As the FT reported yesterday, Twitter has been holding discreet discussions with agencies and marketers on the sidelines of the Cannes Lions festival this week, figuring out how best to up the advertising ante on its site.
It’s interesting to contrast its low-key approach – setting up shop in a beach bar and staying away from the central Palais des Festivals – with Facebook’s full-on charm offensive to Cannes delegates.
Both face similar challenges in that neither they nor the marketing men quite know how best to balance commercial messages with personal communication on social networks. Facebook has had the bulk of the airtime on stage in Cannes and in conversations along its Croisette seafront (even if Facebook pages have won few awards, while Google itself won five ‘lions’).
“The influence of Facebook and a handful of other companies cannot be underestimated,” said Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, in a Cannes speech. “For the first time, we now have truly global media companies such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Amazon. These companies have the capability to know their – and our – consumers intimately. The implications for the marketing industry are enormous.”
The consumer power ushered in by social media isn’t always a positive thing for marketers, Mr Polman noted: “If they can bring down the Egyptian regime in weeks they can bring us down in nanoseconds.”
But while the amount of advertising spending on Facebook dwarfs that of Twitter, David Jones, chief executive of Havas (one of the “big six” agency groups), believes that users will be ultimately more comfortable with promoted tweets than sponsored stories. He told the FT:
“I think Twitter will have an easier advertising revenue model than Facebook on many levels. I have that [belief] because I use Facebook all the time and when I use it, I’m not really going there for information, I’m going there for communication.
“When I go to Twitter, I’m going there because I want some information or to tweet. The whole thing about putting paid feeds in your natural stream – as long as they don’t go over the top and are relevant… that’s not a problem.
“The challenge that Facebook face in terms of advertising revenue is… we don’t want it to be anywhere near as intrusive as we will accept from a Google or a Twitter.”
No wonder Twitter execs seem to love him. “Great week of meetings at #Cannes2011. One of my favorites was with super-tweeting CEO @davidjoneshavas,” posted Katie Jacobs Stanton, the ex-Googler and former White House staffer who leads Twitter’s international strategy.
Facebook will still make “decent money” from advertising, Mr Jones reckons, but says its bigger opportunity is in retail and e-commerce. He’s also a big believer in location-based services like Foursquare and Facebook Places as a way for brands to connect the “cool sexiness of the digital world [with] the cold hard cash of the bricks-and-mortar physical world”, especially as mobile-phone payments become widespread.
These observations are driven as much by personal experience as marketing savvy. Mr Jones’ avid use of social media marks him out from the vast majority of his peers at the tops of the big advertising holding companies. Even WPP’s always-on chief, Sir Martin Sorrell, doesn’t tweet.
“If you are not completely engaged and using social media, it’s very hard to have your own view on where the future is, the talent you should be hiring, the businesses you should be buying the technology you should be investing in,” he said.
Those who don’t tweet and check in are, he says, “like when TV came along, saying ‘I want to make TV ads for my clients but I don’t have a TV at home’”.
