Twitter Goes to the Movies
Hollywood is digging deep into new ways of using social media; the selling of ‘Ted’ — The teddy bear's first tweet, from an account called @WhatTedSaid set up by the Universal Pictures marketing department, was “Hello, Twitter. Kindly go f— yourself.”
Context & Ripple Effects
The joke version of this story ran two years ago, when TechCrunch covered a fan-made Twitter movie trailer as a curiosity. What changed by mid-2012 is that the studios stopped treating Twitter as material to mock and started treating it as infrastructure: a week earlier, Adweek reported Twitter working with Hollywood producers and network executives on an in-stream video series, part of a confirmed push to position itself as a media player rather than a messaging utility.
The Wall Street Journal putting Universal's @WhatTedSaid campaign on its front section signals that this has crossed from trade-press novelty to mainstream business story — a studio marketing department running a profane fictional bear as a first-class Twitter voice, in the same month Twitter VP Michael Sippey published a blog letter sketching the platform's future direction.
First-order effects
- Universal Pictures gets a near-zero-cost promotional channel that reaches filmgoers directly, with the character's voice doing work a trailer buy cannot; Twitter gains proof that entertainment marketers will fund native presence on the service.
- The campaign lands while Twitter is courting Hollywood for original video, giving the company a concrete case study to sell other studios and networks on.
Second-order effects
- Rival studios face pressure to staff their own character accounts and social-first campaigns, shifting marketing budgets from traditional media buys toward platform-native content where Twitter competes with Facebook for the same dollars.
- As brands become regular publishers on the service, Twitter's product decisions — including the confirmed work on letting users retrieve and search old tweets — start to carry commercial weight for advertisers building archives of campaign content.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the boundary between entertainment content and advertising erodes: fictional characters market films inside the same feed users read for news and conversation, making platforms rather than studios the gatekeepers of audience attention.
- Twitter's dual track — hosting studio marketing while producing its own in-stream video — points toward social platforms consolidating into media companies whose revenue depends on Hollywood relationships, a structure regulators and partners have not yet had to price.
The trend: Social platforms are converting entertainment marketing from an afterthought into a core revenue relationship, with Twitter moving from mocked subject to media partner in roughly two years.