Twitter’s first television ad campaign is here and it’s… interesting

Everybody has at least heard of Twitter by now, but most of them still have no idea what it does, which is the biggest problem that the company has faced as it struggles to pull in more users. That’s the problem that Jack Dorsey, the new CEO of Twitter, intends to solve, not only by simplifying everything about Twitter and making it easy for new people to understand, but by advertising. For the first time ever, Twitter has started putting advertisements on television, and while I’m probably not part of the target audience for these ads, they’re a little weird. 

This month Twitter unveiled Moments, the simplified way of browsing tweets that the company hopes will return it to rapid growth. It’s an increasingly pressing concern: today the company announced it added just 4 million new monthly users in its most recent quarter, news that sent the stock tumbling. Before releasing Moments, Twitter said its release would be accompanied by a large-scale marketing campaign designed to reach people who had never used Twitter before, or who had tried and abandoned it years ago. Today, that marketing campaign arrives, led by a series of television advertisements that will debut tonight during the World Series. “Post-Season,” which you can see above, is a 30-second spot aimed at sports enthusiasts. In a fast-moving series of clips, the ad showcases highlights of the Major League Baseball playoffs as they appeared in real tweets. There’s the viral bat flip of the Toronto Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista, a GIF representing the billy goat that cursed the Chicago Cubs, and a spectacular catch from the Blue Jays’ Kevin Pillar. The ad is animated, but the text from fans’ tweets is preserved in each moment. The ad is set to upbeat music and moves a little faster than you can really read anything — the young people who are the ad’s target audience prefer it that way, Twitter says, and the rest of us will still be noticing new things when we see it for the 14th time.