MattCreamer.com

I’m all for advertisers and media companies taking steps to improve their relevance to their audiences, but this New York Times story about MySpace’s plan to offer customized ads leaves me cold. The announcement, basically, is that the social network’s advertisers will be able to target consumers based on information contained in a person’s profile. So, in one of the examples in the article, a mention of Donald Trump as a hero (!?) would suggest a yen for financial news and information. Then there’s an automated system so a punk band performing in Seattle, to quote another example, could promote its appearance without dealing with a sales team. It’s also worth noting that MySpace teams will occasionally backcheck their alghortithm’s performance to make sure it’s up to snuff.

The story contains the expected complaints from privacy advocates, but that’s not what’s wrong here. The big misstep is assuming that the stuff that MySpace’s 110 million active users post actually reflects their real interests and is thus targeting fodder for marketers. I’m doubtful that this is the case. Let’s face it. People put all kinds of crap on their MySpace and Facebook pages for all kinds of reason. Maybe a supposed Donald Trump fan is just being funny or is a connoisseur of famous comb-overs and not at all interested in real-estate news. These pages are virtual identities, not real ones. In the opening days of my Facebook experience, I posted a bunch of Wham! songs, mainly out of some infantile sense of irony. It amused me, but I can’t think of anything less reflective of my buying behavior or my needs as a consumer. I really wouldn’t want to be marketed to on the basis of a tounge-in-cheek fondness for “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”, though, now that I think about it, I am a little curious what I’d see.

Anyway, I’d bet the way around is this is an opt-in approach in the form of groups and community. I’m reasonably confident that people will only sign up for that which genuinely interests them. No one wants more spam or more things to idly belong to.  And then you might actually have some criteria to begin properly targeting.