140 Proof

Join 140 Proof at SXSW Interactive

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:40:00 -0800

Attention Austin-bound Brand Marketers:

Join us on March 13 to discuss outstanding social campaign strategies and examples of how brands are using social to increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Our CTO John Manoogian III (@jm3) will be joined by Jason Harris of Mekanism (@jason_harris), Kristin Maverick of The Barbarian Group (@kmaverick), and Sarahjane Sachetti of Formspring (@sf_sj). Tech writer Jolie O’Dell (@jolieodell) will also make a special appearance.

If you’re in Austin for Interactive, drop by, say hello, and bring us your questions about getting the most out of social.

Epic Battle: Creative vs Discipline in Social

Tuesday, March 13, 9:30am — 10:30am
InterContinental Stephen F. Austin, Capital Ballroom A
Panel info link
Panel description:

As social media marketing moves from experimental to institutional, brands no longer question social media marketing as a line item. That said, the strategies and deployment of social campaigns continues to introduce big questions about ROI versus spend and effective measurement has been a trendy topic without clear answers for years. The tension introduced by the the creativity made familiar by traditional brand campaigns and the measurement that performance/Internet marketing allows has created increasingly urgent questions for CMOs, agencies and social networks alike. This panel brings together divergent voices in the evolving social media marketing realm and will address the questions brands, agencies and social networks need to answer in 2012.

Native Monetization and Sponsored Posts

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:40:06 -0800

Native Monetization and Sponsored Posts:

Why Big Publishers Are Looking to “Sponsored” Posts for Ad Revenue

The moves are part of the shift by many brands to think of themselves as publishers in their own right. As Todd Sawicki, chief revenue officer of Cheezburger, said, “It’s a form of advertising that the online world is uniquely qualified to distribute.”

Silicon Valley & Music DNA

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:20:06 -0800

Silicon Valley & Music DNA:

Our friends at Pandora on brand relevance, social music, and what music to listen to in the office.

Toward A Modern Media Framework.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:05:00 -0800

by jm3.

P.O.E.M., or Paid (vs) Owned (vs) Earned Media, is a strategic framework that buyers and planners use to segment campaigns and channels. Paid / Owned / Earned gave us a common lingua franca to organize our conversations and separate the big buys from the experimental backwaters. But in 2012, standing on the banks of the social stream, thinking in terms of Paid / Owned / Earned will break the back of your media team and send money leaking out of your strategy. Here’s why: the world has changed.

Looking back to its inception, Paid / Owned / Earned is really two things: 1. a classification system for media types, and 2. a relational model, describing how those media types affected each other. The relational model is actually the more valuable, less commonly seen version. Here’s a version of how they can be visualized:

POEM envisioned Paid, Owned, and Earned channels as discrete entities: either you bought massive reach in a channel you controlled (paid), or you had the intern send out some tweets to your followers (earned), and these two initiatives had very different resource structures and, yes, budgets. But thinking of Paid vs Earned as unrelated in 2012 will get you booted back into the traffic department.

POEM assumed that each digital channel fit into a neat bucket. The new ad formats springing forth almost weekly from Twitter + Facebook blend paid and earned media opportunities, creating new ways to spend money and annihilate POEM’s neat “is it paid or earned?” distinction in a single stroke. Is a Facebook Sponsored Story from Nike featuring my friend who recently bought shoes considered paid or earned? How about a social stream ad with a funny tagline that I retweet to my friends? Or a rich media banner with a viral video and a share button? Paid / Owned / Earned distinctions don’t make room for these new ad experiences that are becoming the leading edge of digital brand campaigns.

So as Twitter and Facebook become a much larger share of digital ad spend (which now exceeds 20% of media spend [1,2]), the old POEM no longer fits. It’s time for digital advertisers to create some new media classifications and relational models that can evaluate new hybrid models. Creating new vocabularies for this stuff enables more productive conversations about the value of advertising channels like Twitter and Facebook, and helps us sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Here then, is my humble proposal for a NEW framework for our new hybrid universe. It’s an updated set of guidelines I’ve dubbed, “MASS,” and it just might help us hold new hybrid paid/earned platforms accountable to a higher set of standards that end up making things more valuable for everyone. Here it is:

Measurable

Can you track activity and engagement in the channel using trusted third-party verified tools?

Authentic

Does the message rest comfortably in the customer’s world, representing a clear and valuable position the brand stands for?

Scalable

“I need 2 million mommy-bloggers tomorrow.” Can this channel deliver that kind of reach without sacrificing targeting specificity?

Social

Our world has become the web, and the web has become social. Ad solutions without social actions are just customer budget stolen.

The MASS framework is something we’re trying internally at 140 Proof to help customers evaluate their branded digital and retool media plans to scale social. Is it perfect? Hardly. Does it shine a bright light into the most relevant bits of the most innovative ad formats on the market today? We are beginning to think it does.

I welcome questions, comments, slings, arrows, and remixes in the comments section.

