MySpace: The most effective advertisement?

This evening I was reading the first post by our new writer, Kristen, when I suddenly recollected something that had run through my mind a few months back. Her article was about movies having MySpaces. Here's what I've noticed: hundreds of profiles are popping up to advertise TV shows, movies, radio shows and organizations. Think about this: these groups are putting up MySpaces, and putting information about them on them. They might not necessarily be directly telling you to buy something, watch something or join something, but in the end, that's most likely the effect. These people want your attention from their flashy profiles with often excellent layouts... and they do it to try to get you involved with them. This seems to be like one of the biggest trends in advertisement today, and I actually believe it to be the most effective advertisement tool.

Let's first take a look at an organization that you may not figure to be on MySpace: The United States Army. I visited their profile by stumbling through things, and I'll be honest, it was an excellent profile. From doing some gathering over the Internet, I've found out that MySpace is at the least the second most effective advertising tool for the Army, perhaps only falling to television advertisements. That's big. The best part for these advertisers is that they don't even have to pay to try to sell their product. Rather than paying television stations or radio stations to air advertisements, they might hire a person to run their MySpace and to add as many friends as possible in order to spread their word. It seems to me like MySpace is actually benefiting groups just by them creating a profile.

Many movies have made MySpaces, and one of the first I saw was X-Men 3. But they went yet another step further than just adding people and spreading themselves- they gave you an option to add a top 24, even before MySpace had implemented it itself. However, in order to get this benefit, you had to add them and view their profile (spectacular as well.) They were trying to get you to visit their profile- even more advertisement. So I guess what I'm trying to portray here is that MySpace profiles themselves are tools for advertisement and are extremely effective when you add friends en mass. With no money spent, a few minutes can take you a long way in getting your product out there- be that the army, music, or anything else in particular. With that, I'll leave it to you to decide if this is good or bad, what you might want to do with it, what you could do with it, or anything else in particular. I'm here to give you knowledge, not to try to persuade you :)