Grown Up Thinking

This article appeared as part of MediaPost’s Engage:Teens Publications. To read the original post, click here.

So here is my report not from the sidelines, but from the mud pits of Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn. I was only there for 36 hours of it, but had enough time to party with festival children, see some killer bands perform, participate in the festival revelry and witness some brands in action.

In my eyes, event sponsorship is all about heightening the consumer’s experience. I hope for the sake of our industry, that corporate culture has graduated from thinking signage and logo placement equates to consumer retention and interest.

The true play for a brand in the event activation space is to elevate the event goers’ experience by ultimately conveying that the brand understands what the consumer is going through. Once a brand understands and connections to the consumer’s emotional event experience, they can effectively add real value as a sponsor.

Additionally, event producers don’t have the time to offer every amenity, every perk, every nice-to-have since they are focused on the entertainment and general production needs. I’m sure every festival producer says, “That’s a great idea; maybe we’ll get to it next year.” Four years later, it’s still a great idea but hasn’t been executed. This leaves a huge opportunity for brands to elevate their activations.

A quick snapshot of Bonnaroo to properly set the stage: four days of music and mayhem on a 700-acre farm in the middle of nowhere. There is no escaping the festival grounds. The average teen I spoke with drove 8+ hours and stayed in a basic camp tent with minimal amenities. Most didn’t have a basic fan in their tent and it was insanely hot. Bonnaroo isn’t an event; it’s a cultural movement comprised of loyal adventure seekers, with approximately half of 100,000 attendees being teens and college-aged.

Click here to read more of Doug’s experience at Bonnaroo 2010, and how some brands got it right.

This article first appeared as part of iMedia Connection’s Social Media: In Focus

More than a fan aggregator

With its recent F8 announcements, Facebook has again one-upped the world as we thought we knew it. Brand marketers need to start looking at Facebook as a much deeper and broader solution than one that purely amasses a fan base. As Facebook rolls out new functionality, brands have the opportunity to act immediately in a variety of ways. In addition, it’s important for brand managers to re-imagine their brands by leveraging social enhancements.

Brands need to be able to take immediate advantage of features such as the “like” functionality, but they also need to be visionary in how they can build their brands for the future and become truly social. While I encourage brands to take part in these new advancements, we also need to make sure that we keep an eye on the Facebook future and build with this future in mind.

So, in the quest to make your brand truly social, uproot your assets and think of new ways to infuse them through Facebook integration and by adding key social layers to the brand experience. Look toward the future and start evaluating the role that Facebook can play at retail, on the ground, and across every channel your brand touches. Not all opportunities will be a fit, but one thing is for sure: If you only look at Facebook as a place to have a fan page, you are missing the greater offering and will likely be sitting on the sidelines when the future arrives.

Get the full article here to take a look at some of Facebook’s new and evolving functionalities, as well as what they mean for your marketing efforts.

They are the holy grail of youth marketing; the 5-million-plus American high school students who will be leaving home for the first time this fall, building brand loyalties and buying habits that will last a lifetime.

During student orientation before my freshman year at Boston University, I signed up for a Bank of America credit card. Eighteen years later, I am still a customer — as a dad, homeowner and entrepreneur. Talk about the lifetime value of a consumer …

As students are about to leave the nest (and the influence of parental purchasing), they will have the freedom to build their own “best of” roster of preferred brands that will make this tenuous transition just a little easier. Their choices now will likely affect their loyalties for life, proving that there is no more critical time for brands to connect with consumers than that first step from adolescence to adulthood.

How can your brand seize this crucial market opportunity? Here are the top seven ways to emotionally connect with the class of 2014… right now:

#7: Facilitate connections: Most seniors are still strangers to their future roommates and classmates and have burning questions about the people and things that will shape their college experience. “What kind of music will my future roommate like?” “Where is the best place to grab late-night sushi at my new campus?” Create social connections between classmates and their new college town between now and September to get students talking early on.

#6: Talk dollars and sense: Most kids leaving high school have no clue how to balance a checkbook, apply for a credit card or even start building credit. Provide resources that educate (and make their lives easier) to build brand equity and trust.

#5: Give them the goods: Whether it is a coupon, VIP event access, or just a free slice of pizza, incoming freshman appreciate every edge they can get. If you really want to win the hearts of inbound college students, help them get the clout they need to rock those first days on campus.

#4: Help them domesticate: When mom is doing the laundry and making sure things don’t get musty, teens don’t have to think about home care. Now, it’s their turn to be the head of the household (or don of the dorm room). Show them the way, and your brand can “clean house.”