[1] http://paidcontent.org/article/419-online-ad-spend-continued-to-surge-in-q1-google-overtakes-yahoo-in-disp/

[2] http://www.emarketer.com/PressRelease.aspx?R=1008432

Facebook's IPO and the $100 billion ad question

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:04:32 -0800

140 Proof CEO and CTOs Jon Elvekrog and John Manoogian III speak out in Forbes and in USA Today about the Interest Graph, Facebook’s Ad Platform CPM, and what it means for the social juggernaut to expand its targeting and dominate the feed.

In Forbes:

Jon Elvekrog, CEO, and John Manoogian III, CTO of 140 Proof, a social ad company: The cofounders, who work less with Facebook than with Twitter (thus the name, a play on the number of characters in a tweet), believe Facebook is only now starting to emerge from a long bout with what Elvekrog calls “Googleitis.” That’s the tendency of ad companies to create ad systems that look like Google’s, which is to say automated and focused on direct-response.

Such has been the case with Facebook’s ads until recently, they say, when the company has begun to see results from “a pretty big pivot toward a brand- and audience-centric approach” in the last six to 12 months, says Manoogian. Still, the pair thinks Facebook remains mostly dependent on direct-response ads, a business that Elvekrog notes “isn’t exactly broken” at close to $4 billion in revenues. “But that momentum may slow them from changing too much too quickly” toward the brand focus that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and most ad folks think should be its ultimate mainstay.

In USAToday:

Improving its CPM is a matter of Facebook “targeting” what users subscribe to and status updates from friends, says John Manoogian III, CTO of social advertising company 140 Proof. “They’re not really taking advantage of the feed. They’re still putting most of their effort into the right rail” ads on the side of member profiles, where both attention and clickthrough rates are lower. The feed is where users look, and where ads perform the best.

Welcome, Echofon for Firefox Users!

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:44:00 -0800

140 Proof is pleased to announce a partnership with naan studio to support Echofon for Firefox. 140 Proof ads will begin appearing in Echofon’s popular Firefox client, in addition to the Echofon clients for Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Echofon has been part of the 140 Proof network since 2010.

What are 140 Proof Ads?

140 Proof ads are short, paid advertising messages that appear on social stream apps. We do our best to show you relevant ads, but you can always send us feedback at @140ProofAds if something seems wrong. Learn how 140 Proof ads are targeted.

Why Is Echofon for Firefox Showing Me Ads?

Building and maintaining useful apps like Echofon bears substantial costs. Developers can choose to pass along these costs to the user (by charging for use of the application) or keep the app free for users by incorporating paid advertising.

How Do I Remove Ads in Echofon for Firefox?

Users can remove ads by buying an Echofon for Firefox license for $9.99. To upgrade, go to the Echofon menu and select the “Remove Ads…” menu item.

How to Advertise on the 140 Proof Network

140 Proof reaches digitally engaged consumers across all social streams, with a monthly audience of 44 million and a total reach of 160 million. Learn more about the 140 Proof audience.

Echofon users with further questions can tweet us at @140ProofAds.

Coming Soon: How Will Social Shape the 2012 Election?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:05:17 -0800

Ad teams are gearing up nationwide to shift their efforts away from everything nonpolitical and lock in for an intense year of political advertising. Given the growing influence of social seen in the last two presidential elections, how big a role will social play in 2012?

President Obama’s social strategy in 2008 was hailed as a coup (New York Times). And AdWeek says, “the use of social and online media has increased exponentially among political organizations” (emphasis ours).

Could social eclipse TV and print for the hearts and minds effort this year? We’ll explore this theme next week in a special installment of our video series on 140 Proof.

Customer Spotlight: Starcom

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:15:22 -0800

The Starcom team and the 140 Proof team have built up a great partnership, and we’re delighted to see them get much-deserved praise from AdAge in their “10 Standout Shops” list:

It’s been a booming new-business year for Publicis’ Starcom, as the firm continues to embrace the paid, owned and earned trifecta. Contributing to its 14% growth in revenue, the firm won A-B InBev, Burger King, Novartis and a portion of the billion-dollar-in-billings Microsoft account. It also brought in smaller pieces of business such as Universal Parks and Groupon.

We’re looking forward to an exciting 2012, as we work to help Starcom’s customers succeed in the social stream. Cheers!

The Interest Graph Advantage: What Amazon and Apple Must Learn

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:29:00 -0800

Amazon and Apple are massively successful retailers, the envy of digital and brick-and-mortar businesses alike. Currently, the two tech retailers enjoy a place among the biggest, most successful companies in the world. But they have a blind spot. The premises on which they’ve built their market advantage are now no longer the most important things in digital. They’re missing a data asset that would allow them to understand their customers better: the interest graph.

What is the interest graph?

Not to be confused with the social graph, which describes who you know, the interest graph describes what you like. On Facebook, the difference between the social graph and the interest graph is easily understood as the difference between a friend request and a Like. On Twitter, the social graph and the interest graph is mapped via only one vector — the follow — but in this case, following influencers is what signifies interest. If you follow an influential account like @David_Lynch on Twitter, it’s safe to assume you probably like indie films.

