It’s time to call time out, folks, and call a penalty on the play. Someone’s got to.
Yesterday, MySpace issued a report pushing social networking’s benefits to advertisers. It was, as Rafat Ali of Paid Content stated, “a study about MySpace, touting MySpace as an AdSpace…so take it with a grain of salt.” The findings were interesting, no doubt, but seeing MySpace push its agenda in conjunction with Isobar and Carat USA is somewhat eyebrow-raising. MySpace is a great company, and advertisers can yield a lot of benefit by working with it, but come on, today mainstream and new media sources are running with this story without questioning the evident bias in the study of, hmm… 3,000 US Internet Users.
Don’t get me wrong, MySpace is so large, and demand for its inventory relatively small, that basic algebra suggests that indeed, the ROI could be high, if you can overlook the headache-inducing layouts, occasional child predator and what not.
That, apparently, is the theme behind today’s latest “study,” this time conducted by another company I respect, Blue Lithium, that states that “User-Generated Content Delivers More Bang for Your Online Marketing Buck According to Study From BlueLithium Labs.”
All righty then. Again, I am sure this is all true, because social networking generates more pages online than porn and offers much more supply of real estate than demand thereof (implying low costs and potentially higher ROI).
But, what is nonsense about this and MySpace’s study is the evident bias: Blue Lithium is an ad network that
a) probably sells advertising on a lot of these social networking pages and would like to stoke advertisers’ demand for such content and
b) just launched Mingle Now, a social network, that it pushes via its network using house ads, making it a double no-no, in my humble opinion.
It would not be such a big deal, if at least Blue Lithium disclosed how much exposure its core network business has to social networks, or that it now launches its own social network. After all, everyone knows and recognizes MySpace’s bias…
Are advertisers that gullible?
Or do folks at Blue Lithium and MySpace - powerful and fantastic businesses that don’t need to rely on such smoke and mirror tactics to generate business - think that marketers are so gullible that they won’t notice this evident and flagrant conflict of interest?
Folks, just a bit of disclosure goes a long way, the story is interesting, but the delivery thereof could be a tad less biased, no?
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