Twitter Just Ran Its First-Ever TV Commercial ... - Business Insider

Twitter is still trying to persuade Madison Avenue to buy ads on its website and apps. So what's it doing running a television ad?

Omid Ashtari, Twitter's head of sports, noted that his company ran its first-ever television during today's 2012 Pocono 400 Nascar race.

It features racer Brad Keselowski (who ended up placing 24th) snapping a photo with his iPhone. (Twitter features are built into Apple's smartphones, thanks to a deal between the companies.

?The ad also featured a very interesting URL:

TWITTER.COM/#NASCAR

Plenty of TV ads advertise hashtags?a pound sign followed by a keyword, which leads to a search-results page on Twitter for tweets which mention the same topic.

But hashtags in TV ads normally stand alone. They don't form part of a Web address.

Maybe we missed it, but we've never seen that kind of hashtag URL before.

And it redirects to this page, which we definitely haven't seen before:

twitter.com/hashtag/nascar

Here's Ashtari's tweet and the television ad which ran today.

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