Advertising with MySpace

It’s 2008, and the media seem to have moved on from one social network obsession to the next—but today MySpace refuses to become irrelevant.

MySpace announced new metrics and branding platform, called the Community Branding advertising platform, to appeal to advertisers. The platform is currently in beta testing.

What makes the new Community Branding platform different? As MySpace says in their release:

“Community Builder is the next evolution of the MySpace brand profile — a more flexible solution that puts creative freedom and control into the hands of advertisers to ensure that a community stays dynamic and interesting in between major campaigns and projects,” said Bryce Emo, Senior Vice President of Sales, MySpace.

What, you don’t speak press-release-ese? I’ll help: “Community Builder is the next evolution of the MySpace brand profile — [buzzword buzzword] that puts [buzzword buzzword and buzzword] into the hands of advertisers to ensure that [buzzword] stays [buzzword] and interesting in between major campaigns and projects” or they’re working on a project to keep eyeballs on your brand profile even when you’re not doing anything new and cool.

The new platform will have two service levels: self-service, for those with MySpace, CSS and XHTML experience (and enough time to devote to this); and full-service, for those who want/need MySpace to design it for them.

If you’re wondering what about the new platform will actually keep people interested, MySpace gives some ideas in their full-service description: sweepstakes and contests. Classic. Maybe that’s the best news of all: you don’t have to come up with revolutionary ideas here, just apply all the old tricks to MySpace in a cooler way now. The platform is also touted as giving advertisers even more creative control.

And for people like me, those data demons, MySpace will also be including cold, hard facts about your brand pages:

Both versions give advertisers 24/7 access to update community elements (blogs, bulletins), increased analytics (via Hitbox) and increased profile functionality, giving them the control to create and maintain brand momentum with users in an unprecedented way.

The Community Branding platform will be available in the US only.

And lest we assume that MySpace actually is irrelevant, MySpace also wanted you to know that comScore says MySpace saw an all-time high of uniques in March 2008—up 7.1% to 73M. Page views and time on site were also up.

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