Great article in the Hollywood Reporter about Rupert Murdoch’s plan for MySpace.com.
Here’s one nugget:
What’s next for [Fox Interactive Media] is leveraging MySpace’s online community and communication into a peer recommendations framework for leads on everything and anything: the best children’s playgrounds in Los Angeles to the best concert seats in Madison Square Garden to the best steakhouse in Dallas. Such peer recommendations provide a gentle seaway into targeted, fine-tuned behavioral marketing for national and local advertisers wanting to reach MySpace’s 15- to 34-year-old core user.
And once you have peer recommendations, you have a context for targeted advertising. If, for example, MySpace users in your market (and remember, there are nearly 100 million of them overall – although some are much more “active” than others) can direct your audience to the best place to buy an HD TV, then MySpace becomes the obvious place for your local HD TV shop (let alone Best Buy) to advertise.
Increasingly, thanks to folks like MySpace and Google and others, the Internet will be the destination for local advertising dollars. That is why your local newspaper and TV stations, if they’re wise, are investing more and more of their resources online. And, with a few prominent exceptions, the radio industry is hopelessly behind in this regard, expecting every online investment to pay for itself out of the box. Had Murdoch expected this of MySpace, Viacom would own it right now.
How do you keep up with the pace of change? One way MySpace does it is by conducting daily online focus groups. Yes, I said daily.
How often does your outrageously profitable radio station research your audience?
Don’t be surprised if your audience finds marketers who understand them better online. And a richer, more relevant online environment at a URL that is not yours.