In a week, the entire advertising sales staff of MySpace will gather at a swanky new seaside resort about 20 miles south of Los Angeles to get a first glimpse of the fresh direction the company is preparing to take under its new management.

The beleaguered social networking site has been in the midst of an effort to reinvigorate its image, spur innovation in its product and–most of all–pull itself out of a too-long slump, even as longtime rival Facebook has seen explosive growth.

Now, with a new team of execs, the News Corp. (NWS) property is putting the finishing touches on a master plan, which will include a new redesign of its hopelessly messy interface and doubling down on a product strategy that will center on, said one source, “what we own”–namely, music and entertainment.

On the agenda, aptly enough, for the 150 ad sales employees, who will gather at Terranea in Palos Verdes, is Ben Sherwood, author of “The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life,” and founder of a Web site of the same name that describes itself as “the place for surviving and thriving.”

Also coming to the meeting will be several bands that have successfully leveraged MySpace as a platform, to talk about their experiences and to play for the crowd.

And, perhaps most importantly, the group might also get to meet its new boss by then, as several sources close to the situation said that MySpace has settled on an exec to fill the key job of running its ad business.

While it is unclear if the deal is completely done, sources said MySpace management will announce the pick this week.

Sources added that MySpace has been particularly interested in one exec from Viacom (VIA) and another from Microsoft (MSFT).

While the sources would not name the Viacom exec, several pointed to Keith Lorizio, Microsoft VP of U.S. sales, as someone MySpace has been targeting.

In late August, MySpace sales and marketing head Jeff Berman left the company as MySpace hired MediaLink, a New York- and Los Angeles-based media consultancy, to help get its ad sales business back on track.

That effort has been led by MediaLink President Wenda Millard, who is well known in the ad industry and was longtime leader of the ad sales force at Yahoo (YHOO).

Getting an experienced top ad exec in place will round out a recent spate of new hiring by MySpace, including a new CTO, Alex Maghen, who moved over from its MySpace Music joint venture, and a new CFO, Mark Rosenbaum.

This has been part of a wholesale flushing out of most of the top execs who worked under co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe by new CEO Owen Van Natta.

Van Natta, along with COO Michael Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn, have been squirreled away since late April, working at cleaning up the company by replacing management, restructuring its various units and cutting costs, including massive layoffs.

They have also been trying to come up with a plan to differentiate MySpace from Facebook, a good strategy since it is now well-nigh impossible for the Beverly Hills-based MySpace to catch up with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook’s galloping growth.

While the whole new offering will not be rolled out prominently until at least the first quarter of next year, said several sources, some changes will begin sooner, including a gradual redesign of the site.

Under the new plan, said several sources, the main idea will be to shift the focus to engagement over sheer audience numbers. While MySpace is still huge, with about 70 million monthly U.S. visitors, increasing how much time they spend on the site is the goal.

“It’s not like numbers are not important, but the better metric for MySpace will be how involved users are,” said one person close to the situation. “MySpace needs to win on minutes.”

And, rather than the wider and more scattershot approach of past years, the new direction being stressed is more scalable and focused.

“It is not about getting everyone and their mothers on MySpace,” said a source, “but about being a better site to those here.”

That will include stressing “ownership” of online categories, which for MySpace are music and entertainment, with the hope that advertisers will be attracted to more engaged users.

Unlike Facebook, which is often described as a utility platform for communications between friends, sources said MySpace will be aimed more at being a platform for communities of interest.

That includes using tools from other companies, such as MySpace’s recent two-way synch with Twitter, the hot microblogging service, to link those communities.

Presumably, the company’s August purchase of iLike, the social music start-up, is also part of that plan.

“Instead of the ability to just connect friend to friend in a single social graph, this will be about connecting a person to their communities of passion and interest and to others like them anywhere,” said one source.

Music is the obvious key leverage point, the still-bright spot of MySpace, followed by adding big entertainment categories like movies, television, gaming, video and other pop culture arenas.

(BoomTown request: Become the HQ for “Gossip Girl” addicts, um, fans, and I am so there.)

“MySpace should represent pop culture online to customers and advertisers,” said one source. “The core strength has always been music and that is where the site will really excel, because it binds customers to the service.”

The even heavier music focus on the main juggernaut site, noted several sources, does create an odd situation with MySpace Music, the separate joint venture the site has with music labels to create a massive music community.

While sources do not think News Corp. will attempt to suck MySpace Music back into the main site, due to the complex partnership issues, the idea is to make them even more deeply integrated and to sell them to advertisers as one powerful marketing message.

In any case, several sources noted that one of the most successful parts of the new plan has been to convince News Corp. leaders that MySpace does not have to beat Facebook to be successful.

Sooner than later, of course, MySpace has to do just that.

Will it work? Who knows, but said one source close to the situation quite correctly:

“There is no silver bullet for MySpace–it just has to climb back step by step.”

