The more we work with agencies and brands to bring advertising to Twitter users, the more we see how important it is to be able to target an audience accurately. Consumers respond well to ads that fit their needs and interest, and they respond badly to offers they perceive as irrelevant. Their message: if you’re going to interrupt me with an advertisement, make it a good one.
But with great targeting prowess comes targeting responsibility, and many websites have signed on to the IAB’s “Power I” (previously called the “Privacy I”) program.
Recently spotted:
Have you found any good implementations of the Power I out there? We’d love to see more examples of how advertisers are sharing targeting control with their audience as this program grows.
Working With Twitter
A few folks have asked our opinion on recent Twitter API & TOS changes. While 140 Proof has no official comment on the matter, we are in active discussions with Twitter (about these and other matters), and have been for several weeks. Once that process concludes we will have an exciting announcement to make. Please stay tuned, and happy tweeting! :-)
Twitter has created a specific brand around its universal sign-in buttons, and rightly so. Brand identity is critically important.
But the Twitter buttons are provided only in pixel format, meaning they won’t scale without degrading, and we needed a slightly bigger version for our advertiser login page.
For maximum flexibility and utility, our co-founder @jm3 painstakingly recreated one of the Twitter buttons using 100% vectors and layer effects in Photoshop, to make a brand-accurate Twitter button that will scale up as big as you want it.
We like scaling ;-)
Choose your weapon:
The CSS/HTML version of the button has been tested in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome.
(As Gaia Online’s old home page used to say, “It’s almost like it’s too big NOT to click!”)
The 140 Proof developers attended Chirp, Twitter’s first developer conference, to make new friends in the developer community and strengthen our ties with Twitter. And it was one of the coolest things we’ve done as a company.
Our favorite moments:
Some of the amazing announcements that came out of Chirp have already spurred the Twitter app ecosystem to get to work on new projects.
Thanks, Twitter, for throwing a great event and bringing a ton of smart talent together.
Twitter In-Stream Advertising Is Live on Echofon for Mac
Today we are pleased to welcome Echofon for Mac to the Proof Network.
Echofon, a family of Twitter apps for Mac, iPhone, and Firefox, keep users’ unread tweets synced across platforms and provide a clean and simple interface for users.
Echofon released version 1.0 of their Twitter app for the Mac today for $20 or for free with ads by 140 Proof and OneRiot. The app has a simple, clean user interface which allows users to easily attach photos to your tweets with drag and drop. Users can also attach things — screen captures, a song, or a web page — to a tweet.
140 Proof’s personalized ad solution allows advertisers to reach Echofon’s loyal user base, with relevant, unobtrusive ads that resonate with users. Users can interact with ads, just as they do with normal tweets: they can be replied to, retweeted, or favorited.
“We’re excited that Twitter has adopted our strategy for monetizing the 25% of users who use twitter.com and we’re thrilled to be partnering with great application developers like Echofon to monetize the rest of the Twitter ecosystem.” said CEO Jon Elvekrog. “We are excited to be working with Echofon, the best Mac app for Twitter available today.”
Check out the Echofon announcement or visit echofon.com to try Echofon for Mac.
Read the press release.
140 Proof is delighted to be co-sponsoring the Chirp Pre-Party on April 13. All Twitter app developers and Twitter employees are invited to attend. So far over 300 people have RSVPed.
We’ll be in the Porter Novelli Offices at 350 3rd Street in San Francisco, 6-8 pm. Drop in for a chat about API call limitations, firehose vs filtered streams, and find out who’s whitelisted and who’s not.
We’ll be on hand to talk to you about how to monetize your Twitter apps.
Join us for a glass of 21st Amendment Watermelon Wheat beer and a slice of pizza, and kick off Chirp week right.
See you there!
As part of its iPhone OS 4 announcement, Apple announced its iPhone advertising platform, anticipated ever since Apple bought Quattro. Dubbed “iAd,” it would enable app developers to add complex, engagement-driven dynamic advertisements to their applications. These new ads would take over a user’s iPhone screen when clicked and could take such divergent forms as games and movie trailers.
The ad format is flashy, appealing, and it holds tremendous potential for advertisers and agencies focused on engagement (a flag VideoEgg has been carrying for some time now).
Engagement is a key component of the industry-wide move toward Better Advertising. An ad standard that encourages engagement is a win for advertisers and consumers alike.
