CBS Tests Twitter Rules By Placing Film Critic's Tweet In An Ad
On Saturday, the print edition of the New York Times carried a full-page ad for the movie Inside Llewyn Davis with a single tweet by A.O. Scott, a film critic for the newspaper. — While he tweeted the words of praise …
Context & Ripple Effects
CBS has spent the past year pushing into new distribution channels — bringing its full-episode streaming app to Android and Windows 8 in October 2013 after acquiring TVGuide.com from Lionsgate — so a stunt built around social media fits its pattern. The ad itself is simple: a single praise tweet from Times critic A.O. Scott, run as a full-page New York Times print ad for Inside Llewyn Davis.
What makes it notable is that it probes Twitter's own rules on embedding tweets in commercial work, an area Twitter had been circling since at least 2010 when it warned rival ad players to tread carefully. Hollywood and Twitter have been courting each other for years — Twitter's movie-industry push and its in-stream video experiments date back to 2012 — but putting a working critic's tweet inside paid advertising raises questions both platforms and newsrooms hadn't yet had to answer. The pickup was unusually broad for a single print ad: Re/code, Slate, Mashable, The Wrap, Mediaite, Gothamist, The Wire and Jim Romenesko all covered it the same day.
First-order effects
- CBS buys outsized attention for Inside Llewyn Davis from a single tweet, converting earned critical praise into paid media at roughly the cost of one full-page ad.
- A.O. Scott and the New York Times are pulled into a marketing campaign without having authored it, forcing the paper to confront whether its critics' tweets can be quoted commercially.
Second-order effects
- Twitter faces pressure to clarify its terms on using embedded tweets in advertising, since its own product is now the raw material for another company's paid campaign.
- Other studios can replicate the format cheaply, which would bid up demand for quotable positive tweets from brand-name critics and make every critic's feed a potential ad inventory.
Third-order effects
- If studios keep mining social posts for print and broadcast ads, the line between editorial endorsement and paid promotion blurs further, likely prompting outlets to set explicit policies on how their bylined staff's public posts may be reused.
- For Twitter, third parties treating tweets as free-to-clip content foreshadows the platform having to decide whether it licenses that usage or polices it — a governance question it first raised back in 2010.
The trend: Film marketing is absorbing social media directly into paid placements, turning individual critics' tweets into advertising assets and forcing platforms like Twitter to define the rules for that reuse.