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
Along the lines of helping people control their ad experience, one Canadian startup called DoGood gives consumers the options of replacing ordinary web ads in their browser with green initiatives and social change movements.
To hack your ad experience, you install DoGood’s browser plugin and use the web normally. As you encounter sites that show you banner or flash advertising, DoGood will cover up those ads with its own messages and “good” ads sponsored by brands.
Amazing, appealing, monetized, and 100% opt-in. Sort of a grassroots, socially-conscious version of The Deck.
From the DoGood website:
The DoGooder browser plug-in hides the generic advertising you see on the Internet, and shows you thoughtful green related initiatives, philanthropic calls for action, and health and wellness ideas instead. We then donate 50% of our profits back to charity, green initiatives, and non-profit organizations.
Today we are pleased to welcome HootSuite to the 140 Proof Network.
HootSuite, the professional Twitter client, lets users manage their entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface. HootSuite is a top ten Twitter client, and 140 Proof will be serving ads on HootSuite’s newly launched Android client and the free version of their iPhone client.
Read the whole story on TechCrunch:
HootSuite Rolls Out Android App; Partners With 140 Proof To Serve Ads On Mobile Clients
More detailed information about HootSuite’s new iPhone and Android clients can be found on the HootSuite blog.
Pepsi’s decision to skip the Super Bowl was probably a good idea. Advertising Age, which tracks ad campaign popularity from week to week, reports that viral campaigns from before the Super Bowl are already regaining traction.
Pepsi’s money is probably better spent building a dedicated user base with their Refresh Everything social campaign. And opting out of the $12m Super Bowl buy fits nicely with their “do good on a small scale” message.
From AdAge’s “Most Super Bowl Ads Don’t Go Viral”:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — This week’s chart is a testament to the power of TV. Now that the Super Bowl is a fading memory, so are many of the Super Bowl ads, meaning TV was the key driver of their popularity, rather than a groundswell of demand on the web.
This week, only four ads from last week’s Bowl-dominated chart remain: Doritos, Snickers, E-Trade and Google, while a fifth Super Bowl ad, from Bud Light, joins the list for the first time. Doritos came in at No. 1 with an impressive 5 million views, even though that’s a 73% drop from last week. Gone are many of the ads that generated heat around the game, such as Audi’s “Green Police,” Tim Tebow’s Focus on the Family ad and Motorola’s Megan Fox ad.
But while ads from the big game fade, some of the more durable viral campaigns are returning to the list, a testament to their lasting power. It’s the difference between a surge in audience powered by marketing and exposure from a big event, and a sustained viral campaign, powered by social media and marketing.
Gigaom says Twitter might reveal ad strategy details at SXSW, but it’s much more likely Twitter would make such an announcement at their own conference, Chirp, happening in April.
For one thing, Twitter is still hiring its monetization team. It’s unlikely they’d be ready to launch in three weeks.
Gigaom:
Twitter will roll out an official advertising platform, likely within the next month or so, one of the company’s executives told an advertising-industry conference, according to a report in Media Post. Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter, apparently made the comment in response to a question from a panel moderator at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting on Monday.
What do you think? Which is the more likely announcement date?
@seth has some great thoughts on the impact on the ad industry that Twitter’s ad platform has (even while it doesn’t exist): “On Twitter Advertising and Briefcase Theory”
While you wait to find out what Twitter has in store, create your own Twitter ad now with our self-service form at http://140proof.com. Clicks are $1, and Retweets/replies/follows are free!
Twitter’s newly-minted engineering blog features a list of job postings, including three new listings for “Monetization” engineers. Cue speculative gossip among those of us interested in how Twitter will monetize its huge platform and make good on promises of the “fascinating,” “non-traditional” advertising program Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo announced in November 2009.
A selection of skills the Monetization team must possess:
The job listings don’t reveal how exactly Twitter’s own advertising system might work or how large the team might be. All they do reveal is that Twitter is ready to get cracking on the next phase.
(That said, if you’re interested working on an advertising platform for Twitter, you should join us. We’ve built it already.)
Apple has announced that it will reject applications using location primarily for ad targeting. Yesterday, Apple posted an update to its “News and Announcements” Dev Center about Apple CoreLocation technology:
If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.
Both Craig Hockenberry (inventor of Twitterific) and Gizmodo opine that this is a preliminary move to make space for Apple’s own answer to mobile advertising, which is plausible given Apple’s recent acquisition of Quattro for $275 million.
Location is extremely valuable data with regard to ad targeting, but it’s not the only valuable data. If you’re walking down a street with two restaurants and a shoe store, you could reasonably be served an ad for dinner specials and shoe repair. But if you’ve just eaten and you’re wearing new shoes, those ads aren’t relevant.
The only ad that could beat ads solely targeted on location is one that’s also relevant to your interests. Based on the results we’ve seen at 140 Proof, combining persona targeting with location targeting is a much more successful approach. The fact that Twitter ads are social too is a huge win for brands. (This isn’t to say that Apple wouldn’t target ads based on personas, since Apple is in the best position to do so. It’s conceivable that they have access to rich mines of behavior and purchase data on all their iPhone and App Store customers.) So knowing only where you are isn’t quite as useful as also knowing who you are.
Major platforms are fighting hard to claim and keep the lead in the mobile ad space. For more details on that, try the Business Week article “Apple vs. Google.”
Last week, a coalition of advertising industry organizations announced the privacy “i”: a symbol that will ride on ads that have been targeted to the viewer. The symbol is expected to appear wherever ads are targeted. Clicking on the “i” symbol will lead you to information about why you were targeted for the ad.