The interest graph attracted significant interest from technologists in 2011. Read Write Web said the interest graph is part of “the future of the social web,” while PayPal founder Max Levchin boldly predicted success for companies that capture the interest graph. So far, all Amazon sees is your shopping cart; companies leveraging the interest graph see your hopes and dreams.

What must Amazon learn from the interest graph?

Amazon could detect purchase intent earlier and identify under-served customers

What Amazon already knows about its customers:

products purchase data (backward looking)
wishlist data (sparse)

What Amazon could discover from the interest graph:

our favorite brands (aspirational)
new purchases shared by our friends (social proof)

(Amazon attempted in 2010 to expand its recommendations engine with a still-in-beta program that taps into the social graph, but the app’s intelligence is currently limited to Facebook friends’ Likes.)

What must Apple learn from the interest graph?

Apple could recommend songs and apps with greater accuracy

What Apple already knows about its customers:

songs and apps purchased (backward-looking)
location (and possibly what sites you visit, though it would cause a privacy uproar)

What Apple could discover from the interest graph:

musicians who we follow but haven’t purchased yet (forward-looking)
our friends’ apps

Ramifications of the interest graph for e-commerce

In a surprise upset, Apple and Amazon, with their massive product catalogs, cash hoards, and fulfillment channels, could potentially lap Twitter and Facebook in the race to monetize social. The e-commerce giants could create a much richer portrait of their customers – and better predict their behavior — by leveraging the interest graph. However, if they snooze on the opportunity (or waste valuable time building “abandoned garden” social networks like Ping), someone else could develop interest graph technology for e-tailers first and gain the advantage.

Interest graph technology has powerful ramifications for e-commerce as a whole. Information in the interest graph (which is public, by the way), can clue retailers into the aspirations of their customers — at the brand awareness stage.

Adobe: Tablet Users Spend More Online

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:32:28 -0800

Score one for the tablet audience: from an e-commerce standpoint, they’re worth more than your average visitor.

Adobe’s newly released Digital Marketing Insights report found that tablet users in 2011 spent 21% more per purchase than desktop users.

Why is that? Demographics have a lot to do with it: if you can afford a tablet, you’re generally more affluent. And the fact that tablets are mostly used on the weekends — prime shopping times — plays into it too.

At 140 Proof, we’ve built tablet apps into our network, and they’ve proven popular with advertisers. If your client is looking for a way to increase brand awareness among affluent audiences like tablet owners, contact us at hello@140proof.com.

140 Proof Customer Spotlight: Chevy Launches Smartphone and Tablet Super Bowl Apps

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:05:00 -0800

At 140 Proof, we’ve been working with Chevrolet on dozens of campaigns. For the 2011 Super Bowl, we were delighted to be part of Chevrolet’s success, and Chevrolet has even bigger ambitions for the 2012 game: mobile games.

Today, Chevrolet announced they’re releasing the Chevy Game Time app for smartphones and tablets, and the app hits Android and iOS app stores this Sunday. Chevy Game Time quizzes football fans about game broadcasts, teams, and in-game commercials for the chance to win one of thousands of prizes (including a free Chevy, of course).

For more info, watch the video on YouTube.

The 5 Hottest Social Advertising Trends Of 2012

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:26:00 -0800

2011 was a huge year for social advertising. As agency teams reorganized and scrambled to take advantage of social as a modern media framework, the campaigns got bigger and smarter.

Marketers will face important challenges in 2012, as customers are more savvy than before and late-adopting brands enter the social stream. Take a look at the top 5 upcoming social stream trends of 2012: each one will affect brands’ marketing plan in different ways.

1. Online Video Is Getting Social

“It’s not only in the stream, but video is feeding back into the stream too”

Video is powerful. Brands are learning that adding video to a site increases traffic and improves SEO, and marketing email effectiveness increases 90% when video is used (Creattica). In the social stream, Twitter users post YouTube links 500 times a minute, and Facebook users watch 150 years’ worth of video every day.

What’s your brand’s social video strategy for 2012? Are you increasing the volume of video you produce and share, or building entire campaigns around video content?

(Soon, 140 Proof will unveil a special offering for brands interested in enhancing their video strategy. Stay tuned.)

2. Smartphones Rule

“Brands not mobilizing in 2012 are behind the curve”

The smartphone buying spree of 2011, plus the growing tablet market, means customers are now spread across many devices. Most adults 18-34 own smartphones, and Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has predicted that mobile traffic will overtake desktop traffic by the end of 2014. This doesn’t mean that you need to hire a team to create apps for every platform, but it does mean you need:

mobile-optimized digital assets and communications
a mobile advertising strategy
a thorough understanding of how customers use devices

At 140 Proof, we help our customers navigate social advertising on every platform, with platform-independent ad units as well as smartphone-only campaign strategies for brands who want to reach that slightly tech-leaning, slightly more affluent audience.

