MySpace is crowded; Amanda Beard is a 'GoDaddy Girl'

NEW YORK -- Two years ago, MySpace was the cool, do-no-wrong website in the new area of social networking when Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. NWS bought it for $580 million.

Now part of the company's Fox Interactive unit, MySpace remains the Internet's biggest social-networking site, with 200 million registered profiles and 100 million unique users a month.

But social networking has become a crowded, intensely competitive business.

MySpace's top rival is Facebook, now one of the hottest Web brands, which is registering new users at a rate of 150,000 a day.

The sites also are a hot new thing with marketers. Social-networking-site users bare personal data as well as their souls in creating their profiles, and these advertisers see huge potential in using that information, if allowed, to precisely target users with sales pitches.

Fox says revenue for the interactive unit will top $1 billion for its fiscal year ending in June.

Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett, 45, is in charge of making sure Fox Interactive's properties click with marketers.

Before joining Fox in 2006, Barrett was at AOL for four years, rising to head of sales and partner marketing. He bailed, he says, because he felt AOL was too hung up on its dialup business in a broadband world.

He spoke with USA TODAY about MySpace and its future.

Q: Given Facebook's rapid growth, are you concerned that MySpace could become the dialup of social networking?

A: If you looked at the press 18 months ago, you couldn't pick up an article or watch a TV show without hearing about MySpace founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe as the media darlings.

Now, Facebook is the next media darling, and in between there was YouTube. They are highly differentiated products. We are seeing growth in both.

A. How are they different?

Q. Facebook is very much about keeping in touch with current friends. MySpace is about keeping in touch with current friends and meeting new friends.

Q: Has MySpace lost some of its early cool factor because of Facebook?

A: I don't think the shine has come off one product and transferred to the other. It's a new product.

When the dust settles, there will be another cool thing that the news will be writing about.

Q: As users continue to grow, how have advertisers changed their view of social networking?

A: Over the course of the past 12 to 14 months, it's gone from dipping a toe in the water to making bigger investments.

Marketers are saying, "Social media is on my budget." And there's going to be plenty of room for us and competitors.

Q: A year ago, it was a big step for a marketer to create a free profile at MySpace. What's to stop an advertiser from just continuing to create a brand profile rather than paying for your ad services?

A: Companies still do it. We have terms and conditions that regulate the nature of your profile, and if it's a pure commerce profile, we have the right to take it down. But we don't really exercise it.

We tell marketers that we can embellish their presence. If you want to do a sweepstakes with a really cool viral piece or wallpaper or any of those elements, you can't do it in just a MySpace profile.

It's difficult to achieve that presence without working with us and creating awareness that you are there.

Q: Why would an advertiser buy on MySpace vs. rivals?

A: We are the largest site to reach 18- to 34-year-olds. We have a sales team that's tripled this year, and we're concentrating on making our site more efficient and able to handle more targeted advertising.

Q: You say you are trying to make the site a more efficient buy for advertisers. How?

A: (Users) volunteer a tremendous amount of information about themselves.

We have the technology to capture their interests and passions and put them in certain big buckets … of 3 million-plus, which builds scale of efficiency for marketers. We are now in the process of breaking those buckets down into thousands of other buckets.

We call it hypermarketing.

Q: How does it work?

A. Before, our bigger, broader buckets included music, entertainment and sports. Now, with music, for instance, we'll break it down by genre, like hip-hop, and then break it down to the artist level.

So if Kanye West has a new album, the record label will be able to reach users who like Kanye West.

Q: Are you trying to lock advertisers into spending the way TV networks sell their ad inventory in the upfront?

A: We have a lot of marketers doing advance buying, especially film companies … leading up to a movie release. And for the past few weeks, we've been sold out on our home page with networks promoting their new fall lineups.

We're already sold out for the fourth quarter. My issue with an upfront for online is trying to mirror a model that is broken.

Q: Are prices going up?

A. Before you see prices start to increase, you're going to see more demand. We want to be able to do more business with more people, then we can work up our pricing. Our focus this year is to create more demand.

Q: How do you keep up with how social networking is evolving?

A: You use it. You create your own networks and work on your pages. I use both MySpace and Facebook. If you are going to make recommendations to marketers, you have to be in the loop. Social networking really does help me stay in touch with what's going on.