Google and Yahoo already share this kind of targeting information, except that they show you your overall ad profile, not how they matched you to a specific ad.
Your Google ad preferences
Your Yahoo! ad preferences
If that was your first time seeing your ad profile, chances are the experience was surprisingly ordinary. Has Google decided you’re interested in air travel and jobs? It’s hard to get angry about that. Taking the mystery out of such things is good for all parties.
However, there’s something important about configurable ad preferences. Allowing users to indicate what kinds of ads they’d prefer to see (even if ultimately they’d prefer to see no ads at all) is a first step in bringing brands and consumers closer together.
Imagine that ads are conversations between brands and consumers, not just one-way messages. Consumers’ ad profiles make them visible to brands that match their interests. In that context, the brand’s ad feels less like an unwanted interruption and more like an invitation to connect. Increasingly, platforms are building functionality for consumers to respond to brands directly instead of being mediated by a website (such as Google’s click-to-call functionality).
Platforms that were built around communication are well-positioned for this change in the industry. Facebook has made strides around integrating social actions into advertising. The biggest opportunity, though, lies in Twitter, which was built for conversations.
Twitter is ideally suited for a brand that wants to show a message to millions of users and get an instantaneous response. With the addition of consumer-influenced targeting, brands that choose to advertise on Twitter have a better chance for engaging customers than they do in most other mass-marketing contexts.
A new startup, 140 Proof, is emerging from development mode today with a Twitter-only advertising service that could change the way advertisers think about social media. While online advertising itself is nothing new, new ad solutions for Twitter that perform better are interesting both to Twitter client developers (who need to monetize their free apps) and to Twitter itself, who has expressed interest in advertising solutions but has yet to reveal its plans. 140 Proof’s method of targeting and matching ads delivers clickthrough rates 8 to 12 times higher than the current, un-targeted industry average, says the team, and although still in beta, can serve over 10 million ads a day reaching over half a million uniques through the Twitter client ecosystem.
The service calculates a person’s Twitter “persona” based on public tweets and who they follow and serves ads to users via a patent-pending matching algorithm. Having spent three months fine-tuning algorithms and signing up advertisers, is the first Twitter advertising solution that is both self-service and optimized for individual users’ interests. 140 Proof believes that targeted, unobtrusive advertising is the answer to Twitter’s monetization quandaries (discussed frequently on TechCrunch).
The ads can be targeted to a custom audience based on keywords in tweets, demographic group, or influence size. “Mass-market, untargeted advertising is a waste of consumers’ time and advertisers’ money,” said Co-Founder John Manoogian III. “140 Proof asks advertisers to rethink their ads as tweets, which, surprisingly, works.”
The ads appear in third-party Twitter clients who use 140 Proof’s API to serve and measure their ads. By signing up Twitter app developers, 140 Proof hopes to be the go-to solution for Twitter clients to monetize their apps. After signing several up several smaller Twitter clients and growing its network to over half a million users, 140 Proof recently added a major Twitter client to its network and is in discussions with several others.
The ads behave just like tweets: each ad must have a real tweet associated with it so users can reply, and if desired, retweet the ad. 140 Proof does not charge for retweets, instead, advertisers pay per click, and retweets and direct replies are considered a free bonus. The service operates like Google AdWords in that advertisers can create their own ad tweets through a self-service interface, define a specific Twitter persona to target, and then measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.
“Tweets, which are transparent, pocket-sized, and incredibly brief, force advertisers to get serious about reaching the right customers,” said Manoogian. “140 Proof lets small and large advertisers build custom audiences, just like keyword advertising, but it all happens through the lens of Twitter. Brands who embrace Twitter and open conversations will be successful with this. Brands who hide behind mass-market, ‘spray-and-pray’ media campaigns will struggle — but those brands will struggle on any level playing field.”
“We’ve seen that scalable, targeted advertising is the holy grail for brand advertisers because it gives them measurable results and real ROI. What big advertisers have been missing was a way to connect with the Twitter community in ways that users don’t find obtrusive. We think we’ve cracked that code with 140 Proof,” offered CEO Jon Elvekrog.
“As Twitter developers, we created the ad service that we wanted to use ourselves. We’re sharing it with the Twitter developer ecosystem because we want Twitter’s ads to be better than anything else online.” said co-founding engineer Erik Michaels-Ober.
The 140 Proof team is unusual in the startup space for being a hybrid of both advertisers and technologists; the UX co-founder spent eight years at digital advertising agency Organic, while the engineering co-founder worked on the scaling architecture for email shop Vertical Response.
140 Proof is backed by a 2 million dollar venture investment from Blue Run Ventures and Founders Fund raised in the summer of 2009.
Today we’re proud to announce the launch of 140 Proof, the first targeted, self-service ad solution for Twitter.
The Proof network connects 3rd-party Twitter clients (roughly 100+ million users) into a single, dynamic audience that advertisers can buy the same way they buy keyword advertising. Our ads are served anywhere tweets are consumed & shared: mobile, desktop, and web.
To those of you visiting us from TechCrunch: welcome. We’re offering $100 of free advertising impressions to the first 50 signups from TechCrunch.
TC readers, click here to create your ads.
We welcome inquiries from Twitter developers interested in monetizing their apps through personalized, unobtrusive advertising.
Twitter app developers can sign up at developers.140proof.com.
Interested in joining a happy team of hackers, copywriters, and Rock Band players? Motivated doers and thinkers are invited to reach out to us on our jobs page.
