The three keys to Net Gen marketing are word of mouth, word of mouth, and… you get the idea. The Net Generation are important beyond their (huge) demographic muscle. They influence all generations like never before.
Last week in the UK a report from stockbroker Morgan Stanley by 15-year-old schoolboy Matthew Robson caused a sensation. The report raised serious questions about the outlook for newspapers, free-to-air television and other traditional media. Inspired by Robson’s arguments, the Australian Business Spectator asked its 15-year-old intern Scott Guthrie whether teenagers down under had the same views. The short answer: Yes. Here are some snippets that are sure to make shareholders in old media companies weep:
Radio
As Matthew Robson said last week, most teenagers nowadays do not listen actively to the radio. It has effectively become obsolete with the coming of the internet and the creation of sites such as last.fm and Myspace Music, which provide a practically on-demand music service with no uninteresting DJs chatting - and also no ads.
Television
The amount of television viewed varies greatly from person to person in terms of what interests them,…
The research on which Grown Up Digital is based showed that teen attitudes toward brands can differ from country to country. A recently released study of teenagers around the world confirms this. In the U.S. and U.K., brands are used to express individuality and for standing out from the crowd. For many other countries the opposite rings true: brands are used to showcase membership of a certain group.
This is one nugget offered by the Global Habbo Youth Survey (GHYS) Brand Update 2009 conducted by Habbo, the largest virtual world for teenagers.The study, conducted in April 2009, quizzed 112,000 teens aged 11 to 19 from over 30 countries—including 4,500 teens from the U.S.
“The teenage years are developmentally very important when moving into adulthood,” said Emmi Kuusikko of Sulake, the company that owns Habbo. “Status is important, being recognised for who you are and what you stand for….
I like the electronics retailing juggernaut Best Buy, and have had a number of discussions with the company’s senior management on how it can tap the full potential of the Net Generation as employees and as customers.
Recently the company advertised for a Sr. Manager of Emerging Media Marketing. This person would be in charge of social media marketing. And according to Best Buy, the successful candidate would have at least one year of active blogging experience, a graduate degree, and more than 250 followers on Twitter.
The job qualifications caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere. Some questioned the need for a graduate degree (in what?), or the idea that people with less than 250 Twitter followers need not apply.
The reason I think Best Buy is so great is illustrated by what happened next. Best Buy’s CMO Barry Judge…
There are a number of reasons why the actual spending by teens and young adults for online goods and services drastically understates the importance of the Internet in the total volume of young consumer purchases. Many young consumers research products online but make the purchase at a regular store because they don’t have a credit card. Often the product they research simply isn’t sold by regular online merchants.
A good example of the latter is universities, which gather hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition every year. Choosing a college is a daunting decision, and if advertisers could reach this young demographic and help them in their decision-making process, it could form the basis of a long and trusting relationship.
That’s the premise of YOUniversityTV.com, which was founded last year. It is designed to help students in the college-selection process by providing videos and educational resources for colleges across the U.S….
Levi Strauss & Company has launched a new ad campaign for its flagship Levi’s brand, hoping to appeal to young adults with an ambitious call to arms: “Go forth.”
According to the New York Times, the campaign will include commercials on television, online and in movie theaters; print advertisements; outdoor and transit signs and posters; social media sites like Facebook; event marketing; and a contest on a section of the brand’s own Web site (levi.com/goforth).
The campaign is replete with Americana imagery, in keeping with research indicating that teenagers and 20-somethings are patriotic and optimistic about the United States. Those elements include the poetry of Walt Whitman, flags, paeans to the pioneering spirit, declarations of independence, salutes to hard work and, in the star-spangled tradition of Madison Avenue, copious amounts of nubile flesh.
Don was recently interviewed on BigThink.com, which is an online forum connecting people and ideas. In the short video above, Don discusses why traditional marketing strategies no longer work, and why relationship building with customers should be a company’s top goal. This is particularly true of N-Gen customers, who want to have a relationship with companies and help them co-innovate great products.
Here is some background about the BigThink.com website: “Through an ever-expanding platform of knowledge content, including in-depth interviews with the world’s leading experts, Big Think is a vital hub for important information to help you function, and succeed, in a rapidly changing world. In keeping with our belief that crucial information should be freely shared, discussed and debated, we have developed a full menu of tools to engage, disseminate, and subscribe to uniquely powerful content. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Digg.com, Delicious, Google Reader, Vimeo, YouTube, a…
The 2009 Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup, being held today and tomorrow in San Francisco, is where top brand, corporate and social marketers, media professionals, educators and non-profit organizations gather to share best practices, research and latest strategies on marketing to youth with technology. Attendees find out what leading-edge technologies youth are using today and will be using tomorrow. Attendess also get an insider’s view into youth-focused tech and media startups and learn how to leverage social media, gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and more to authentically reach youth.
I am the keynote speaker today at 5:10 pm PDT. I will ask audience members to come to GrownUpDigital.com and post their success stories about marketing to the Net Generation. If you have a story to share, please submit your story as a response to this post. The first twenty responders will…
Undiscovered Gyrl is a novel written in the form of blog by a 17-year-old girl. It will be released this August. Publisher Vintage Books thinks it could be a best-seller, so the company is launching a “multi-tiered social networking approach” to reach the book’s target audience of young women.