NEW & NOTABLE

Jolting java sales. Sure, we love to stop at 7-Eleven for super-size Slurpees, hot dogs or fine literature from the magazine rack.

But now the convenience store king wants to give us another reason to pop in: coffee with an herbal kick.

That's java to jump start your immune system, as well as your brain. In anticipation of the cold and flu season, the chain has launched "Fusion Defense": coffee spiked with ginseng (for stamina), astragalus (said to increase white blood cell count) and echinacea (an immune system stimulant).

It will cost the same as a 7-Eleven's other varieties — which average about $1.25 nationally.

A word of caution: The FDA does not evaluate these herbal supplements for effectiveness. That's why signs at the coffee area just list the herbs "and make no cold/flu claims," says 7-Eleven spokeswoman Margaret Chabris.

Licking a Jeep craving. One lucky chocolaholic with tongue power may literally lick his or her way into the driver's seat of a new $24,625 Jeep Liberty in a regional contest being held in Cleveland by the carmaker.

On Oct. 18, seven contestants will compete in licking their way through to the surface of one of seven 2008 Jeep vehicles each coated with 100 pounds of chocolate. The first two contestants to lick clean through will then have to rummage through a Jeep Liberty filled with 26,000 wrapped chocolates. The one who finds the key to the Jeep Liberty buried in the chocolate gets a new ride.

Would-be winners can register for a chance to compete at SweetestDaytheJeepWay.com. But only chocoholics and Jeep fans in seven states are eligible. The contest is limited to residents of Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, West Virginia and Kentucky.

GoDaddy.com makes waves. Bob Parsons, CEO of Super Bowl advertiser and Web domain naming company GoDaddy.com, is famous for trying to make news out of nothing, such as holding press conferences to announce that he may not advertise in a big game or that a network won't air his ads.

But last week, he actually announced a real news nugget: Gold-medal-winning Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard is joining his roster of "GoDaddy Girls."

Auto racer Danica Patrick and motorcycle racer Valerie Thompson are among the others who appear in ads, blog on the website and make personal appearances for the company.

Break out the fake cobwebs: Fearnet — the all horror, all-the-time website and on-demand TV channel — is launching a contest for "America's most spirited Halloween home decorators."

Fearnet will "pay your rent or mortgage for a year" for the contestant whose home is voted scariest by fellow fear lovers. (The actual prize is $50,000 — enough for an exorcist after the holiday.)

Contestants can upload a 60- to 90-second video of their house of horrors at bix.yahoo.com/fearnet. Others can go to that site to view the videos and vote.

Now this is scary. Burger King has sold masks of its creepy King mascot in the past, but this year, it's raising the weirdness quotient.

Halloween partygoers (or folks who just want to scare the neighborhood children) can get a "Deluxe King Costume" — king mask, robe and huge gold medallion — for $69.99 here.

Also available: an oversize 18.5-inch-by-14-inch King mask for $24.99.

That comes with an offbeat etiquette book for the mask's use, with tips such as "wait until you get home" to eat trick-or-treat loot.

Why? "The mask doesn't have a mouth hole," the book warns. "You'll look stupid trying to shove a candy bar in there."

By Laura Petrecca, Bruce Horovitz and Theresa Howard

ASK THE AD TEAM

Q. A few years ago, Coca-Cola had TV ads featuring polar bears and penguins. One ad had a great R&B-type jingle, with lyrics about "falling in love." Is it a real song and, if so, what is it called?

A. Coca-Cola featured penguins with its polar bears in a 2005 holiday ad called Arctic Beach Party. It was the 10th anniversary of Coke's polar bear ads and the first time it used other characters with the frolicking bears. The song was the Beach Boys' Little Saint Nick, a "real song," but it doesn't say anything about falling in love. It's about the man in the red suit.

Q. Is the song in the TV ad for HSBCdirect.com available to buy? I love the smooth jazzy sound.

A. The song is Gatekeeper by Feist, and it appears on her albums Let It Die, out in 2005, and Open Season, out last year. The song is in the background as animated men and women go about banking online. The 31-year-old Canadian singer (full name Leslie Feist) also is in an ad for Apple's new video Nano player — her music video for 1234 plays on the Nano's 2-inch screen. The tune is on this year's album, The Reminder.

•For more on Leslie Feist, go to listentofeist.com