140 Proof

140 Proof delivers 50x the performance of Facebook

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:18:18 -0700

It’s the Pepsi Challenge for advertising.

We created two ads for our intern position and ran them on both the Facebook ad platform and the 140 Proof network. The ads had the same copy and graphic, the same targeting, and the same landing page. Except for the different format requirements of the two platforms, the ads appeared identically to the end user.

We ran the ads for roughly the same number of impressions and compared the results.

Note: 140 Proof does not display an average CPC or CPM because 140 Proof charges a flat rate as opposed to an auction-based fee.

We encourage you to conduct your own test and compare.

Ad Networks’ “Power I” Takes Root

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:39:00 -0700

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:

Meebo’s ads (displayed on its partner publisher sites) sport a Power I, and clicking it offers users the option to simply opt out of targeted advertising.
And Yahoo! recently created a new landing page to educate consumers about the Power I and what it means.

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...

Mon, 24 May 2010 12:49:00 -0700

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! :-)

The Scalable Sign-In Button for Twitter

Mon, 03 May 2010 19:49:00 -0700

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:

CSS + HTML (github)
Photoshop (zipfile)

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!”)

Chirp, The Twitter Developer Conference

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:55:00 -0700

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:

Hosting the pre-Chirp party with oneforty and other Twitter app startups
Throwing a Mad Men-themed party for the 140 Proof friends + family
Live-yammering presentations while our office-bound colleagues watched online
Pouring that classic San Francisco drink — Fernet — to fellow hackers at 3 am
Del “@delbius” Harvey’s talk about policy-making for the app ecosystem
John “@netik” Adams’s talk about scaling Twitter
Jolie O’Dell’s roller skates
Giving out the classic 140 Proof t-shirt to new friends

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.

Peep our photos and viddy the videos of the talks.

Echofon Joins the Proof Network

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:22:00 -0700

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.

The Chirp Pre-Party, Sponsored by 140 Proof

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:48:00 -0700

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!

Apple's "iAd" Platform Too Pricey For Most Advertisers

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:59:00 -0700

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.

Enabling the Twitter Ecosystem to Monetize and Thrive

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:36:00 -0700

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

The 140 Proof Developers Head to Chirp

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:00:00 -0700

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.

Rumorists Foiled at SxSW: No Ad Announcement From Twitter (Yet)

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:04:00 -0700

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

Hacking Your Advertising Experience on the Web

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:21:00 -0800

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.

HootSuite joins the Proof Network

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:46:00 -0800

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.

Skipping the Super Bowl Was Totally a Thing

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:47:00 -0800

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.

Twitter Unlikely to Launch Ads at SXSW

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:58:00 -0800

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!

Building the Ad Team: Twitter Seeks "Monetization" Engineers

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:30:00 -0800

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:

Experience in developing front-end advertiser applications
Ability to implement statistical tools for improving relevance and yield
Experience in mining and displaying data from a real time database

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 Bars App Developers from Using Location to Target Ads

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:41:00 -0800

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.”

Ads Are Conversations: Giving Consumers Control over the Ads They See

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:50:00 -0800

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.

140 Proof: Targeted Ads Distilled from Real Tweets

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:38:00 -0800

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.

140 Proof: Advertising, Pure and Simple

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:56:24 -0800

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.