Community Connect owns five niche social networking sites that reach reach out to ethnic and other niche markets. BlackPlanet.com, its biggest site, has 16.5 million members. It also operates AsianAve.com for the Asian American community, MiGente.com for the Hispanic community, Glee.com for the gay and lesbian community and Faithbase.com, a multi-denominational Christian network. The sites are popular with advertisers who seek to reach both the niche and social community markets. Peter Chen, VP of ad operations, explains how advertisers are using the community sites.
iSPOT: Can you explain your marketing strategy?
Chen: Niches were the thing we felt had high impact with a lot of cultural relevance. We try to bring real world experiences online and we focus on specific niches. We see high relevance in the offline world for black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, the gay and lesbian community and the Christian market. All the sites are leaders in the market. BlackPlanet is the largest site and gets over four and a half million visits per month.
iSPOT: Advertising to minority communities is growing. How does it apply to social networks?
Chen: When we started in ’96 the dollar amount on mulitcultural wasn’t big. That trend has evolved and it’s the same thing for the online spend and social media which have also grown over the last two years. We’re in a position where a lot are interested in spending on social media and also on multicultural, so we’re at a great spot now. We can reach multicultural markets in a social media environment that’s been growing tremendously over the last 18 months.
iSPOT: What kind of advertising is being used on your sites?
Chen: Not your standard banners–we have them but we build a lot of custom interactive programs. A lot of entertainment advertisers come to our sites because they want to build something members can interact with. We’ve done a lot of movie campaigns and just did something for Meet the Browns. There’s a page on the site for member profiles, they can go to our site, be friends with the profile, interact with it, leave messages and comments. It’s a much richer experience. We can run video in standard IAB units but what’s most effective is when they come to the profile page and the preview is right there. They can see the video and interact with the page. Members see a full page ad and interact with the page. They can activate page send messages for friends. We’ve also run movie campaigns that have exclusive clips from directors and actors so members get special content.
iSPOT: Have you run other campaigns with custom content?
Chen: Most of them are on BlackPlanet because it’s our largest site, so the majority of custom campaigns are there. Last year we did Why Did I Get Married?. They did a theatrical release and DVD release so they had a profile page for that one. House of Pain from TBS also has its own page.
iSPOT: Is video advertising being used in any other way on your sites?
Chen: We did video advertising for the Obama campaign. They ran it in a standard 300 x 250 unit. It was across all our sites focused on the Texas and Ohio markets. VH1 had a campaign targeted to the Salt and Pepper show, they had a profile page and the video was set up to rotate like TV spots. It was launching on a Monday so from Friday to Monday a different video played. We also did something for Visa that was a video campaign in a standard 300 x 250 format.
iSPOT: Do you have an in-house sales department?
Chen: We have a direct sales team in-house and satellite offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
iSPOT: You don’t use ad networks?
Chen: We do both. We sell a lot of advertising directly and whatever we don’t sell goes to remnant which goes to the ad networks. They do less on the video side, although a few do. Blue Lithium spent a lot on a GM program with rich media and expanding ads were running.
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