"I wouldn't be caught dead in that kind of environment"

Eric Sass has an interesting article about MySpace and why big companies aren't advertising there:

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE MYSPACE HAS grown to 60 million members, adding 8 million to million new members in the last few months alone, and now accounts for around 12.5 percent of all online display ads.

But major brand marketers continue to shun the site. That's according to executives at a panel on the "Revolution in Television" hosted by the Advertising Research Foundation Monday in New York.

You'll hear the term social networking websites, referring to sites like MySpace and the much smaller Tribe.  These are sites where tens-of-thousands or millions of people create personal pages and connect through similar interests.  Billions of hits.  Lot's of potential customers, but...

Big marketers are cautious because advertising on sites with user-generated content can hurt their brand.  Imagine your ad next to a profile with an explicit photo or bigoted headline...get ready for damage control when someone calls their congressman.

So is there an opportunity here?  Yep.  Smaller firms can grow revenues with user-generated content. It starts with creating a place where you know something about the users...where they are your customer.

It's called a blog, and if managed correctly your customers will be contributing content (in the form of comments) and interacting with you like never before.  The blog marketing projects I have in development are showing great promise as loyalty-building, repeat-business-generating, brand-boosting machines.  Blogs are valuable.

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ASIDE:  For an example of an excellent business networking site see LinkedIn. 100's of CEO's (and yours truly) find it a great place to make new contacts.

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Full text of Eric's article is here.

Comments

[Evan Carlton]

The reason may go deeper than being brand conscious. From reading through various business forums and blogs, it appears that MySpace has the reputation of being a pedophiles dream. Who wants their 'brand' linked with any site that has been linked to a number of cases of disappearing pre-teens. It may be only an anamoly, or just an unfortunate instance of media scare tactics, but it seems unless the target market is for teens or tweens, why would an advertiser spend good money to find out what they think? Why would Boeing care?

[Michael]

Why would Boeing care? You're right, they wouldn't because they aren't targeting this demographic.

What is interesting to me is the *consensus* among brand marketers: Even if the MySpace user is a perfect fit for your product an ad could do more harm than good to your brand.

Thanks Evan.