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Advertising 'Safely' On MySpace

A Wall Street Journal article attempts to demonstrate how to market your products on MySpace the right way. Marketers, weary about buying ad inventory on the massive site due to the explicit content that can be found all over its user pages, have no control over the content on MySpace--and thus, many don't want to play. But some are turning to what they can control to help them reach MySpace's 85-100 million users. To promote its summer blockbuster "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," the Walt Disney Company built its own MySpace page, and bought an ad appearing on the site's front page to promote it. "We would never be on a personal profile," Jack Pan, marketing vice president of Disney's Buena Vista Pictures said flatly. Of course not. No national brand with a good image to keep in mind would ever do such a thing. It's PR suicide. But MySpace knows this, too, and is trying to work with advertisers to mine so-called "safe" sections of the massive social networking portal that advertisers like Disney would comfortable being seen on. That said, parent News Corp. has also been sensitive about micro-managing its site, which could potentially lead to user defection. Advertisers like Disney and Fox, which created a page for its latest "X-Men" movie, can gauge their success with these pages to certain extent by tracking the number of friends they keep. Partly because of a promotional opportunity arranged by MySpace, "X-Men 3" received 8.1 million friends; "Pirates" so far has collected over 70,000.

Read the whole story at WSJ.com (subscription required) »

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