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Yahoo is set to unveil a major marketing campaign to reset advertiser and consumer perception of the long-troubled company during Advertising Week in New York, which starts a week from tomorrow.

According to numerous sources BoomTown has spoken to about the campaign, Yahoo (YHOO) is–at least with advertisers–going to focus on stressing the size and scale of the Internet giant.

The details of the plan will be made public Tuesday, Sept. 22, at a press conference.

It will take place immediately after a keynote speech–titled “Yahoo’s Consumer Revolution…Round II”–that the company’s new CMO, Elisa Steele, is set to deliver on the second day of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference.

MIXX is a two-day event, run by IAB, focused specifically on online advertising.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is also going to be attending Advertising Week–during which all the major players in the advertising business gather in Manhattan for a series of events–for a plethora of meetings with big Yahoo clients.

It is likely she and several other senior Yahoo execs will be at the press conference, sources said.

That press event will also include Penny Baldwin, a well-known industry exec Yahoo hired as its SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management in July.

The main message Bartz is set to deliver is that Yahoo is a powerhouse unlike any others on the Web when it comes to online display advertising.

And, in fact, Yahoo–despite all the internal and external turmoil it has undergone in recent years–remains one of the largest sites on the Internet, and is the top player in what is also called graphical advertising, as well as online media and communications.

“The whole push seems to be to remind people of vibrancy of the brand and exactly how huge its reach is,” said one person who has seen parts of the presentation. “It is less Yahoo is back than Yahoo has never left.”

Sources also noted that Yahoo is likely to stick to its plan to push the idea of “your home on the Web” to consumers, which I had previously posted about earlier this summer.

The idea of the Silicon Valley icon being the key hub destination for Internet users does dovetail with pushing its size to advertisers–major marketing messages that will also likely cost a pretty penny.

They will have to–Microsoft (MSFT) has been in the midst of a $100 million campaign for its new Bing search site and will likely spend more when it unveils updates to the service, dubbed Bing 2.0–within the next few weeks.

The company showed the changes it showed to its own employees last week, which was the subject of much tweeting on Twitter.

Yahoo will apparently give more specifics as to the spend for the marketing push at the press conference.

But, many sources said, the company is already out in the advertising market now, buying tens of millions of dollars in advertising online and offline to hawk Yahoo in print, on television and elsewhere.

(Full disclosure: Sources said that campaign will include The Wall Street Journal network, which includes this site.)

“It’s dramatic,” said one source about the marketing outlay.

Since she got to Yahoo, Bartz has continually stressed the need to promote Yahoo products and services more, including in an interview last week on CNBC (you can see that longish video here).

And, in the July earnings call for Yahoo, Bartz said: “In addition, we’re hard at work on plans to reposition our most valuable asset: Yahoo’s brand. Our Q3 plans include an initial wave of incremental marketing spend which will increase substantially into Q4 and next year.”

Also, in a Q&A in the same call, she added more about the long-term nature of the spending on branding:

“The branding and our whole campaign of advertising is just starting; however you have to understand that this is an ongoing campaign so it’s not transient at least for the next year or so. We’re really going to move to reposition the Yahoo brand and Yahoo Company, so right now, consider that as cost that’s in the system.”

What Bartz and other Yahoo execs will likely stress less is search, due to the search deal Yahoo struck in July with Microsoft in which the software giant will take over the back-end technology and Yahoo will sell search ads for both companies.

The company will compete with both Microsoft and Google (GOOG) in garnering the search market still, once the partnership is approved by regulators, with Yahoo focusing on differentiating itself via innovative user interface, design, features and functionality.

In yet another letter to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, the ever-grumpier billionaire investor, who is waging a proxy fight against Yahoo (YHOO) and seeking to oust Yang and crew, stepped up the volume to Crazy Eddie levels today.

It’s almost too juicy to require translation, as the veins practically pop out in Icahn’s letter from all the agita he seems to be experiencing over this botched takeover.

Icahn writes: Dear Mr. Bostock:

I have constantly complained about how far CEOs and boards will go in order to retain their jobs, yet even I am amazed at the length Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board have gone to in order to entrench their positions and keep shareholders from deciding if they wished to sell to Microsoft.

Translation: And I thought Dick Parsons of Time Warner (TWX) was a potted plant! But you guys make him look like the Road Runner, which is a very nice Warner Bros. brand, I might add.

Icahn wrote: According to details in a complaint that I became aware of yesterday (details Yahoo fought to keep under seal), Jerry Yang and a majority of the board went to inordinate lengths to sabotage a Microsoft bid.

The damage to Microsoft “is compounded by the fact that Yahoo’s thousands of engineers, known as ‘Technical Yahoos!,’ have detailed job responsibilities and qualifications.”

Translation: I am playing brain dead here, even though everyone and their grandmother knew exactly what Yang was doing at the time with that massive and costly severance plan.

