MySpace said this week that its new advertising platform, HyperTargeting has made it successfully through testing and now includes more than 50 top advertisers as if goes into phase II.
HyperTargeting is the fledgling MySpace addressable advertising system which allows advertisers to reach specific interest groups based on the interests they have expressed on their MySpace profiles.
Naturally that’s only attractive to certain types of brands but MySpace says that Procter & Gamble, Microsoft XBOX, Ford, Sony Electronics, Taco Bell, Universal Pictures, Toyota, Lionsgate, Fox Searchlight, XM Satellite Radio, AZJeans.com, and Summit Entertainment are all among those that have signed up for the service and claims that HyperTargeting delivers performance increases of up to 300%, in terms of advertising response for the number of adverts served.
‘Our mission with HyperTargeting by MySpace was to build an ad platform that translates our massive amounts of self expressed user data into highly-targeted, interest-based segments, enabling us to better serve the exact right ad to the right person at the right time,’ said Michael Barrett, Chief Revenue Officer for Fox Interactive Media. ‘We far exceeded our initial goals in increasing campaign performance for our clients ‘ in some cases tripling the performance over comparable campaigns.’
In July, the first phase of the HyperTargeting program began on MySpace allowing marketers to buy advertising targeted to specific segments of MySpace users identified as enthusiasts in 10 categories which included music, movies, personal finance, gaming, consumer electronics, sports, travel, auto, fashion and fitness.
MySpace has now entered the second phase of HyperTargeting which allows marketers to segment users by more than 100 additional sub-categories. For example, if phase one enables brands to target movie fans, phase two will allow marketers to target fans of horror movies and so on. MySpace will continue expanding categories and will deploy the idea internationally throughout next year.
MySpace also told this week of a new plan called SelfServe which is also in development as a new advertising platform which lets users such as small businesses and bands, to purchase, create and analyze the performance of ads throughout the MySpace network using a set of customized tools.
‘SelfServe leverages our industry-leading ad targeting platform, enabling anyone to create meaningful business and promotional campaigns through the vast friend networks they’ve built on the MySpace platform,’ said Michael Barrett, Chief Revenue Officer for Fox Interactive Media.
‘Targeting is for everyone’from the smallest band to the biggest brand’now MySpace provides a solution for anyone looking to advertise on the most trafficked site in the country.’
Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace said ‘There are 23 million small businesses in the US and less than a million advertise online.’ We guess that’s who SelfSelve is aimed at.