywriting, and water-towers, and Twitter’s government liaison Adam Sharp said the company doesn’t believe “paid for by” disclosures are required on sponsored tweets. However, it has created a feature to allow campaigns to make those disclosures appear when a user hovers over the tweet.

The ad campaign comes as Twitter beefs up its presence in Washington, D.C., following a traditional path for tech companies that become big enough that government matters to them, and they matter to the government. The company this year hired Sharp and another D.C. based executive, and Bain told POLITICO that Twitter had also brought aboard Peter Greenberger, a former Democratic political staffer who had built and run Google’s political advertising unit since 2007.

And the move comes as the company’s penetration of government and politics becomes almost total. The share of members of Congress who are on Twitter, for instance, has doubled since the beginning of this year, to 80 percent — apparently unabated by Anthony Weiner’s Twitter-fueled flameout.