MySpace: Slap Them in the Face with Your Brand Message

I finally found time to jump into the latest issue of Fast Company. I had been really looking forward to reading the cover-story about MySpace.

Cruising along through the fairly entertaining article, I jumped out of my seat and shouted, "*%# %^#@#+," when I read the following passage:

In June, for example, Anderson and DeWolfe [MySpace execs] created an aggressive new "takeover" feature on their home page, which gets some 45 million views a day -- a shiny bit of advertainment offering marketers a "more creative palette" with which to burn their messages into users' skulls. "You can own the page, whether you're McDonald's, Taco Bell, or Sony with Hancock [the recent Will Smith vehicle]," says Berman. "Our users look at you as content, while you're slapping them in the face with this incredible brand message."

What?!?! What does the language say about MySpace's marketing philosophy?

Burn your messages into my skull? Slap me in the face with your incredible brand message?

Please! That's just wrong on so many levels. It wreaks of Web 1.0. It smacks of one-way communication and broadcasting the advertising message. MySpace, like Facebook and many of the great new Web 2.0 social media platforms, is all about the conversation. It's two-way, not one-way. Not to mention that the language illustrates a lack of respect for the visitor (customer).

Egad! No wonder MySpace is getting dusted by Facebook in terms of growth.

"For all the bravado and new ideas, MySpace still has significant challenges. Foremost among them is the relentlessly evolving Facebook, whose most recent comScore numbers show it widening the gap on MySpace to nearly 10 million worldwide visitors in May -- 124 million for Facebook versus MySpace's 115 million."

It appears that for MySpace it's all about the advertiser and ad revenues--and not all about the user experience (i.e., taking care of the customer). Please join in and add your perspective. Am I over-reacting here?

Sticky - Are Marketers Obsessed?

Friend, blogger and fellow marketing genius, Jennifer Wood pointed me to this thought-provoking commentary over on the Fast Company Web site:

The sticky-wars have arrived. Yesterday AdAge's Matthew Creamer introduced Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociology professor from down under who's challenging The Tipping Point's Malcolm Gladwell to a battle at the mic.

Armed with a mathematical and computer modeling arsenal instead of anecdotes, Watts debunks Gladwell's "influencer" theory. Writes Creamer: "The crux of Mr. Watts' argument is that even if influentials are several times as influential as a normal person, they have little impact beyond their own immediate neighborhood -- not good when you're trying to create a cascade through a large network of people, as most big brands do. In those cases, he argues, it's best to skip the idea of targeting that treasured select group of plugged-in folks and instead think about that group's polar opposite: a large number of easily influenced people. He calls this big-seed marketing. Sounds a lot like mass marketing, doesn't it?"

Oy veh. In the high brow stratosphere of marketing theory, one day it's all about the niche ("long tail"), the next it's all about the mass ("big seed"). Between Gladwell and Watts (who in 2003 penned the book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, to much less fanfare), and Fast Company's very own Made to Stick columnists, Dan and Chip Heath, it seems an entire academic generation has emerged around the study of: how to get our ideas, products and brands to stick. You could argue it's the obsession of 21st century marketers.

Creamer goes on to interview a couple marketers who have discovered that Gladwell's "tipping point" theory (which, as I wrote about in my January 2005 profile on Gladwell, has become fully operationalized at companies like Pepsi and Coke's VitaminWater), is a hell of a lot more difficult to recreate, than it is to admire from a far. (Please, why is anyone surprised by this? Didn't you learn by second grade that doing is always harder than pontificating?)

But my favorite line from Creamer's piece is this: "An irony of our age is that, though everyone acknowledges consumers are in control, marketers still believe they're running the show, right down to trying to plan for virality as any creative told to "just go make a viral video" will lament. Virality is an outcome, not a channel to be planned." It's similar to a point I made in "Down the Rabbit Hole," a November 2006 story that deconstructs the labyrinth campaigns the Blair Witch Project's stunt-men architected for Audi and Sega. Creating a tipping point phenomenon is not just some algorithm on Google or a magic widget you can click--it requires tireless hard work and attention, relentless strategy and creativity, and a deep respect for your audience so you can give them want they want, or better yet, what they don't even know they want.

Where do you stand in the Gladwell vs. Watts smackdown?