3. Social as a Second Screen Will Change TV Media

“Social will circle back on TV, influencing shows and ad buys”

Social buys are already tagging along to the broadcast TV buy, as we saw last year with Victoria’s Secret Fall TV Continuity (140 Proof’s #1 campaign of 2011).

Additionally, broadcasters are starting to recognize the value of social as the second screen for television. And the fact that TV shows have their own Facebook pages and all the show actors are active on Twitter…the line between social and broadcast will continue to blur.

Social advertising, as a complement to upfront or scatter buys, promises a strategic flexibility that’s tougher to get in the high-overhead world of TV production. TV shows will be designed and promoted with the knowledge that viewers use the second screen as a backchannel. Social advertising campaigns will be built up in advance of show premieres, in increasingly more ambitious efforts to shape public opinion.

4. Big Data Will Start Overwhelming Brands

“Social means big data, and social ads mean bigger data”

At 140 Proof, we’re already up to our ears in big data. Studying the interest graph means we analyze those many-to-many relationships, and the data points multiply like bunnies as our audience members click and Like their way through the Internet. Our Data Science team is dedicated to researching and reporting on the interest graph. And Luke Lonergan of EMC recently told Forbes of companies who underestimate the impact of Big Data on their business: “They are going to miss the opportunity or get overwhelmed. Those with data science teams begin to understand; others don’t see how much it can do.”

The kinds of big data created continues to grow in volume and change in kind, but now there’s a critical mass of teams getting a handle on it. In 2012, R&D teams will have more tools and resources to choose from, as data streams and online behaviors are better understood.

5. Brands That Can Speak It Real Will Win

“Good social strategy supports sustainable customer relationships”

A new surge of brands will be entering the social stream in 2012. This is the year of the late mainstream. If your brand already has a social media and a social advertising strategy, you’re ahead. Why? Because you’ve adopted that socialspeak that people expect in the stream: personal, more lighthearted, and direct.

Read “5 ways to get creative with 140 characters”

And it goes even deeper than tone. AdAge delved into the power of the sustainable relationship at the start of 2012:

The new imperative, according to Rogers, is “How do you, as a marketer, get the subset of the loyal customer who doesn’t just buy your product again but … writes those positive reviews? They share your links and retweet you on Twitter and post a photo of themselves with your product on Facebook and “like” you on Facebook and generate all these network conversations, which go back to the top of the funnel and influence other customers in your network at their own stage of awareness, consideration, preference or action.”

At 140 Proof, we help brands new to the social stream make a home there: by advising on campaign strategy, taking the message to the right audience, and adapting creative to the special tone of the social stream.

“What challenges is your team most concerned about in 2012?”

Let us know in the comments below, or on Twitter at @140ProofAds.

Tech Bloggers Report from CES: We’re Exhausted

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:30:00 -0800

They’re dropping like flies at this year’s CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show held annually in Las Vegas. Writers from major tech blogs like TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and Business Insider have all reported intense CES fatigue.

TechCrunch: CES is overwhelmingly large

Meanwhile, the show floor itself has evolved (or, really, devolved) into something so mammoth that it would be literally impossible to see all (or even most) of it. It takes up not one, not two, but three separate multi-million square foot halls… and even then, it spills out into ballrooms and side venues all over Vegas.

Gizmodo’s Mat Honan goes Ballardian on scene

I fantasize that I am the only one here, in a post-apocalyptic trade show. Alone among these elaborate booths. Free to scamper up on top of them. Free to grab what I want, and actually play with it, like a child. I want to see it all catch fire. I want to pour gasoline in the ducts and light a long fuse, and watch from the street as it burns and burns and burns. My guess is that the flames would be quite beautiful, colored by chemical washes and treated glass. My hangover is killing me.

For another view into the show and why covering it in the press is such a draining experience, try Steve Kovach’s “One Day in the Life of a Tech Blogger at CES” published by Business Insider.

Is money spent on CES worth it for brands?

Given the saturation of vendors, advertisements, and products at CES, does the conference generate a real return on the investment? Are brand awareness dollars better spent elsewhere than CES, or is the conference now simply a check-the-box expense for gadget manufacturers?

Facebook's Featured Stories Roll Out to News Feed

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:30:00 -0800

As promised, Facebook started pushing Sponsored Stories into the main News Feed area of the Facebook web site, bringing ads to the most popular location. The paid placements, now called Featured Stories, will be shown to the fans of the brand advertisers only, with an initial frequency cap of one Featured Story per day.

The change comes over six months after Twitter.com made a similar move, adding Promoted Tweets to users’ timelines on its site for followers of the advertiser. (As of September 2011, Promoted Tweets in Timelines can now be served to anyone logged into Twitter.com, regardless of the brand follow relationship.)

Read more about the Featured Stories rollout:

Facebook Puts Sponsored Stories Into News Feed And Calls Them Featured Stories

The Most In-Demand Audiences in Social

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:05:00 -0800

At 140 Proof, we help media buyers and brand advertisers reach their target audience in the social stream. Through the thousands of campaigns we’ve run, it’s become clear: some audiences are clearly more valuable than others. So which audiences are the hottest for 2012?

