Myspace – Not Just for Kids Anymore

Recently Myspace.com has been taking on advertisement campaigns that don’t only target a younger audience. It’s newest brand campaign, Cartier, wants to reach a diverse group of people and feels that myspace.com is the social networking site with the influence to do so. By taking on such big names, myspace is transforming from social site to marketing space.

MySpace Signs Up Glam New Member: Cartier
Global Campaign Challenges Assumptions About Social Networking
By Abbey Klaassen
Published: June 30, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The latest marketer to target the reaches of MySpace? Cartier.

Cartier, a brand better known for diamond necklaces and $10,000 watches, will advertise its latest collection, Love by Cartier, in a deal which was done out of MySpace's office in France but will span multiple countries.
Love by Cartier
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Cartier's deal with MySpace is an endorsement of a global ad market and the appeal of doing one buy that can stretch across multiple geographies.


It's yet another reminder that mainstream Web 2.0 sites have broader audiences than people often assume (last year Neiman Marcus chose YouTube as a place to publicize its 100-year anniversary). It's also an endorsement of a global ad market and the appeal of doing one buy that can stretch across multiple geographies.

It's not just for kids anymore
"There's this misperception in the market about MySpace being a youth site, a site for teens," said Travis Katz, managing director-international operations for MySpace. "But 85% of our audience in the U.S. is over 18, and 40% of all moms in U.S. are on MySpace." He claims that MySpace reaches more people making $100,000-plus than other social-network competitors, such as Facebook and Yahoo 360.

Still, a bigger reason brands are feeling more comfortable with MySpace is that the site has created well-lighted areas around video, music, games and celebrity. Some call it the "portalization" approach. According to people familiar with advertising on the site, cost-per-thousand viewers, or CPM, for integrated campaigns such as Cartier's tends to run in the mid-single digits, around $5.

But Mr. Katz seems more excited that Cartier's is a global deal, and that MySpace is figuring out ways to derive revenue from its international traffic -- 40% of its audience is outside the U.S., he said.

"If you're working with a traditional portal or media company, in each country you have to deal with a separate team, sales force. ... We can take a global message and localize it for each territory," he said. This is not MySpace's first global deal (previous multiterritory deals have included Sony Ericsson, Intel and Nokia), but it is the most far-reaching, with the campaign spanning eight languages.

Free downloads
Cartier's MySpace profile has songs from 12 artists, including Lou Reed and Marion Cotillard, that commemorate the collection. Users can listen to them on MySpace or download them for free at a Cartier mini-site. In the first few days, the profile logged 100,000 views, said MySpace.

Recently, TechCrunch took a look at international social-network users and the strength of the online ad market from which those users hail. It determined that even though MySpace is second to Facebook in worldwide unique visitors, MySpace's visitors were from countries that spend more on online advertisers, thus making MySpace potentially more valuable. Such figures certainly excite MySpace executives. Also exciting? Having good traffic in locales with strong currencies, such as the U.K. and across Europe. For U.S.-based companies at a time when the dollar is weak, that can be doubly nice (literally, in the case of the English pound).

Mr. Katz said that CPMs are much higher in countries such as the U.K. and Japan partly because of that currency strength but also because they have strong online ad markets. But he said even in markets where CPMs are weaker and fewer dollars are devoted to online interaction, the shift to digital is happening. He cites Spain, where online ad spending is growing at 35% a year, though it represented just 4% of total marketing budgets a year ago. MySpace's strongest international markets include Japan, Australia, France, Germany and Canada.

Global spending expected to surge
PricewaterhouseCoopers data estimate that while the U.S. has the largest base, internet ad spending in all other regions will outpace domestic growth over the next five years. Given the small base of international business relative to domestic business, it's not surprising that MySpace's international ad growth is outpacing its domestic ad growth.