But, with a little verbal foot-stamping and some grumbly sounds, I think it approximates an appropriately hysterical level of outrage and surprise.

Icahn wrote: Most importantly, Microsoft might never be able to trust a CEO and board who, while claiming to be negotiating in good faith, went behind their back and adopted a “plan,” which not only sabotages any Microsoft acquisition but went so far as to completely disable its own ability to rescind the “plan” as long as Microsoft’s offer remains pending.

In my opinion, it will be extremely difficult for Microsoft or other companies to trust, work with and negotiate with a company that would go to these lengths.

Translation: Outrage! Foot-stamping! Grumbling! Acting like the once-thuggish Microsoft (MSFT) doesn’t actually admire this tactic by Yahoo in its secret heart of hearts.

And now, the piece de resistance, I compare Yang to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, as translated by Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil (One millllllliiiiioooooon dollars!).

What next from you evil-doers? A shark with a nuclear bomb attached in my lap pool? Painting me all gold and purple? Perhaps suspending me and a lovely disposable Bond girl high above a tank of piranhas?

But I am 0000000007, a billionaire’s secret agent number, so bring it on!

Icahn wrote: It is insulting to shareholders that Yahoo for the last month has told us that they are quite willing to negotiate a sale of the company to Microsoft and cannot understand why Microsoft has walked away.

Could this have been the problem?

Translation: I like the silly focus on “the plan,” don’t you? It sounds so sneaky and naughty.

Even though, truth be told, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has publicly pointed to the ad outsourcing deal with its archrival Google (GOOG) that Yahoo is considering, as well as the price it is willing to pay, as the software giant’s main deal blockers.

Icahn writes: Even more deceitful are Yahoo’s actions toward its own employees, for whom you claimed to have set up the “plan.”

Management neglected to mention to these same employees that Microsoft in its proposals had earmarked $1.5 billion of retention incentives (representing over $100,000 per employee) meant to allay any employee concerns.

Translation: Again, “The Plan” sounds spooky, doesn’t it? M. Night Shyamalan is set to make a movie of it, just like “The Sixth Sense.” The tag line: “I see overcompensated geeks!”

Icahn wrote: Ironically, according to the complaint, this is not the first time that Yahoo has denied shareholders the opportunity of selling to Microsoft at a large premium.

An article in CNET News cited in the complaint sums it up by stating, “Yahoo may indeed agree to Microsoft’s [offer], but it will be over Jerry Yang’s dead body.”

Translation: Dead bodies! I smell a hit movie! Hello, Oscar!

I wonder if Michael Douglas should play me again?

Greed, by the way: Still good!

Wait, I am being distracted from the issue at hand, which is: Was the board and former CEO Terry Semel high not to accept that $40 a share last year?

Smoking, I might add, is very bad for your health.

Icahn wrote: I and many of your shareholders believe that the only way to salvage Yahoo in the long, if not short run, is to merge with Microsoft. However, because of HSR considerations, to complete a merger of this magnitude will take a period of time.

Therefore, the best chance to bring Microsoft and Yahoo together is to replace Yang and the current Yahoo board with a board that will negotiate in good faith with Microsoft and in whom Microsoft will have trust to operate the company during the long period between signing and closing.

Translation: Please step down now! No? Pretty please? (It was worth the try.)

Of course, Microsoft trusts me less than you to run the place, but let’s leave that pertinent point aside here, shall we?

Icahn wrote: You stated in a press release yesterday that, “Yahoo’s board of directors, including Jerry Yang, has been crystal clear that it would consider any proposal by Microsoft that was in the best interests of its shareholders.”

I understand how these actions are in the best interests of management and a board whose members each receive $40,000 per month for several days work, but it is hard for me to understand how these actions are in the “best interests of the shareholders.”

Translation: To make my point, let me channel Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” here, with me playing Jack and Yang Tom Cruise:

Icahn: Ever served in a forward area?

Yang: No sir.

Icahn: Ever put your life in another man’s hands, ask him to put his life in yours?

Yang: No sir.

Icahn: We follow orders, son. We follow orders or people die. It’s that simple. Are we clear?

Yang: Yes sir.

Icahn: Are we clear?

Yang: Crystal.

Icahn wrote: However, despite your actions to date, there is still some possibility that you can resuscitate a Microsoft offer for the company.

I can only hope that you will finally do what is in the “best interests of the shareholders.”

Translation: My “plan” is to say “the plan” as much as possible, until I drive everyone nuts and take their eye off the ball, which is getting more money for me in this digital briar patch, as the only “shareholder” that I actually care about.

I threw in the “one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist” dig, because I am not one in any way whatsoever and still have my secretary print out my emails.

By the way, what is this Facebook thingamajig people keep talking about as another Microsoft target? Do you have to be a rocket scientist to join it?

Icahn wrote: Sincerely yours,

CARL C. ICAHN

Translation: Still as insincere as ever!