The Top 5 Social Audiences Major Brand Advertisers Are Buying

Tech Influencers

The original social stream audience

Tech influencers invented social, so what better place to reach them than the social stream?

Why they matter: Technology influencers are generally more educated and more affluent than the average American, and they tend to be among the first in their social groups to buy new technology (e.g., many tech influencers bought the first generation iPhone when it launched 5 years ago).

Who’s trying to reach them: Software brands (consumer and enterprise), big box electronics retailers, auto brands, anyone launching a product with cutting-edge technology

How to find them in social: Because tech influencers tend to be power users of technology and are endlessly customizing, they’re highly likely to be found outside the walled gardens and accessing the social stream via apps that are ahead of the curve, like Echofon for Mac.

TV Fans

Driving a surge in entertainment-related media buying

The social stream, as the de facto consciousness for 95% of the world’s population, is the water cooler for television.

Why they matter: With the rise of social as the second screen and a trend of media planners looking to scale their TV buys, we’re seeing more and more synergy between TV and Social. Citing 6 million checkins for social TV app GetGlue, AdAge called 2011 “the breakout year for social TV” — and we predict that TV campaigns in social will be one of the top 5 trends of 2012.

Who’s trying to reach them: Cable channels promoting show launches, Brand advertisers supporting their TV spend

How to find them in social: Brand advertisers reach TV fans in the social stream by tapping into the audiences of popular voices like @jimmyfallon, @GleeOnFOX, @RainnWilson, and @RachaelRayShow.

Moms

Influence and buying power, multiplied by family

The importance of moms transcends any one media channel, and as more of them get online, their significance to brands increases.

Why they matter: According to a 2011 report by Nielsen, women control the majority of household purchasing decisions. Moms are 56% more likely to download coupons and 81% more likely to follow a brand online. And brands are paying attention: iMedia’s 2012 iMoms Summit runs this April for a second year, exclusively for helping marketers reach moms.

Who’s trying to reach them: CPG marketers, retail, consumer software brands

How to find them in social: Moms are highly likely to become a fan of or follow brands online, so marketers can build an audience of moms via the interest graph through influentials like @ParentsMagazine, @BrookeBurke, @Momversation, and a host of CPG/retail brands who get social, like @WholeFoods and @Walmart.

College Students

A growing demographic, poised to shape the mainstream

Why they matter: Brand awareness at the college stage is an investment, a play for hearts and minds.

Who’s trying to reach them: Daily deal sites, brands promoting back-to-school pricing programs, political campaigns

How to find them in social: As one of the most on-the-go age demos around, college students are increasingly heavy smartphone and tablet users and can be found on popular, friendly Android apps like Plume. College students tend to have smaller spheres of influence, following mostly their friends and their favorite celebrities.

Small Business Owners

High-value, hard-to-reach targets

Why they matter: Over 27 million small businesses currently operate in the United States, making them a huge audience for business services.

Who’s trying to reach them: Business services like printing and shipping, software brands, telecoms, banks

How to find them in social: Extremely hard to reach via standard channels, small businesses self-organize in the social stream around influential entrepreneurs and leading publications like @IncMagazine, @garyvee, and @SmallBizLady.

Learn More About Social’s Top Audiences

Want to know more about how to reach 2012’s most important audiences in the social stream? Drop us a line at hello@140proof.com or ask a question in the comments.

Coming soon, we’ll also be talking about…

The Most Underrated Audiences in Social
What the Top Social Audiences Mean for Political Media Buyers

140 Proof's Top 10 Social Ad Campaigns of 2011

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:06:00 -0800

Ten campaigns of 2011 raised the bar for social stream initiatives, by virtue of their unique adaptation to the social stream, specialized targeting, or creative approach. So study up on the cream of the crop, know what works, and prepare to innovate once again in 2012.

10. #GilletteJeterCard

Riding the fan response to an historic event

For New York Yankees star Derek Jeter’s anticipated 3,000th hit, Gillette made a big social push to harvest the fan response. Across Twitter, social apps, and Facebook, Gillette collected well-wishes and congratulations from fans around the world. Thousands of fans participated and passed along the #GilletteJeterCard message, and after Jeter finally connected bat to ball for the 3,000th time, Gillette presented him with a huge greeting card and $50,000 for Jeter’s Turn 2 Foundation.

9. Vitaminwater Color Collection

Crowdsourced design from social stream users

Kickstarter, Etsy, and Threadless all broke out in 2011 by tapping into the hot trend of crowdsourced creative, which connects budding creative directors with eager markets halfway around the globe. Vitaminwater, a young brand pursuing a fashionable market, capitalized on the trend in an innovative way.

