Youth Tribes, Double Bottom Line & Multiple Platforms
Posted by anastasia on 06-04-2009
I haven’t had time to plow through our live blogs or read everyone’s Tweets, but I thought I would attempt to summarize three themes I heard at this year’s Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup event come up repeatedly.
The old way of slicing the youth demographic just doesn’t cut it. A big theme that emerged for me from the urban/multicultural pre-conference is that there is a big gap between the practitioners in this space who understand how technology has blown apart traditional ways of “bucketing” youth (i.e. Asian, Latino, African American) and the brands who still allocate dollars according to race/ethnicity. It’s not that racial identity is no longer important to young people or that there aren’t differences to be aware of, but that’s just one part of their identity and not necessarily the part to target in a campaign. We heard this on other panels as well, with the disaggregation and disruption of a monolithic media brought about by the internet, you can and should target in a more granular way that ends up validating youth in the process — i.e. Latino heavy metal fans or environmental documentary film buffs.
The “double bottom line” should be every youth marketer’s bottom line. We heard a lot about how pro-social this generation is from the mobilization around the recent election to research presented by C&R demonstrating which causes and issues are important to youth (interestingly the environment wasn’t number one, it was youth oriented issues like education and child poverty — health issues like cancer were number two followed by environmental issues). Whenever speakers talked about brands adding value, supporting issues youth care about was mentioned as a key way of doing this — especially when using social media to market. For example, Target’s recent Bullseye campaign on Facebook, which gave away $3M every week to charity, let fans decide where the money went. Best Buy’s @15 program (for which I am an advisory board member) is part of the company’s acknowledgment that teens are key customers and parental influencers as well as a big percentage of their employees. By letting teens direct their giving to the issues they care most about, they hope to both have a positive impact on teens and help their bottom line.
Teen girls still like print magazines and yes, they watch TV…but digital is where interactions and engagement happen. Bill Carter from Fuse presented their latest research that included these two surprises: Teens still read magazines: magazine ads receive high approvals and are the second-most-effective medium in reaching them. And TV is not dead to teens: 75% prefer and/or believe it’s appropriate for brands to reach them via TV ads. We heard from a couple of the girls on our youth panel that they still love to read Seventeen and definitely pay attention to the ads — but if they see something they like, they immediately go to the web to FIND IT, find out more about it and possibly order it then and there (or get mom or dad to pay). And as Don Tapscott so eloquently showed in a slide featuring his son and his friends “watching TV” at college, all of them had their laptops open. All of my youth panelists said they don’t watch much, but when pressed, almost all of them said they watched “Family Guy” (specific shows vs. TV) and they watch it when they want on whatever platform they want. This means it’s essential for brands to have integrated, multi-platform strategies. That doesn’t mean, throw in some banner ads while you’re at it. Create branded content that has value and doesn’t intrude on youth’s user experience — whether it’s socializing or playing games. Branded virtual goods girls want in Stardoll, relevant action sports brands integrated seamlessly in snowboarding games, customizing flip flops in a chat environment, or the Target campaign mentioned above where your suggestion of where the charity you voted for ends up in your newsfeed.
I may have three more themes tomorrow…still digesting it all.
Categorized under: 2009 Mashup