ESPN admits Mortensen and Schefter pizza NYE tweets were indeed ads

If you follow ESPN NFL insiders Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter on Twitter, you might have been them both tweet about staying home on New Year’s Eve and having pizza for the College Football Playoff semifinals. We’re not talking just any pizza, Domino’s pizza.

The tweets came from Mortensen and Schefter less than a day apart:

There’s nothing better on NYE than some football and @Dominos #HomeOnNYE

— Chris Mortensen (@mortreport) December 31, 2015

https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/682685524344205312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

ESPN has admitted that the tweets were part of an advertising campaign. When a tweet is part of an advertising campaign, it’s usually tagged as an ad and users have the option to block it on the Twitter website or the official app. But in both cases, you can see neither was labeled as such with a hashtag “#ad” or “#spon” as required by federal law.

ESPN says the next time they do such a thing, they’ll use the hashtags, but it was rather strange to see the ads appear in the insiders’ timeline.

But it appears based on the ratings, not too many people paid heed to the ads and chose to go out rather than stay in and order pizza. Perhaps ESPN will take another approach for next season’s College Football Playoff and appeal to Americans to watch with friends at a bar or at a New Year’s Eve party rather than staying home and ordering pizza.

[Deadspin]