Banner ads are annoying and I presume an extremely ineffective way of advertising.  For God’s sake, they all but ruined digg.  Ok, that’s a little overdramatic though those Ford rollover ads and the flashing ads for whatever that company was really sucked.

Regardless, outside of Facebook (lame ads though overly pertinent to my profile so maybe I’m just lame?) and Yelp (good enough ads), I can’t recall any other site that runs remotely effective ads.  Enter Twitter and tweet advertising.

GIORDANO’S – Example of a Local (based on IP address even?) Advertising Campaign:

NIKE – Example of a Broad/National Advertising Campaign:

So, ads run on Twitter (as tweets) every so often.  In a perfect world, the Twitter user could choose who they wanted to be bothered by.  E.g.  I would fill out a profile that selected only local Chicago ads offering drink, dinner, cover charge, etc. specials.

Talk about Utopia for both the advertiser and consumer – awesome!  Of course, such an option to select preferred types of advertisements could only be realized once Twitter obtains a decent number of local advertisers.  But, if a site like Citysearch can somehow sell to local businesses, so can Twitter!

I’m confident Tweet Ads are a better way to make money than charging corporate users for Twitter Pro accounts or selling placement/banner ads on ExecTweets.com – FAIL!

Update 1: I just noticed in my screenshots that Tweetie bought some ad space for their $2.99 iPhone Twitter client.  Did you miss it?  Look under the numbers displayed for following, followers, updates.  The ad isn’t annoying – per se – but, I think there’s more money to be made.

Update 2: I’m 20 days behind the times though nobody reads PC World.  Here’s something from March 5th referencing a variation of Tweet Ads:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/160747/twitter_tweet_ads_are_on_their_way.html

Update 3: Twitter hired Adam Bain to help make them money. They could have saved money by reading this posting.  Adds: I’m for hire and have the resume. 🙂  Anywho, this posting is 1.5 years old…come on, twitter – it’s not that hard. As mentioned, if Citysearch can somehow make money with online advertising, you can make BILLIONS within months.

Update 4 (9/21/2010): Below is a screenshot of an advertisement from a firefox plugin named yoono. I’ll be damned that a twitter add-on will make money more efficiently than twitter. As I’ve noted several times, I’m über shocked twitter is successful/popular though I’m admittedly addicted to it. When is somebody like google going to clone the service, make it more stable, offer better functionality, and thus make a ton of money via something like “tweet ads?”