Twitter, Inc. has taken to legacy broadcast media for the first time with a new television commercial that allegedly is meant to highlight their new Moments feature.

Allegedly is the key word, because the ad channels the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson and drug fueled binges.

The new Twitter ad first debuted during the World Series Baseball on Fox Tuesday and features a variety of baseball-related images combined with messages; “baseball-related images” is used loosely as it’s not just pictures of action on the field or fans in the crowd, but also animated gifs including a baseball player who has had his head replaced with that of a goat, a dancing dog, a variation of the “deal with it” meme, and more.

Described by Re/Code as being “just like Twitter, full of content that’s a little hard to follow” not surprisingly the ad hasn’t been warmly received, even by regular Twitter users who should at least have a head start over the general public when it comes to understanding the message Twitter is trying to impart on a broader audience.

“Twitter’s ad during the World Series: incomprehensible. Someone should be fired,” tweeted John Gruber, Apple blogger, while TV critic Ryan McGee went with the all caps route tweeting “WHAT THE S— WAS THAT MOMENTS COMMERCIAL, TWITTER?.”

Drugs naturally get a mention, with BuzzFeed’s San Francisco bureau chief Mat Honan writing, “I don’t do drugs, but I bet smoking bath salts after you run out of PCP is a lot like that new Twitter Moments ad.”

WTF

The proverbial what the f**k (WTF) doesn’t come close to describing Twitter’s effort to take itself to a broader audience, neither does the word bizarre.

Twitter’s implementation of its Moments feature in and of itself makes sense in offering something more to a broader public that may not fully have understood traditional Twitter as many of us use it, but it still needs to be explained and this is not the way to do it; surely there could have been clearer, more understandable ways to relate to a broader audience that Twitter is no longer simply a messaging and sharing service, but also a way to follow events in real time as they happen.

Perhaps the more scary part of the campaign is that it’s likely to have been designed by an advertising agency as well, which makes Gruber (quoted above) correct: someone needs to be fired over this debacle.

If you can bear it, the new Twitter moments ad as follows (*warning: may replicate drug use).

Image credit: Twitter