#3: Embrace school spirit: School spirit is at its peak during freshman year. Can your brand leverage the momentum of the football team, harness the heat of homecoming, or take over the tailgate? Create a national effort with local ties that tap into the power of school spirit, and your brand will never look back.

#2: Create a pipeline to the Bank Of Mom & Dad: Parents don’t know what their kids need at college, and students often don’t know how to ask for it. Brands can bridge this gap by helping students understand their needs and leveraging the growing 55+ age group presence on Facebook to ask for the right stuff in creative ways.

#1: Help them hook up: Facebook was developed to help guys and girls meet each another and hook up. Period. Incoming freshman will “like” anything that allows them to meet more members of the opposite sex. It is a premise as old as the dean, but remember: only certain brands can get away with this (and you know who you are).

This article appeared as part of MediaPost’s Engage:Teens Publications. To read the original post, click here.

An hour-long high school dramedy series that’s a musical? Let’s face it: Glee initially had everything going against it. Time will ultimately tell, but skeptics be damned. This year’s Golden Globe winner for Best Comedy Series turned out to be a runaway hit that has yet to lose steam as it heads into the second part of its freshman season. Above all, the show’s writing is top notch by melding a perfect blend of edgy dark humor and a lot of heart. The talent of the young cast is undeniable. And Jane Lynch turns anything into comic gold. But producers were faced with some tough challenges right from the start. How to get people to actually tune in? Enter social media and a relatively risky gamble on an aggressive interactive marketing campaign.

First of all, Fox chose to debut the pilot episode months before its actual season debut in order to capitalize on its 20+ million captive audience from American Idol. They then utilized the down time to really gain traction online by engaging with their most passionate fans (or ‘Gleeks’). Currently, @gleeks has a nearly 50,000 person following on Twitter and almost 2 million fans on Facebook. Mix that with its very own YouTube channel with exclusive content, PR-worthy appearances (Oprah!) and even nationwide mall performances. Yep, everyone’s all abuzz over the little show that could.

Blurring the line between fan and fiction even further, Glee has since launched a national casting campaign for new characters to appear on the series. Fox also recently released an interactive “hypertrailer” allowing viewers to click and “fan” the show’s cast members on Facebook, who also participate live on-air in weekly re-run episodes (or “Tweetpeats”) much like the cast commentary on today’s DVD and Blu-ray discs.

So what’s so significant about Glee’s marketing strategy, anyway? At its core, it is truly a niche show. But a very enthusiastic niche crowd at that. And Glee is giving that very core audience exactly what they want: access and interaction. At a time when studios are shuttering unauthorized playback of content and guarding creative copyrights like a fortress, this show is practically shooting it across America through a t-shirt cannon. Whether it be the show’s music content (consistently charting week after week on iTunes) or capturing that “underdog” spirit in everyone, Glee has succeeded in truly crossing all media types, including a forthcoming iPhone/iPad app. That makes it one of the very first scripted shows to actually achieve results in reaching out to a young, digital audience with significant viral success. That’s definitely a social media coup to be gleeful about. I, for one, am proud to be a Gleek. Who’s with me?

Glee resumes its season on Tuesday,  April 13 on Fox.

A recent video response by Kristina, a 21-year old student on the topic of communities working with brands, seemed to touch on so much of what Mr Youth has found to define the new consumer. While older generations might question the placement of advertising into personal blogs and You Tube channels, Consumer 2.0 struggles to see how this is any different then attempting to bombard them with a brand’s message via traditional channels. Kristina identifies how much more contextual and relevant marketing via peers and communities is. She explains how off putting “shoving commercials down our throats is” and how brands who take the time to think through ways to engage them and “work with them” have a much better grasp of how to positively communicate with their generation. Marketers could learn a lot from this 21-year old.

Though the price of an average mobile phone call keeps dropping, as does the number of land lines, the phone industry has seen no shortage of income thanks to the purchasing ferocity of their youngest market segment .  A recent study released showed that by the age of 17 at least 91 percent of girls and 78 percent of boys own a mobile phone, the majority of which use it for more than just making and receiving phone calls.  Mobile providers are embracing teenagers in every possible way, through youth centric promotions, applications and model designs.   Like any brand, the goal is to win consumers early, and create an affinity that will continue on, even after their parents stop paying the bill.  They have done this by constantly adding or offering more to each device and mobile plan, placing a higher importance on features over functionality, quickly phasing out the traditional cell phone and cell user in the process.

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