Lifestyle marketing has come to MySpace. MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media presented to a group of online-advertising clients in Los Angeles the results of a study covering the integration of individual MySpace pages with advertising.
As reported in Advertising Age, Fox conducted a study with Carat Fusion, which looked at three different types of ad interactions available through MySpace: display ads, "custom marketer" MySpace pages, and branded profile skins and features consumers can use on their personal pages.
As opposed to traditional forms of advertising, the value of an ad interaction in a social-networking space has no assessable quantifiable measurement. Four traditional forms of return-on-investment metrics—intent to purchase, positive brand image, intent to recommend, and unaided awareness—were used in case studies of two Carat clients: Adidas and Electronic Arts. However, as integrated lifestyle advertising on MySpace pages is a new channel, no standardized measurement of ad effectiveness has been determined.
MySpace’s move to market user pages is an attempt to close the monetization gap between the massive number of page views and the advertising revenue the website currently accrues. Advertising Age reports MySpace this year will garner somewhere between $200 million and $300 million in advertising.
