"We're able to target not only followers and fans of the brand
and our editors but reach people who are having conversations that
are relevant," said Lindsey Emanuel, creative services director at
The Atlantic.
The tech partner, a San Francisco company called 140 Proof, can
also find potential audiences by surveying social platforms beyond
Twitter. "Think of this as public social signals from all the major
networks, so that could include a Pinterest or a Tumblr," said Andy
Scott, co-founder and chief revenue officer at 140 Proof.
"This is all based on the public social graph, but at some level
our tech says user 537602, they follow this and they see this and
they pinned that and they checked in there, so we can identify them
as having the following interests: tech progressive, NBA fan,
innovation, thought leadership and auto intender," Mr. Scott
said.
"We believe that is a richer, more powerful way to define
interest than just, say, the websites you visited," he added.
Atlantic Media plans to use the program to promote the custom
content it produces for advertisers.
It already promotes that content through its editorial Twitter
feeds. And the new ads won't appear on Twitter.com or in Twitter's
own apps, where Twitter tightly controls the user experience and
advertising. But Atlantic Media hopes the program can help its
custom content programs reach many more of the people who are most
likely to take an interest.
"It's definitely increasing the reach of the custom content that
we're producing for our advertisers in the hopes of increasing
ROI," Ms. Emanuel said, "not only in terms of clicks but also by
reaching the most invested and interested users to also then drive
engagement and increased social amplification."
The 140 Proof platform can also serve standard ad units to
targeted audiences on certain participating websites, but Atlantic
Media said it plans to focus on Twitter capabilities to start.
That's partly because the brief text ads that it will display look
like traditional tweets -- in line with the argument that consumers
are more likely to engage with ads that resemble a given platform's
content than traditional banners and boxes.