Vitaminwater invited young fashion designers from across the country to try for a chance at a jump start to their careers. Fashion designers were invited to submit a t-shirt design for Vitaminwater, for the chance to be sold alongside exclusive T-shirts designed by CFDA designers like Vena Cava and Rag & Bone. 140 Proof helped them reach Fashion Design Students and Shopping Influencers by targeting the followers of accounts like @CathyHorynNYT and @rag_bone.

8. Mercedes-Benz Tweet Rally

A social scavenger hunt

A contest campaign takes advantage of the inherent virality of Twitter and Facebook and accelerates buzz around a brand’s profile. Audience members can tweet a hashtag, retweet a message, or follow the brand to enter to win. It’s a surefire way to gain followers quickly.

Mercedes-Benz hosted their annual Tweet Rally for the 2011 US Open, an all-out push to attract tennis fans and luxury lovers (and showcase the new M Class in the meantime). Anyone who followed @MBUSA in the days leading up to the US Open could win tickets for the best seats at the tournament — delivered by Roger Federer. The Tweet Rally reached 1 million people across the social app ecosystem in the space of less than a week.

7. Sony Pictures Moneyball

A blockbuster movie launch driven by the social stream

Moneyball grossed a staggering $19.5 million its opening weekend and $104 worldwide so far, making it the #3 baseball movie of all time.

To wind up entertainment lovers, Sony Pictures and 140 Proof teamed up to reach Movie Fans, Connected Millennials, and Baseball Fans. Followers and friends of followers of accounts like @TMZ, @MLB, and @jimmyfallon saw the Moneyball message in their favorite social apps during the week-long run-up to the premiere.

6. UFC Personal Trainer Fitness Video Game Launch

Testable targeting and optimization

In 2011, THQ launched UFC Personal Trainer, a fitness game for Ultimate Fighting Championship fans and fitness buffs. Taking a page from Wii Fit, the cross-platform UFC Personal Trainer coaches and conditions aspirational fighters at home.

140 Proof targeted 3 distinct personas with separate sets of creative: Male Fitness Fans, Female Fitness Fans, and UFC Fans by reaching followers of top UFC fighter @UrijahFaber and The Biggest Loser trainer @JillianMichaels. The surprising result? Female fitness fans responded more strongly to the campaign than any other targeted persona.

5. Microsoft Office 365 Launch

Bringing the cloud to the social stream

When Microsoft was ready to unleash its new cloud offering Office 365 on the world, they turned to influencers in the social stream. Microsoft used 140 Proof’s interest graph targeting to reach Small Business Owners and Technology Influencers, who follow accounts like @FedEx and @cdixon.

Cloud computing services is one of the fastest growing segments for 140 Proof, as businesses race to outsource their architecture. 2012 will see bigger initiatives from all players around increasing cloud services adoption.

4. Glee “Sing the USA” by Chevrolet

Leveraging the combined power of Gleeks nationwide

Chevrolet went the extra mile in 2011 with nimble cross-media strategy, and to promote their new Cruze compact car, they went to bat with the fans of prime time TV hit Glee.

To support a TV collaboration that debuted at the Super Bowl, Chevrolet tapped the social stream to find the most fanatical Gleeks, who submitted their own versions of the classic Chevrolet song “See the USA.” 140 Proof helped Chevrolet target TV Fans and Glee Fans by reaching the audiences of accounts like @gleeonfox and @ConanOBrien.

3. Burger King Chicken Tenders

Connecting to busy moms via their smartphones

2011 for Burger King was a momentous year: agency upheavals, new menu launches, and mascot regicide all contributed to a frenetic marketing calendar.

Burger King was re-launching its famous Chicken Tenders, and they needed to reach busy moms — the top US purchaser of crispy, tender, chicken tidbits (averaging 200 tenders and/or nuggets per mom).*

140 Proof helped reach the millions of U.S. Moms and Family Decision Makers on their smartphone by targeting the followers of the 100 best family influencers in social, such as @thepioneerwoman and @Oprah.

2. AMC: The Walking Dead

Biting off a fresh social strategy

The AMC zombie TV series The Walking Dead debuted its second season to critical and fan acclaim in October, ravaging basic cable records and biting off a third season commitment from AMC. TargetCast and 140 Proof partnered to promote the show in the social stream, achieving performance twice the network average.

AMC and its agency of record, TargetCast, sought to target the 18-34 demographic to grow awareness around the season premiere. 140 Proof took the plan a step further, adding interest-based targeting to reach AMC fans, Zombie Thriller Fans, and Halloween Celebrants in the social stream by reaching the fans of accounts like zombie apocalypse blogger @manvszombies, @BreakingBad_AMC, and @DAVID_LYNCH.

1. Victoria’s Secret Gorgeous: Fall TV Continuity

Syncing Fall TV buys with social

Fall premiere week is a highly anticipated time for network TV, and likewise it’s an important time for advertisers. Victoria’s Secret was banking on the fall premieres of popular shows like Glee and Gossip Girl to find young, fashion-loving women to show its new Gorgeous fashion line.

