Taking a page from their search partner Google and main competitor in Facebook, MySpace plans to launch their own ‘do-it-yourself’ contextual targeting & advertising platform : MySpace SelfServe Ads.
MySpace is now letting its current advertisers test their contextual and group targeting system, which lets advertisers target direct groups and sub-groups, with targeting broken down to the demographic level. The company plans to take this advertising system one step further, opening it up to any advertiser who wishes to use MySpace as a targeted market platform.
Using Google AdSense as inspiration, MySpace will be launching SelfServe, which will let advertisers from small or local businesses to Fortune 500 companies log in, create an advertising campaign, target that campaign, upload copy & creative, then track the campaign impressions and clicks.
Travis Katz, the MySpace international managing director discussed the influence of Google AdSense on the SelfServe ad platform with The Guardian:
“AdSense was the first targeted advertising product that was open to everyone, and tapped the long tail,” Mr Katz added.
“It showed that you don’t have to be a huge company to buy media space, you could be a small start-up, a pizza place or a band. We’re taking the same concept but it’s not just text based.”
Facebook offers a similar service in Facebook Flyers which lets advertisers target specific user profile demographics, schools attended, ages and groups. With MySpace (Google partner) and Facebook (Microsoft partner) launching their own contextual targeting, and AOL (Google partner) acquiring Quigo; will this threaten the hold sponsored search companies have on the contextual targeting world? Or can the various platforms live hand in hand?
