14 DAY TRIAL // With MySpace struggling financially and dragging down parent company News Corp's earnings in the second quarter, it's no surprise that the social network is trying to shake up things in its advertising unit. Jeff Berman, MySpace's head of ad sales for the past three years and a half, is now leaving to “explore other opportunities” and the social network has hired ad and marketing consultancy firm Media Link to handle this side of the business.
“Media Link will be focusing on two primary objectives. First, the firm will provide guidance as we reconfigure our ad products to meet the current needs of the marketplace. As a key strategic advisor and partner, they’ll provide us with an external perspective on the larger advertising market as well as insight into what top clients (and those we’re looking to attract) are asking for,” CEO Owen Van Natta told his employees in an internal memo surfaced by MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka.
MySpace has decided to get outside help to handle the advertising and has hired the Media Link consultancy firm. The real news is the fact that Wenda Harris Millard, a top ad sales executive with a long history with tech companies and other big names and now president of Media Link, will be taking over the day-to-day sales operations at MySpace. Millard was a top ad sales executive at Yahoo during some of its best times and has recently left her position as CEO of Martha Stewart's Living Omnimedia.
In an interesting twist, she will not quit her job at Media Link and won't be hired directly by MySpace. Still, she will report directly to Van Natta and all local VPs will, in turn, report to her. The new ad sales head has a lot of work in front of her as users are turning away from the once largest social network in the US with visitor and pageview numbers down in recent months. This, coupled with a struggling online ad market, should make it hard to turn MySpace's fortunes around.