To supplement the huge TV spend, Victoria’s Secret took advantage of social as a second screen and coordinated the social campaign timing with the TV spots, targeting fans of show-related accounts like Glee star @jennaushkowitz and Glee fan club @OMGlee_.

The social stream as second screen strategy delivered over 75,000 fans to Victoria’s Secret to check out the Gorgeous line.

Next: The Top Trends of 2012

2011 was a fantastic year for 140 Proof. We offer congratulations to all of our customers, and to everyone who’s pushing the envelope and innovating in the social stream. Look for most posts to come about the upcoming challenges and opportunities to innovate in 2012.

* Probably.

21st Amendment Beer-Tasting & Hiring Party

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:18:00 -0800

21st Amendment Beer-Tasting & Hiring Party, 12/20

Like everyone else in the Bay Area, we love Github and we’re hiring engineers! Unlike everyone else, our office is located next to San Francisco’s best micro-brewery, 21st Amendment, and we’ll be hanging out and talking beer, Ruby, and Rails on Tuesday December 20th.

Brews on tap:

South Park Blonde
Baby Horse
./script/lager
Red Dwarf
Fireside Chat
Eager Loading
Back in Black
Two Rivers Cider
has_many glasses

Does talking Ruby make you thirsty? Get your ticket now from Eventbrite

Who is 140 Proof?

We’ve built a super-performant recommendation engine using the best tools (Rails, GitHub, Hudson, Memcache, NewRelic, Redis, Resque, etc). We’ve also contributed several gems back to the community, like the Twitter gem, Rails admin, the monetization libraries, and scalable Twitter buttons.

We’re seeking full-time Rubyists, Rails developers, and dev-ops’ers to join our team (these are full-time jobs in San Francisco).

To learn more, check out this amazingly tall page: http://labs.140proof.com, or ping jm3 on Github or on Twitter.

(If you’re reading this after 12/20 and still want to grab a beer at 21A, contact us at jobs@140proof.com)

What Social Media Teams Need To Know About Twitter's New "Discover"

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:52:00 -0800

Twitter Flatters Facebook by Revealing User Activity

Hidden in the Discover tab of the new Twitter design is a stream called Activity, designed to generate more activity and keep people engaged with the site. Said Twitter, “It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow.”

Emphasis on discovery: by surfacing more activity — and offering calls to action via Follow buttons and Retweet links — Twitter hopes to raise engagement and time spent on site.

Tech blogs read this keep-them-clicking move as Facebook flattery and point to the Facebook News Feed, which supports Facebook’s “incredibly low bounce rate.” Expect to see follows, retweets, and favorites increase everywhere across Twitter, as discovery multiplies the eyes on your brand.

Your Brand’s Activity Is Being Broadcast — So Make It Count

Because the people who follow you now have an easy way to keep tabs on all your activity, make sure all your activity is relevant to the brand. Everything your brand does on twitter — not just tweeting — is visible to people.

This means that in addition to tweeting the wrong thing — as Kenneth Cole learned during the Egypt uprising and when Chrysler dropped the F-bomb — a brand can be publicly shamed for following the wrong thing or saving the wrong thing to favorites.

Imagine the following headlines:

Ford Fires Media Agency for Favoriting Road Rage Jokes
Whole Foods Follows Monsanto on Twitter — What Does It Mean?
Juicy Couture in Bed with Advertising Age Reporters?

So follow people who reflect well on your brand, and favorite only the tweets that back up your brand’s core principles and values. Everything else? Do it with an unbranded account.

Stop trying to turn Yahoo into a media company

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:00:06 -0800

by Jon Elvekrog, CEO

Carol Bartz’s abrupt departure from Yahoo has a lot of people talking about how this moment gives the struggling portal the chance to become a media company again. Ideas are swirling: Should Yahoo buy Hulu? Should they merge with News Corp.?

Those intriguing possibilities make great headlines for the trade publications, but this line of thinking – Hulu, News Corp, or becoming a media company – is a mistake.

Yahoo is in the business of providing information (you might actually say it’s a portal to information) and it’s really good at this business. Yahoo Finance is great. Yahoo Sports is pretty nice. Yahoo Games is pretty strong among the social game companies that have not kept up with Zynga. Messenger and Mail are both strong franchises as well. This information attracts an audience, which Yahoo can sell. But it needs to stop there, rather than try to become an enterprise that produces the media it tries to sell.

Yahoo is a company that creates cool products and uses technology to organize information in ways that build a loyal audience. It’s not Hollywood, and that’s why Terry Semel was a bad choice to run the company for most of the 2000s.

Yahoo needs a product CEO who can leverage technology to grow new or existing audiences. That’s not possible in search, which Yahoo should probably outsource to Google like they did in the old days and start making more money than they currently do with Microsoft.

By freeing itself of search and making additional profit, Yahoo could actually go out and acquire valuable companies to bolster its product offering. Around a year ago, Google bought the social gaming company Slide for close to $200 million. Just last week, Google killed all of Slide’s products to concentrate on Google+. It surprised many people in the Valley, but for me it seemed like a huge missed opportunity for Yahoo.

