Digital: The man from myspace

But while MySpace is undoubtedly the biggest outlet for youthful
self-expression on the internet, until recently it has been a largely US
phenomenon. Local versions of the website are rolling out and Jay
Stevens has been recruited to develop its European sales operations.

Stevens is an old hand at new technology. In the 90s he was a press
attache to the former US president Jimmy Carter before joining the
hi-tech PR company Alexander Ogilvy. Today he is recognised as one of
the best interactive marketers in the business.

- You once worked as a press aide to Jimmy Carter. How was it?

I was there between 1992 and 1996 when he negotiated peace talks in
Bosnia, oversaw the withdrawal of a Haitian military dictatorship, and
met with North Korea's then leader Kim Il Sung, to discuss nuclear
disarmament. It was my first job, but it's the kind of thing you can
only do when you're young and don't have a family.

- You started in interactive marketing in 1998. Did you feel like a
pioneer?

In fact, I had my first e-mail account with Compuserve in 1988, when I
was still in high school. Then when I went to university I didn't have
so much time to mess around online, so I let it slide. It was only after
I'd graduated, when Netscape went public in 1994, that I began to see
the full potential of online.

- Immediately before MySpace, you worked at Silverpop. I don't know what
that is. Can you fill me in?

Silverpop is the leading provider of e-mail marketing software services.
If you want to reach, say, men in London who've bought a tie recently,
they slice and dice their database, execute the e-mail and monitor the
results afterwards. The potential for this kind of marketing is only
just being realised.

- When Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, everyone assumed it would be
immediately relegated to the graveyard of the unhip. But that doesn't
seem to have happened. Do your user figures bear this out?

When Mr Murdoch bought the company about a year ago, it had 50 million
registered users. That figure has since grown fourfold. In the UK there
are 3.6 million registered users - those are this morning's figures.
Right now in the UK we're growing by about 15,000 users every day. We
had a 19.8 per cent growth between June and July. The great thing is
that Mr Murdoch has let the site grow organically. He hasn't tried to
change it and there haven't been any directives from on high.

- Is the MySpace demographic mainly teens and young adults?

If you're talking about the core audience, you could say it appeals to
18-to 24-year-olds. You could, in fact, widen that to 16- to
30-year-olds. Interestingly, in the UK we've just discovered that 69.8
per cent of the registered users are older than 18.

- What is being done to reassure advertisers anxious about the
uncontrolled, rock 'n' roll nature of the content?

To put this in context, we are a small company with about 350 staff
around the world. Some 100 of them are constantly sifting through the
material, and if we find things that are inappropriate, we take them
offline. Having said that, there's no way that we can effectively police
100 million pages, so to an extent we rely on members of the community
to alert us. A certain lack of control is inherent when you're giving
people the chance to create their own content.

- It seems like the perfect media product: user-generated content, viral
marketing, loyal user. But I hear it's not so easy to sell to
advertisers. Why should one advertise on MySpace?

When you look at the time people spend on MySpace, it blows your mind.
The average user spends 22.8 minutes per day, five days a month. That
comes to about two hours per month. And that's just the average user. If
you want to reach this demographic, you're better off on MySpace than
running a 30-second spot in the middle of Coronation Street.

- Who have been your most supportive advertisers?

In the US we've had a lot of FMCG brands, wireless carriers and
automotive companies. And it looks as though the same pattern will
emerge here in the UK. Big clients at the moment include the film
distributor UIP, clearly to drive its sales at the box office, and O2,
which is also a strong supporter.

- What innovative methods can advertisers use to imprint brands on the
consciousness of MySpace users?

Advertisers can create their own customised pages. Visitors to the pages
are self-selecting, so it's essentially "permission marketing". It
enables brands to find out who their brand champions are and engage in
dialogue with them. For instance, if you go on to the site you can see
the Honda Element has more than 43,000 "friends".

- I notice Univillage has just launched in the UK as the equivalent of
Facebook in the US, which is aimed at college students. Then there's
Piczo, which seems to be doing a good job of targeting teens. Might
MySpace users not gradually be lured away?

MySpace seems to grow at the same rate regardless of competitors.
Personally, I think that the competition confirms social networking is
here to stay. We're all part of the same movement.

- How do you see MySpace evolving? Can you keep users hooked for four,
five or ten years?

The thing that really separates us is the concept of discovery. More
than two million bands have profiles on MySpace, from Madonna right down
to the most obscure garage band. People are coming to discover all this
talent. In the US we have film channels and comedy and books - and all
of this is coming to the UK. We give people a chance to present their
work and have it judged by a collective. Lily Allen is a great example
of somebody who has leveraged MySpace as a platform to gain attention.
We'll be seeing a lot more examples in the future.