For agencies and brands looking to advertise on social media, audience size persisted as the primary metric for deciding where to buy ad space ©. Advertisers and brands saw no difference between what Twitter offered and what the platforms with larger reach could give them; neither had Twitter itself identified this in a clear enough way to articulate its value to potential customers.

What, exactly, made Twitter distinct, and how could this be used to appeal to creative and brand directors? Combo strategists positioned Twitter as the only social media platform moving at the speed of culture. Moreover, culture has never moved at the speed it’s moving at today, making Twitter uniquely positioned to meet the needs of a marketing community driven by campaigns and obsessed with cultural relevancy.

A successful marketing campaign needed to persuade agencies and brands that ad space on Twitter had the ability to connect them in a meaningful way to the audience they wanted to reach. But knowing that no audience is more skeptical of an advertising campaign than marketers, Combo strategists conceptualized the Twitter Awards as a way for Twitter to meaningfully engage with brands by highlighting the ones that made the best use of its platform, while also putting another award on the shelf.

To help buyers understand Twitter’s different capabilities, Combo strategists developed a set of categories, such as #Scale (won by Dove), #Creativity (won by Airbnb) and #Impact (won by Snickers). The ambition was to build literacy among advertisers about Twitter’s unique offerings and generate activity right on the platform itself. The participants' engagement helped generate a reference library of best use cases that inspired and incentivized potential advertisers to adapt to their own marketing efforts on Twitter.

Combo designers were asked to create a visual identity and an artifact that could live on as a point of pride for winners. Each trophy was uniquely engraved to reflect the impact of the winning tweet in its first 24 hours, a proud symbol of the potential connective power found exclusively on Twitter.