Had Yahoo gone all in a year ago and bought Slide, it would have inherited a cool set of products along with Max Levchin, a smart technology lead who could have transformed the company from a stumbling “media” empire back into a company with killer products. But that didn’t happen, Google killed Slide, and now Levchin works for neither company.

Hypothetical or not, Yahoo needs to capitalize on these kinds of opportunities. It’s fairly easy to understand why the media are having fun prognosticating about Yahoo’s future as a media company – Yahoo itself is confused about the matter. In reality, we need to think about Yahoo not as a media clearinghouse, but as a conduit to a great audience.

Media companies develop and generate content, like editorial copy or video. Newspapers are media companies, and the current idea of a “newspaper” can easily be split into two different models. There are papers filled with investigative reporting, such as The New York Times and The Economist, and then there are content re-packagers who modify and reconstruct existing content in new and interesting ways, like Huffington Post, TMZ and Bleacher Report.

In reality, the former group will only exist via a subscription model, because they have to cover overhead costs. Investigative journalism takes months of reporting and the ability to cover stories both near and far requires international and regional bureaus.

The re-packagers, meanwhile, have such a low cost structure that they can easily survive on fewer page views and smaller audiences. TV networks operate in a similar fashion by developing content in the hopes of attracting a big audience they can sell to advertisers.

But Silicon Valley is not the newspaper industry, nor is it primetime TV, and big technology companies like Yahoo cannot create the same hit-driven content that we expect from TV networks or traditional newspapers.

But Yahoo is already a hit-driven business with several successes that already attract large audiences, including mail and games. If it wants to survive on ad revenue, Yahoo can’t focus on manufacturing media. The struggling portal can sell its technology audiences and compete for advertising dollars, and that’s the end of the story. Technology and media companies are not the same, so let’s stop expecting a cat to bark.

Stop Calling Google+ a Facebook Killer

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 13:00:06 -0800

by Jon Elvekrog, CEO

With its rapid growth, Google+ has been hailed by many within the digital media industry as a potential Facebook killer, just like every other buzz-worthy social platform that came along in the past few years. Google+ is growing at a faster rate than any other social network, so surely it has the power to unseat Facebook, right? I don’t see that happening.

A few years ago we saw the same thing with Twitter. Skyrocketing growth and mainstream acceptance had Twitter hailed as a potential Facebook killer, and Mark Zuckerberg’s network even tried to buy the messaging platform when it was still plagued by growing pains and fail whales. When Twitter rebuffed Facebook’s offer in 2008, the larger social network just copied some of Twitter’s features. Both platforms still exist today, and savvy users often have accounts on both platforms, for very different reasons.

Twitter is a place where users share things with their followers. Twitter is where users turn for news, media and entertainment, almost like an RSS feed where they can talk back and share their own content. The relationships aren’t always one-to-one, and the people whom users follow can differ drastically from whom they follow. Users may follow Barack Obama, but their tweets are not intended for the commander in chief.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a place for friends and family, a network built on one-to-one connections, where sharing in public means sharing with your entire network. As business relationships increasingly creep onto Facebook, users are actively thinking before they share, with the knowledge that everyone within their network has a chance of seeing their posts.

Now, which of these models does Google+ more closely resemble? It’s very clearly Twitter, because of the asymmetric relationships between users. But Google+ goes one step further and lets consumers define these relationships – called Circles — and then pick and choose how they want to share content and news with those relationships. Users are essentially building buckets and then deciding how they want to share and interact with those buckets of friends or contacts.

This unique feature of Google+ could be a major tool for advertisers, due to two factors. The first is that the clustering of users into circles actually makes it far easier for ad targeting. Entire companies specialize in building audience segments based on similar interests and behaviors, and then sell these segments to advertisers. In the case ofGoogle+, users are performing the grouping themselves. All these users obviously have one common link, whether it’s just the single user they’re connected to or a shared interest. All Google has to do is look at the kind of content shared in the circle and use that interest graph data to target advertising to specific audiences.

That’s a huge coup for big G, but there’s a big ad opportunity for brand advertisers as well. Google+ was created for sharing, whether it’s with the family, friends, co-workers or loose acquaintances. Brands haven’t really become part of the Google+ experience, but when they do, it’s very likely that consumers will share branded messaging as well. Research shows that users are comfortable sharing ads with their friends and family if they feel the ads appeal to them, which is good news for brands. If successfully implement, this approach turns paid impressions (the original ad served) into additional earned media (the shared ad that other users see).

Rumors are constantly flaring up that either Facebook or Google will still buy Twitter, but there’s no reason to think that all three social platforms can’t peacefully coexist. Google+was built to fix some of the sharing mishaps that can occur on the other major social platforms, and it encourages sharing more than any other platform.

By targeting appropriate ads to receptive audiences, Google+ opens the door to more appealing and relevant advertising for brands, in a non-intrusive way that can appeal to users. What remains to be seen is how well Google can pull it off, and whether the network’s meteoric growth can continue.