Twitter recycles 7-year-old tagline in new ad campaign

On a day that one high-profile tech company that had notoriously struggled for years to define itself gave up its independence — and soon its brand — another is trying to reassert itself.

Twitter debuted a new ad campaign on Monday that attempts to define the former social network and now news company. “Twitter is where you go to see what’s happening everywhere in the world right now,” Twitter CMO Leslie Berland wrote in a company blog post — titled “See What’s Happening” — announcing the campaign.

See what’s happening: https://t.co/ChbWRrSJyKhttps://t.co/r9AZd9rzI3

— Twitter (@twitter) July 25, 2016

The campaign may be new, but the tagline isn’t. Twitter adopted “What’s happening?” as the question prompting people to tweet in 2009, later dropped it, and then re-adopted it in 2014, as its tagline and as the company’s raison d’être. In a company blog post at the time — titled “What’s Happening?” — Twitter co-founder Biz Stone hoped that the two-word phrase would “make it easier to explain [Twitter] to your dad.”

Not so. A year ago, during its second-quarter 2015 earnings call — six years after Stone’s declaration — then-interim and now-permanent Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company needed to come up with an answer to the question, “Why Twitter?” Apparently, Twitter already had the answer.

Now that Twitter has the answer again — and maybe a better grasp of how to relay it thanks to Leslie Berland’s hire as CMO earlier this year — it’s going to make a big point of telling everyone what it is, including your dad. The company will run digital and video ads highlighting the things that happen on Twitter. A Twitter spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about where those ads will run and what forms they’ll take besides video. I’m also waiting to hear back on what exactly the “new look and feel in our marketing,” as mentioned in Berland’s blog post, will be. In the meantime, you can check out another of Twitter’s new video spots below.

See what’s happening — politics on Twitter.https://t.co/xaJo3PmYn5

— Twitter (@twitter) July 25, 2016

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.