“The days of just sending out books and getting reviews and selling them are just pretty over,” Vintage publicist Lisa Weinert told the New York Observer.
Weinert has already posted a video trailer for Undiscovered Gyrl, set up a Facebook account for its narrator, and started a Twitter feed. Nevertheless, she thought much more could be done, and reached out to her friends in “Ladies Lotto,” a network of about 1,000 women from across the country who correspond and trade career tips and references with each other over a massive email list. It’s a good example of an…
The controversial Story of Stuff video received a big PR boost today with a front-page story in the New York Times. The short video argues that the United States consumes and wastes much of the world’s resources.
Teachers have seized on the video as a way of getting middle and high-school level students to examine whether constantly upgrading to the most recent iPod model or the most fashionable jeans can take a heavy toll on the environment.
“From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view,” explains the video’s Web site. “The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number…
Even in the current economic climate, there is still a ton of equity out there that few companies have thought to tap into. What the heck am I talking about? Think inheritance. That’s right; despite the financial collapse of 2008, we could still be on the brink of a gargantuan redistribution of wealth from passing GIs to Baby Boomers and eventually from retiring Boomers to their inheritors. According to a Deloitte estimate, the Net Gen is set to eventually inherit $17.8 trillion dollars.
Of course no one really knows how much accumulated wealth there is in the GI and Boomer generations, or how longer life expectancies and inheritance taxes will affect the transfer of wealth, or if the current downturn will eventually empty the Boomers coffers, leaving nothing at all. Still, there seems to be an untapped opportunity in there somewhere.
For companies with Boomer marketing strategies, it could mean it’s…
A video of Don’s recent speech to the Institute of Direct Marketing in London, England is available for viewing online, and can be seen here. The video presents an overview of the Net Generation and the challenges of marketing to this age group. The Annual IDM Lunch is one of the most popular events in the direct, data and digital marketing calendar, typically attracting between 250 - 300 senior marketing professionals from around the UK. It has a reputation for attracting high calibre speakers (previous speakers include Sir Martin Sorrell, Sir Keith Mills and Dame Stella Rimington).
The Institute is dedicated to keeping the profession abreast of new techniques, new media and new practices. Promoting best practice, the Institute works to increase marketing’s contribution to business, while reducing its cost, through:
* Assisting the lifetime professional development of those engaged in direct, data and digital marketing
Even in the current economic climate, there is still a ton of equity out there that few companies have thought to tap into. What the heck am I talking about? Think inheritance. That’s right; despite the financial collapse of 2008, we could still be on the brink of a gargantuan redistribution of wealth from passing GIs to Baby Boomers and eventually from retiring Boomers to their inheritors. According to a Deloitte estimate, the Net Gen is set to eventually inherit $17.8 trillion dollars.
Of course no one really knows how much accumulated wealth there is in the GI and Boomer generations, or how longer life expectancies and inheritance taxes will affect the transfer of wealth, or if the current downturn will eventually empty the Boomers coffers, leaving nothing at all. Still, there seems to be an untapped opportunity in there somewhere.
For companies with Boomer marketing strategies, it could mean…
Social media addicts rejoice. This morning FriendFeed rolled out a new beta version with some innovative new features, albeit features that PC Magazine said “might make you throw up your hands and run back to Facebook.”
FriendFeed is a social media aggregator, pulling together and publishing updates from several online accounts–Twitter, Yelp, Netflix, Blogger, Flickr, etc–forming a feed of your online activity, and showing you the feeds of all the Friendfeed users you follow.
The new FriendFeed beta makes some pioneering moves in the search and the feed departments. For one, you now have more powerful search abilities that let you narrow your keyword searches to just your friends’ feeds or to everyone’s feeds. You can also set filters that will highlight posts from specific friends or about specific topics.
The ability to slice and dice the search data in a social network like FriendFeed, Twitter,…
Even though Microsoft claimed Encarta was the world’s best-selling encyclopaedia software, the company announced this week that it would discontinue sales of the CD-ROM shrink-wrapped product in June and shut down the Encarta website in October.
Why abandon the world’s best-selling encyclopaedia software? Because, as we all know, in the world of encyclopaedias, best-selling is meaningless. Most popular is what counts, and by that definition Wikipedia crushes all competitors. The Wikopedia entry in Wikopedia tells us that the site offers 12 million articles in 262 languages, with 2.8 million English entries. Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day, with the English version accounting for slightly more than half.
The site was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and has since become the most populargeneral reference work on the Internet.…
Internet traffic dropped more than 40 percent in Sweden this week after a new law made it much easier for copyright owners to track down file-swappers. Associated Press reported that Henrik Ponten of the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau said the reduced traffic means that people have stopped swapping MP3 files for fear of getting caught. “There’s no other explanation for it.”
I shake my head when I read stories such as this. I have long advocated that the solution is not to haul file-swappers into court for stealing music. Instead, the recording companies should restructure their industry so that music is made available for renting rather than buying.
In an Internet-friendly music industry, consumers wouldn’t download songs at a fixed price per tune, but would instead listen to music streamed to them over the Internet. Music fans would happily pay a few dollars per month to get access anytime, on any…
