MySpace trials targeted ads online
Rating: tomorrow mobile?
By Annie Turner
According to The Financial Times, MySpace is to announce “hyper targeted” ads next Monday. Recently the News International-owned social networking site has taken something of a bashing, while Facebook has become all the rage, not least because of moves to make Facebook available on mobile.
Things might be about to change. The FT says that MySpace has completed the first phase of a pilot scheme that allows it to serve ads to visitors based on the personal information they upload to the site.
On the one hand this could be a high risk strategy because the mostly teenage users of MySpace famously shy away from advertising apart from their favourite ads. This targeting needs to avoid, to borrow from the vernacular, “creeping them out”. Naturally MySpace points out that users can opt out of receiving the targeted ads.
On the other hand, maybe MySpace has done things in the right order – ie targeted advertising first and mobile down the line? If it can crack targeting ads online arguably it will be ahead of the game because it has the scale and scope to make user behaviour patterns and profiles meaningful statistically, whereas at the moment, mobile is just too small as an advertising channel. Interesting that MySpace claims that click-through rates are 300% higher for targeted ads than for the other on its site.
Apparently MySpace has signed up more than 50 advertisers to participate in the scheme including Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Ford and Toyota, who no doubt will be most interested to see what mobile can do for them once they’ve got the hand of targeting online
Another potential source of trouble is rearing its head: last week the Federal Trade Commission held two days of hearing to consider whether new consumer protection legislation is needed for online advertising.
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