Twitter - Oscars TV

In March 2018, at the height of #MeToo and #TimesUp, Twitter aired its first-ever television commercial. During the Oscars. In front of 26 million viewers.

The spot, created in-house, and originally largely filmed at the Cannes Lions Festival as a piece of B2B content, was a one-minute black-and-white film set to a spoken-word poem by Denice Frohman. It featured women - directors, writers, activists, Twitter employees - and carried a single message: #HereWeAre. The hashtag had originated weeks earlier at CES, where Twitter's CMO Leslie Berland called out the absence of female keynote speakers at the industry's biggest technology conference.

The ad was striking. It was also controversial. Critics, including coverage in The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and HuffPost, pointed out the tension between a platform championing women's voices while still struggling to protect women from harassment on that same platform. Jack Dorsey had publicly acknowledged the problem just days before the ad aired.

It was a fair criticism, and it sparked a conversation that went well beyond the ad itself. Twitter reported a 50% increase in discussions about women's rights on the platform in the six months that followed. Either way, it put Twitter at the centre of one of the defining cultural moments of the year.