Tim Peterson says, “Apparently it’s “Back to the Future” week for social networks’ ad networks.

A few days after Facebook announced it would begin to bring its Audience Network to the desktop web for the first time — albeit only for traditional in-stream video ads at the moment — Twitter is bringing its Twitter Audience Platform to the desktop and mobile web, albeit only for some advertisers, at the moment.

Both companies’ moves acknowledge that, for all the talk of “mobile-first” this and “native” that, the worldwide web may be a relic but remains a real, if supplementary, revenue stream.

Launched in April 2014 as a mobile in-app ad network and beefed up in August 2015 with some new ad formats and a new name, until now, TAP was mainly a way for brands to extend their on-Twitter campaigns outside of Twitter. But it had its limits. It was only available to some advertisers. Its ads only ran inside of mobile apps. And it didn’t have much parity with the ads brands were running on Twitter. Sure, advertisers could syndicate their Promoted Tweet and Promoted Video ads across TAP, but only if they were looking to get people to retweet their ads or watch their videos. If a brand wanted to run ads to get people to visit their sites or install their apps across TAP — like the ones they ran on Twitter — they had to handle those separately, assuming the brand was part of the test”.

Twitter, like Facebook, adds old-school elements to its mobile ad network

Marketing Land

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