MySpace has unveiled "MyAds," an advertising technology focused on small businesses and individuals rather than the huge brand advertisers that the News Corp.-owned social network is best known for. It's a platform in which an advertiser can allocate exactly how much to spend--between $25 ad $10,000--and target its audience using the HyperTargeting system that MySpace debuted just under a year ago.
With HyperTargeting, MySpace says that there are more than 1,100 specific ways to target an ad based on geography, demographics, interests, and other information sourced from public profile data. Advertisers can then keep tabs on performance through online analytics.
MyAds is currently restricted to MySpace in the U.S., where it has about 76 million members.
The "self-service" model is similar to what Facebook has done with its own ad platform--create an ad, choose how much to spend, select a target audience. But MySpace has a more obvious clientele in mind: bands. The MyAds homepage explicitly recommends the service for band promotion, something that gets very close to MySpace's roots as an independent music hub.
Promotional campaigns for bands, films, and other indie creative projects may have a more natural home on MySpace than Facebook, where the focus is less about media and more about communication.
MySpace.com, a high-profile player in Google's new OpenSocial developer project, isn't willing to let Facebook get away with stealing the week's big advertising headlines.
The News Corp.-owned social-networking site announced Monday morning that it has completed the first phase of a new advertising program it calls "HyperTargeting," which uses the information that members put in their profiles to serve up ads they might actually want to see.
MySpace initially began its HyperTargeting program in July, dividing its users into groups of "enthusiasts" in 10 categories (music, movies, personal finance, gaming, consumer electronics, sports, travel, auto, fashion, and fitness) and catering the advertising to those segments. "Performance increases for brands on the HyperTargeting platform were as high as 300 percent compared to demographically targeted campaigns," a statement from MySpace claimed.
Some of the 50-plus advertisers in the first phase of the advertising program have been Procter & Gamble, Microsoft's Xbox, Ford, Toyota, XM Satellite Radio, and film studios Universal Pictures, Lionsgate, and Fox Searchlight.
With the second phase of HyperTargeting, those 10 "enthusiast" categories have been expanded into more than 100 subcategories--so instead of simply singling out "movie fans," the targeting intelligence could use profile information to pick out science-fiction fans. So far, this has only been released on MySpace's U.S. site, but early next year it will expand to its international versions.
"Our mission...was to build an ad platform that translates our massive amounts of self-expressed user data into highly targeted, interest-based segments, enabling us to better serve the exact right ad to the right person at the right time," said Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for MySpace parent division Fox Interactive Media.
But logging into MySpace, I don't see a whole lot of "targeting." The home page is covered in student credit-card advertisements, which is odd because I don't think my profile provides any indication that I've been a student recently. On my profile, I saw Google advertisements for New York apartments, a Christian dating service, acne medication, and diet pills.
OK, the first one is relevant, but the other three...I'm not so sure about.
If MySpace's HyperTargeting is trying to tell me I need a full-out makeover and a new G-rated romance, um, I'm not listening.
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