Youth Marketing Mega Event Conference Day 3 Dispatch – Reported by Jennifer Waits: The final day of the conference was Wednesday, April 13th and it was action-packed, including references to Generation I, M, and Y (12-24, 8-18, and up for debate). The big themes included the online space, the importance of buzz marketing to reach Generation Y, the growing influence of Japanese popular culture, and attempts by companies to address social concerns (media & obesity studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Girl Scouts' numerous research studies on girls, and my presentation on SparkTop.org's research with kids with learning difficulties). Highlights included:

Longitudinal Ethnography
One of the most interesting presentations was by Sachs Insights about the transition from high school to college. Researchers used ethnographic methods and followed a number of students over the course of several months to see how they changed after going away to college. Since much of the conference was focused on narrowly defined segment tracks of kids, tweens, teens, and college, it was refreshing to see a presentation tackling a transitional period, something that is trickier to define and market to. The researchers were able to get a glimpse of the context for comments because they employed personal video (kind of like the confessional on Real World) and also had the students keep blogs of their experiences. We saw some hilarious video footage showing how the participants' brand preferences changed as soon as they got to college. One girl excitedly packed her cool, trendy Ugg boots as she departed for school. After she arrived, though, her art school classmates made fun of them, causing her to describe the Uggs as "kind of trendy," meant this time as a negative description.

(Newsletter subscribers, go to YPulse to continue reading.)

Yahoo's Research on "Generation I"
Yahoo uses the term i-Generation to describe 12-24 year olds and their VP of Research shared information from the numerous studies that they've done on online behavior (they get more data in a day than Wal-Mart gets in a year). They did a big study of youth called Born to be Wired about how young people interact with all forms of media and she shared some video clips from teens.

My favorite insight was that teens find it easier to engage in potentially awkward conversations offline, such as emailing a late paper excuse to a teacher or having an IM conversation with a friend about "how you really feel." Similarly, a kid in Tuesday's panel discussion said that he used text messaging to apologize to his girlfriend, rationalizing that she can't ignore his text messages the way she could ignore a phone call. Teens in the study also mentioned their avoidance of unnecessary interactions with friends' parents by simply making all calls via personal cell phones.

Yahoo mentioned Yahoo!360 (currently an invitation-only Beta), a new service incorporating communications, content, and community. They will be integrating all of Yahoo's features and adding blogging, moblogging (blog made using camera phone) and tools for sharing photos and listening to music. They contrast this offering with Friendster, arguing that Friendster may be losing ground because they don't have enough tools or content to engage people or facilitate community after users have tired of the quest to search for friends.

Buzz Marketing
AMP talked about how Generation Y cannot be reached through traditional marketing techniques. We've all heard that there are hundreds of TV stations, a bazillion websites, and that young people aren't reading newspapers and magazines the way they used to. They are also supreme multi-taskers and extremely savvy consumers. AMP recommended the use of buzz or viral marketing and talked about some case studies where they incorporated word of mouth elements with sweepstakes, websites, magazines, and live events.

Influence of Asian Popular Culture
Tokyo Pop is a huge publisher of manga in English. They've embraced the growing influence of Asian culture on American popular culture and are working on numerous publishing, licensing, and multimedia projects. Historically, TokyoPop's manga business has been extremely popular with girls and teen girls are still big consumers of their products. They have a new (obviously more boy-oriented) show on G4 called Street Fury and another new show Initial D is coming to Nickelodeon's Gas (games and sports) Network.

How Girl Scouting is Changing for Tweens
Representatives from Girl Scouts discussed how they are revamping scouting based on their research with tween and teen girls. They've introduced a hipper/non-Girl Scout labelled website called Studio2B, are involving young adult scout leaders (vs. the traditional parent troop leaders of my youth), have loosened participation requirements, and are awarding charms instead of badges. They also mentioned that the massively scheduled girls today really don't have too many opportunities to just hang out with friends, so they are hoping that Girl Scouts can help provide that important space and time.

A few interesting studies mentioned on Wednesday:

Yahoo's Internet deprivation study asked 13 families with broadband to go without the Internet for two weeks.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has done extensive research about media and youth, including the recent Generation M study on the role of media among 8-18 year olds and surveys related to childhood obesity.

Girl Scouts operates the Girl Scout Research Institute, which has conducted a number of studies about girls on topics like self-esteem, safety, and obesity.

Complete Mega Event Coverage:

Youth Marketing Mega Event Day One
Youth Marketing Mega Event Day Two-Part One
Youth Marketing Mega Event Day Two-Part Two
Youth Marketing Mega Event Day Three

Categorized under: Youth Marketing

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