It's Rishi

Universal Studios apparently has a large MySpace marketing budget for the upcoming movie Smokin’ Aces. So large that during my last session, I repeatedly got served three Smokin’ Aces ad placements on the same page. Of course, everybody knows that MySpace has a huge ad inventory surplus, so it seems likely to me that Univeral Studios got a pretty sweet deal on such a bulk purchase. The question I ask is whether three ad placements are more effective than one? My first instinct was no, but I must say being bombarded with Smokin’ Aces imagery really did get me to stop and take notice.

UPDATE: Found an article from AdWeek that talks about Universal’s online efforts to market the film. Apparently there is a Smokin’ Aces action game & sweepstakes on Second Life and a widget that allows you to include the Smokin’ Aces trailer on your blog, profile, etc. I love the widget idea. It’s cheap to make and I’ll guess that 1 widget placement by a user brings better conversion than even 100 ad impressions on the same page. I say this because profile pages on social network sites follow a standard layout (except for heavily customized MySpace profile pages), so our eyes are easily trained to focus on the page content and ignore the ads in the layout. However, if a user places the widget on their profile, it’s much more likely to get noticed because it’s in the “line of sight”. Kudos to Universal for experimenting with these new forms of marketing. I’m sure other studios will follow with their own efforts. It’ll be interesting to see what works.

The big headline on t.m today has been an insightful blog post from Mike Davidson titledMySpace: Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory?. Mike raises an interesting point about MySpace. Basically, because of poor site design, users are forced to perform more clicks to complete a given action versus competing sites. Thus, pageview stats for MySpace are, in a sense, inflated and shouldn’t be compared directly to competitors. Moreover, because most of the pageviews on the site are produced as the user is traversing from point A to point B, these intermediary pageviews have little advertising value and may be a significant cause as to why MySpace’s average advertising rates are so horribly low (~ 10cent CPM). If you have a minute, read the post.

Some of my own thoughts:

- It is being suggested that MySpace intentionally has not redesigned the site to reduce the number of clicks to navigate the site because they want to maximize their pageview statistics. While there may be some truth to this pre-acquisiton, I don’t think MySpace has really benefitted that much from the hype spurred from it’s lofty monthly pageview stats. The typical MySpace user simply does not care about this. The only people that do care about stats like this are the people who have just recently created MySpace accounts to see what the fuss is all about (and afterward blog about how they finally “get” MySpace).
- It is true that MySpace is notorious for being flaky, cumbersome and just plain slow. While the site leaves much to be desired, I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t deterred adoption by users. People come to MySpace to interact with people. There are an excessive number of clicks involved, but soon becomes automatic to the typical user.
- All this focus on CPM, pageviews, etc. is a waste of time. Instead of looking at pageviews, what really matter is maximizing the the average length (measured in time, not clicks) of a user session. Instead of looking at CPM, the only thing that matters is the total dollar amount extracted from each advertiser. Ultimately, advertisers will pay for performance upto their hard budget limit. If I have 10MM to spend on an online marketing campaign, I will identify which channels are bringing me maximum conversion and proceed to infuse as much of my budget into those channels as possible. It doesn’t really matter if I’m paying $.01 CPM or $100 CPM. All that matters to me is the conversion rate. (Of course, measuring conversion for a branding campaign for offline brands like Coke is difficult) The only way to increase conversion is to increase ad relevance. In this NY Time article it is mentioned that MySpace is currently improving ad relevance by serving ads based on deeper user profile and behavior data. This is what matters folks. If MySpace can successfully do this, they will quickly see more advertising dollars flow in from a larger pool of advertisers.

I stumbled upon a very nice essay by Danah Boyd which compares and contrasts MySpace and Friendster and in the process describes the DNA of a social networking site and its users. I have read just about every commentary on social networking, Friendster, Facebook, Tribe, MySpace,… over the past couple of weeks for some research that Andrew and I have been doing. I will go out on a limb and say that if you read one commentary/analysis, read this one. Kudos Danah!

Some quotes:

People were hanging out on Friendster before they hung out on MySpace. But hanging out on Friendster is like hanging out in a super clean police state where you can’t chew gum let alone goof around and you’re told exactly how to speak to others. Hanging out on MySpace is more like hanging out in a graffiti park with fellow goofballs while your favorite band is playing. That said, there are plenty of folks who don’t want to be hanging out in a graffiti park and they are not sticking around on MySpace as a result.

This is the difference between tasks that people are required to do and social life. Social life isn’t about the easy way to do something – it’s about making meaning out of practice, about finding your own way.

the vast majority of Friendster users simply went back to email and IM, web surfing and the occasional blogging. Friendster didn’t meet their needs and the core practices of identity production and social sharing that MySpace offered were not significant enough for this group.

Oh and btw, if you think that you don’t need to care about MySpace, think again. A statistic from a few months back showed that MySpace had over 27 billion pageviews per month. All of Yahoo!’s properties combined is 32 billion. Google is around 10 billion. MySpace also has over 10% of the ad inventory on the Web. Un-freakin-believable.