Shawn Gold, CMO of MySpace.com at ad:tech Sydney

Here is my summary of Shawn Gold’s presen­ta­tion at ad:tech Sydney today. Shawn is the Chief Market­ing Offi­cer for MySpace.com, the world’s biggest social network. How big you ask? Well;

• 0 — 150 million regis­tered users in less than 3 years.
  Number One in the US in terms of page impres­sions, down­loads and aver­age time spent (an indi­ca­tor of how “sticky” the content is). Other sites have more unique visi­tors (those with much wider appeal such as CNN.com etc) but no one can match them in terms of actual content deliv­ered.
  Number 5 in Australia of all websites, Number 1 based on the same metrics as in the US.
  400 billion page views per month, over 100 billion ads served.
  Currently in 7 coun­tries, with inter­na­tion­alised sites, and will be in 20 coun­tries by year end 2007, includ­ing China.

What adver­tis­ing options do they offer now to adver­tis­ers beyond just stan­dard online ads?

• The movie indus­try were really the first to adopt MySpace seri­ously as an adver­tis­ing option by setting up dedi­cated MySpace pages with video trail­ers and allow other users to comment on and become friends of the movie. A movie studio can spend between US$1 — 3 million in a period of a couple of weeks to promote a new release through targeted adver­tis­ing on the network. They can get instant market feed­back and research on a movie as soon as it is released via comments on their MySpace page.
• Bands and come­di­ans have used MySpace to build and main­tain a loyal fan base. It is becom­ing common for them to offer exclu­sive access to events to just their MySpace friends. The Beastie Boys recently did a show recently where only their MySpace friends could gain entry.
• MySpace creates orig­i­nally branded video content that can then be promoted through the network.
• MySpace can promote orig­i­nal video content. Dove Skin­care in Canada created a 1 minute video, did a very small TVC campaign and then pushed it entirely online, using MySpace and other tools. They got 20–30 million unique views for a frac­tion of the dollars it would have cost to get via tradi­tional air time.
• They can offer highly targeted campaigns e.g. if you wanted to adver­tise to all hip hop DJ’s in the US market or just Cali­for­nia, they can do this.
• If you have a MySpace page and have built up a signif­i­cant number of friends, then MySpace can run demo­graphic profiles on your friends, given you deep metrics on who is inter­ested in your product/brand.

What’s next? Well like every­one, they are trying to figure out how to mone­tise consumer gener­ated video content. I was inter­ested to discover that MySpace deliv­ers more video content than YouTube or Google Video. Videos with “hotspots” with hyper­links, branded/“wrapped” video play­ers and pre and post rolls are all being exper­i­mented with.

What are the key areas of focus for MySpace?

1. Self Expres­sion Plat­form — Grow­ing their toolkit of widgets and tools to allow more consumer gener­ated content to be put up on MySpace. They really believe that this idea of self-expressionion, 21st century cyber-hippies if you will, are the key to their success. Other previ­ous social networks, such as Friend­ster, which was the basis for their busi­ness model, failed because they were very restric­tive on the content you could publish and in what format. For exam­ple they wouldn’t allow you to customise the look of your Friend­ster page.
2. Commu­ni­ca­tions Plat­form — Vari­ous tools such as instant message, text, Voice over IP, video call­ing, to enable their users to commu­ni­cate easily with one another.
3. Content Aggre­ga­tion — They already have massive commu­ni­ties for movies, music and come­di­ans, they intend to pool more content in specific commu­ni­ties such as fashion.
4. Marketer Plat­form — Tools for marketers and agen­cies to more easily adver­tise and run/analyse campaigns on their site. Impor­tantly, all adver­tis­ing and the type of adver­tis­ing will always be elec­tive to the user to avoid the impact being diluted over time.
5. Safety & Educa­tion — MySpace gets a bad rap from people about the dangers of meet­ing people online. Confi­dence in the site is crit­i­cal to the site and they have a big team work­ing on this area. Every photo (about 5 million per day!) and video(about 40,000 per day) posted to the site is looked at by a human being to screen out porno­graphic or hate­ful material.
6. Inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion — Contin­u­ing to roll out MySpace to differ­ent coun­tries in differ­ent languages with regional specialisations.

Here are some final soundbites:

Andy Worhol said “Every­one is famous for 15 minutes” well today “Every­one is famous for 15 people”

The arty kid in a small time who used to feel isolated because he coudn’t relate to the friends in his local school can now connect with thou­sands of like-minded people around the world. It’s a great time to be lonely on the Inter­net.