I've really enjoyed brainstorming the last couple of weeks about our June event with our advisers — not just because they're helping me plan what we hope will be our best Mashup yet, but because these discussions have been great for stimulating blog posts like my recent question about the words "urban" and "multicultural."

This week I met with our advisers to brainstorm about the main event and ended up having a really interesting discussion about research — What's behind the numbers, how do you interpret them, what role research plays in innovation and campaign development, and how can marketers take advantage of (and learn to read) academic research that may be available to them.

With everyone's budgets being slashed, free research like that from The Pew Internet & American Life Project and academic research, like the recent report on youth and digital learning funded by the MacArthur Foundation, as well as dissertations like danah boyd's work on youth and social networking, are suddenly not just valuable to the academics, educators and policy makers, but to marketers as well.

So often marketers tend to look for that perfect stat to throw into a Power Point and then these presentations become accepted as fact, even though that bullet could be completely taken out of context. The other challenge with paid research is that a lot of it is funded by companies looking for specific outcomes and often focuses on more connected, affluent teens. This can also leave brands or organizations using this research with an incomplete picture regarding how teens are really using the internet. As our adviser danah boyd explained, there are lots of working class teens in urban environments who access the internet completely through their Sidekicks. This means if you're focused on designing your user interface only for teens with laptops or desktops, you could be missing an entire segment of the youth population.

I've always thought there was an advantage to companies reaching out to and teaming up with academics doing research in this space — but it has to be a quid pro quo. Academics and foundations can't really justify doing research for the purpose of companies marketing to youth. But they can benefit from the data that a lot of these companies have about how youth are using the web or mobile.  Perfect example: Whyville sharing its data for research purposes with UCLA researcher Dr. Yasmin Kafai.

It's important for companies trying to reach youth to take advantage of the research being produced by academics. Not just so they can sell more stuff, but so they can better understand how youth are using technology in order to create products in this space that are useful…and that don't leave out youth often underrepresented in traditional market research.

Categorized under: Youth Marketing

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