However, the cost of producing an iAd, which requires new HTML5 technology and the best in user-driven design, will be prohibitive for most advertisers. The first buyers of the iAds will be bigger, mainstream brands with large advertising budgets. Those brands can afford to include an iAd campaign in their suite of ad solutions for digital campaigns.
Most advertisers — who will lack budget to cover the cost of producing complex media for JUST the iPhone component of their campaigns — will naturally be excluded from participating.
Advertisers who want to buy Better Advertising have more streamlined options for engaging consumers directly. For example, on 140 Proof, all that’s required is to produce an ad is an icon and 140 characters of text — and engagement comes for free in the form of retweets and replies.
Welcome to advertising, Apple.
By choosing to expose their API, Twitter has built a 75+ million user-strong business, and an entirely new mode of communication. This open API has launched an unprecedented developer phenomenon and created a unique ecosystem of developers and companies building innovative products on every imaginable platform.
While there has been an exceptional amount of press and discussion about how Twitter will monetize their platform, I suggest that this is a question that Twitter does not need to answer.
Twitter could very well release next week their master plan for monetization, but I could also envision a world where Twitter applies the same approach to generating revenue that they took with respect to building applications…let the ecosystem lead the way.
Once the ecosystem has developed multiple thriving business models, you can simply tax the rich. Twitter has already done something similar with their search advertising partners at Google, Bing and Yahoo. Effectively they have outsourced some form of search functionality and keyword monetization to the larger search companies in exchange for a tax on data usage and profits (a tax that some report to be in the $10 - $15 million dollar range per partner). These probably are not the first ecosystem partners that one thinks about when you think about Twitter, but they are the ones that are currently able to pay big dollars.
Our vision at 140 Proof is to build a monetization engine for the slightly smaller-than-Google-sized application developers in the ecosystem which will allow them to grow and thrive. We feel that our advertising monetization engine is uniquely suited to both the ethos of Twitter (unobtrusive ads that are highly relevant to customers) and to the capabilities of Twitter (full social interaction allowing conversations with advertisers and honest engagement).
Our hope is that Twitter continues to develop and promote their revolutionary infrastructure solution. They have created a transformational communication medium. Our mission is to apply our advertising and technological expertise to not only help develop closer interactions with all types of organizations and customers, but more importantly, to provide the ecosystem of developers (just like ourselves) a path to grow into sustainable businesses. A healthy ecosystem is not only good for the ecosystem, but it is also good for Twitter and will help all parties deliver on the vision of creating a more open and connected global community.
Jon Elvekrog
CEO, 140 Proof
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As Twitter developers, we’re excited about the very first Twitter developer conference, Chirp, which is coming up on April 14. We’re so excited, in fact, that we’re sending our entire dev team.
We’ll be attending to work on our API chops, hack away at making the 140 Proof app better, and talk to any developer who wants to monetize a Twitter app. If you want to chat during Chirp, just tweet to us at @140ProofAds.
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Rumor-mongers were worked up (as they tend to be) about the prospect of Twitter announcing an ad platform at the 2010 SxSW Interactive Conference. Evan Williams, in a keynote interview conducted by Umair Haque, instead announced that Twitter will be launching not an ad platform but an “at platform” — essentially a neat repackaging of Twitter’s Oauth and API features.
(We called it. In reality, no one at Twitter ever promised an announcement about advertising. The rumors were basically wishful thinking on the part of people who are dying to know how Twitter will ride into the sunset.)
The “at platform” that Williams announced is called @anywhere, and it brings Twitter functionality to the rest of the web. Log in to your favorite news websites with Twitter, and find and follow people from a website without going to Twitter. We at 140 Proof think anything that brings more of Twitter to the web is a great thing. (After all, if Twitter’s on it, 140 Proof can target it.)
For more about the SxSW announcement, Adweek summed up the talk:
Twitter was widely expected to take the wraps off its ad platform at the South by Southwest conference today. Instead, CEO Evan Williams threw the crowd for a loop by instead unveiling an information-sharing tool for publishers.
The @anywhere service lets publishers embed code on their sites that will turn hyperlinks of key terms on Web pages into repositories of Twitter information. SXSW’s notoriously fickle crowds lived up to their reputation, complaining via Twitter that the interview was boring with many leaving the session early.
Photo of Evan Williams (CC) Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com
