Is MySpace the future of Web Marketing?
While researching online for my upcoming thesis, I chanced upon several innovative campaigns by Carat Fusion for their clients Motorola and Adidas Soccer.
Carat Fusion is the first agency I know that is actively exploring new marketing propositions on MySpace. For Adidias, they created a MySpace profile complete with:
- photos of their sponsored players (with Adidas-sponsored player profiles of Beckham, ZIdane, Kaka too),
- videos of their recent ads, including that ad with young Jose Mourinho,
- competitions,
- blogs and most importantly..
- thousands and thousands of MySpace fans — their target market.
These fans are responisble for adding content and relevancy to their page, creatign comments, forum discussions, controversial arguments .. all leading to hours and hours of sustained engagement with soccer fans and hopefully favourable impressions of the Adidas brand.
Player Profiles
I like the secondary MySpace profile Adidas also created to promote the brand through their sponsored players that ensures geographical targetting of their markets. Not only did they include the most popular ones like Beckham and Zidane but they also have players from different regions: US players such as Eddie Pope, Claudio Reyna; Nakamura for the Japanese and other Asians, Riquelme and Kaka for the South American, Jaime Lozano for the Mexicans. They left out the Australians and Africans though.
And the blogs…
Justin mentioned about World Cup blogs and mentioned Yahoo as one of them, well Adidas surely links to much more… here's a selection for you to lap it all up and reinforce your relationship with Adidas.. 
Brad Guzan
Allen Hopkins
Lang Whitaker
Even New York Times, IHT and FIFA are bloggers…
New York Times, that venerable paper of United States, is in too on the long-overdue mission of enlightening Americans to the wonders and marvels of THe Beautiful Game. They now have a World Cup section under their Sports vertical and also a blog too, in partnership with another venerable paper International Herald Tribune, to capture all that web traffic and online surfing of their offline readers.
Not to mention FIFA, the world authority on all things soccer with their blog for almost every country here…
Are you reading this, Straits Times? Time to wake up from your self-induced offline coma and jazz up ST Online.
This article is contributed by Bjorn Lee, a Year 4 student. Check out his blog: http://bjornlee.wordpress.com