NEW YORK — Drycleaners and other small-business owners may not have the resources for a national online ad campaign, but MySpace now offers a self-service graphical “display” advertising platform that lets small businesses and individuals target their marketing to its vast audience by characteristics such as gender, geography and more.
The News Corp.-owned company’s MyAds advertising platform was released in “beta” test phase in late September after a three-month closed test.
With the new MySpace service, advertisers can upload their own ads or make them quickly with an online tool, and set a budget of $25 to $10,000 for their campaigns. Advertisers can choose to target, say, females over 30 years old who live in New York. The advertisers then pay MySpace each time someone clicks on their ad. Ads can link to other MySpace pages, such as a drycleaner’s profile, or external websites.
MyAds lets marketers hone their ads to specific groups of people using the public data on MySpace users’ profiles, blogs and comments.
Jeff Berman, MySpace’s president of sales and marketing, says the company was aware that some small businesses wanted to be able to advertise on the site, but that it’s not economical for MySpace to have ad sales staff devoted to working with small- and medium-sized businesses. That’s why the automated system was created.
“This opens the door to an entire massive class of advertisers who have been effectively barred from the online display market,” Berman says, adding that more than 3,500 advertisers have signed up. “Advertisers are looking for less-expensive and higher (return on investment) advertising ASAP.”
MySpace users are able to opt out of having their public data shared for ad targeting purposes, but Berman says that fewer than 1% of MySpace users have chosen to do so.
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