Dr Matsumura is toiling in a back corner of the Labs today. Strange sounds, brief flashes of light: goodness is brewing.

Posted In technology

RT @jm3: “Twitter is an open standard that became plumbing.” NY Times: http://bit.ly/6JlyX8 /via @zabramny

Posted In technology

Quick Primer: Tagging URLs for Google Analytics

Every ad has an associated URL where users will be redirected when they click. To keep track of your landings in Google Analytics, append tags to your URL.

A GA-tagged URL looks like this:
http://140proof.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=display_ad&utm_campaign=140proof

People clicking on your tagged URL will appear in the “Traffic Sources” tab of Google Analytics (go to Traffic Sources, then click Campaigns).

Your redirect URL isn’t visible to the end user, so we recommend including your main URL in your tweet if you want to show a link to users even if they don’t click.

Build your own Google Analytics-tagged URL using Google’s URL Builder.

We offer deep Google integration to help you keep your metrics organized across campaigns and platforms. Our enhanced Analytics service track clicks, shares, and new follows within Google Analytics. Contact Professional Services for more about integrating social actions into your analytics.

Posted In technology

140 Proof: Advertising, Pure and Simple

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.

Posted In events Technology

140 Proof: Targeted Ads Distilled from Real Tweets

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, share the ad. 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 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.

Posted In Performance Technology

Apple Bars App Developers from Using Location to Target Ads

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.”

Posted In Trends Technology

Hacking Your Advertising Experience on the Web

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.

Posted In Technology Trends

The 140 Proof Developers Head to Chirp

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 @140proof.

Posted In events technology