Shawn Gold is Senior Vice President of Marketing & Content for MySpace.com, the social networking phenomenon nearing a staggering 100 million members. So, when your site adds more than 400,000 new users a day with virtually no advertising, what does the chief marketing guy do exactly? Asked that as he keynoted the CTAM Summit in Boston today, Gold chuckled at the obvious question and answered that his role is mainly to build and position the brand, reward users, influence what goes into the site’s massive database, and to package all of that for the benefit of advertisers. Okay, so maybe his job isn’t so simple after all.

Gold acknowledged that the older generation—basically, anyone over 30 in this case (sigh)—tends to be “freaked out” by the fact that the site’s young users “put themselves out there” and invite strangers into the personal details of their lives. He also has fielded numerous complaints—again, mainly from us old fogies—that the majority of the profiles on the site are unwieldy, frenetic and often a complete mess. “But if you’ve ever seen a teen’s room, it makes perfect sense,” he said. While many of us non-GenY-ers still may not quite get it and question the appeal of obliterating the walls of anonymity online, we nevertheless make up MySpace’s fastest-growing segment of users. The 35+ crowd on MySpace now numbers 26.6 million, Gold reported.

Upending rules of entertainment and socializing, MySpace arguably has forced a reconsideration of the old adage “content is king.” Today, it’s “contact” that rules in the online kingdom. The new world of contact enabled by the site has also changed the dynamics of advertising. Addressing a hall full of marketers today, Gold noted that “the people on MySpace definitely are not there to look at advertising.” He said advertisers must think in terms of “brand programming” that allows MySpacers to interact with the brands, citing recent successful campaigns for X-Men: The Last Stand and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest that created MySpace “evangelists” for those blockbusters. For advertisers, the appeal of such interactive MySpace campaigns, Gold concluded, is that they can “extend a 30-second spot to three months.”