The ads are only going to appear for
individuals that follow Olympic or basketball related accounts. The choice was
made to focus on the accounts are following on Twitter rather than focusing on tweets
posted. This seems like a smart choice, considering that the amount of people that
read content outnumbers the amount of people that actively post content.
The tweets are focused on a large
audience, far beyond the traditional followers that Nike already has. The idea
behind using tweets pertaining to real-time action is to have people be swept
up in the moment and hopefully retweet these promoted tweets. The idea that if
'regular' users start retweeting the ad, it is no longer an ad, but just
another piece of the conversation.
One interesting fact is that Nike is not
an official sponsor of the Olympics, but still wants to benefit from the
attention, though indirectly. Only time will tell, but if this turns out to be
a success for Nike, chances are that we will see the ongoing social discourse
on Twitter targeted more heavily during large-scale events.