Marketing to Teens: How Generation Y is Advocating Innovative New Marketing Techniques Without Even Knowing It
Gone are the days of traditional marketing to teens. If you are truly trying to break into the hearts and minds of these young people with buying power, you had better be Tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubing, Video-Gaming, MMS’ing, texting, and many more made-up verb words that are sure to make it into the next edition of Webster’s dictionary.
These Millennials, or members of Generation Y, are presenting fun and exciting opportunities and challenges to marketers, PR professionals and advertising executives all over the world. This past week I attended the Ypulse Marketing Mashup East here in Boston. Top brand executives and representatives from the likes of Virgin Mobile USA, MTV, Kaboodle, myYearbook and many more gave insights on what their respective companies are doing to reach this on-the-go and plugged-in demographic.
Each presented a wide-range of initiatives, events and research that in the past few years has presented a better look at who Millennials, like me, are. Even I was caught off guard by some of the stats and ideas presented over the two day conference.
Dan Hart, Senior Vice President and General Manager of MTV Digital, gave a presentation on their latest initiative to “engage viewers through multiple screens.” Backchannel, or what MTV calls the ‘party game for the 21st century’ recently launched to coincide with popular reality-TV series ‘The Hills.’ Through interacting with other players during the show, points are gained and stats are tracked over the course of the season. This real-time game lets viewers comment on LC’s outfits, crushes and all of the things that I have absolutely NO clue about to other players who may agree or disagree.
While this may seem like a silly game to some, Hart dropped a statistic claiming that 45% of teens watching a TV program IM their friends who are watching the same show for discussion. MTV Digital is capitalizing on this by now owning viewers on two of their media platforms at the same time – Television AND Internet. Talk about a marketer’s dream. Through the behaviors of Millenials, marketers are able to cater their messaging to the interests of their targets. Unfortunately for them, their targets’ interests span across multiple channels of different complexities, making it more challenging to allocate marketing efforts precisely.
And as a Millennial myself, it is exciting to see modern marketing from both sides of the coin.
Nice article
Thanks for the great summary John and bird’s eye view to Gen M. The IM usage while watching TV is really interesting. I find “my generation” is using Twitter in the same way. I’d love to hear about the Virgin Mobile case study if you have notes you can share.
Every marketer should find out the real interest of their target market. The golden rule of the marketing is to give people what they need.
Thanks,
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