Twitter’s six-second-video app, Vine, has only been around since January, and some naysayers still insist it’s a pointless diversion. But with the news that a Vine-produced ad will be shown on a billboard during Monday Night Football tonight, it’s becoming more and more evident that the app is a useful tool for corporations.
Dunkin’ Donuts produced “what’s most certainly the first TV ad made entirely from a single Vine,” AdWeek reports. It’s one second long and shows a coin-flip. It’ll air on an animated billboard, so if this catches on, your local sports arena is going to start looking like a GIF-laden Geocities website circa 2003.
Nissan is also going to use Vine to make TV ads soon, AdWeek says, and Virgin Mobile last week began to air a 30-second ad made up of Vines that won a contest.
At the same time, more and more Vine celebs, as they’re known, are lending their Internet fame to brands like General Electric, Kenneth Cole and Trident Layers:
AdWeek quotes analyst Jonathan Doran as saying, “Integrating social media with TV is becoming more normal. But it’s still very nascent and experimental.” Regardless of your feelings on Vine, you have to admit that if we’re going to integrate social media with TV, a looping one-second donut ad is probably more palatable than those lame recitations of viewers’ tweets on the Catfish after-show.