There’s a lot of money in sponsored tweets, but they sometimes go wrong. One way they often go wrong is when the sponsor comes up with some text for the athlete or celebrity in question to tweet, with some surrounding instructions, and then the person in question tweets those instructions as well. And Fox Sports announcer Joe Buck is the latest to make that mistake.
This is something we previously saw in 2012 with Desean Jackson tweeting “Desean, can you please tweet this for the ESPYs party tonight: ‘Chillin’ at the @ESPYS #NokiaPreParty. It’s awesome.'” Another example came in 2018 with DeAndre Ayton tweeting “All he needs to tag is #BlackOps4 and #CallofDutyPartner and the rest can be in his words.” The latest to fall down that hole is Buck, who got the initial sponsored tweet right, but then followed it up by putting the instructions in the follow-up (and not actually attaching that to the initial tweet). Here’s how that looked:
Buck then deleted that comment, but not before it drew more than 1,100 likes in 25 minutes.
Then, instead of commenting under his first promo tweet as the good people at Halls intended, he quote-tweeted it with the follow-up conditions. But at least he removed the “Comment (comment this under the original post)” this time around.
https://twitter.com/Buck/status/1445147888942604288
It’s of course possible that this was an intentional screwup to get the ad more attention. And if so, well played, Buck and Halls. It certainly managed to do that; the initial tweet got just 168 likes in 27 minutes, while the follow-up “Comment” got nearly 10 times that amount in less time. And this isn’t the most embarrassing social media thing that’s happened at Fox; at least Buck wasn’t telling himself how great he was.
In any case, we all know now that Buck (or at least whoever’s running his Twitter account today) will tweet anything you put in sponsored ad request copy. Even if it’s not in the copy proper. Ron Burgundy empathizes.
[@Buck on Twitter]
