Teens to Advertisers: We Don’t Want Your Texts (and Other Insights from YPulse Mashup)

I’m attending the YPulse Youth Marketing mashup in San Francisco, hoping to learn how top brands among teens and tweens manage to be successful in marketing to this incredibly discriminating audience. [You can follow #ypulse09 on Twitter if you’re interested.]

One of the best panels I’ve heard so far was a presentation by Bill Carter, a partner in Fuse Marketing, who talked about a study that Fuse did in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts on brand advertising aimed at teens. The survey-done with teens in “Sarah Palin’s America” (e.g. not just teens from the coasts and big cities)-aimed at whether advertising was memorable and presented in a channel that appealed to teens.

Carter emphasized the disconnects between what marketers believe is true about the power of various channels and what teens and tweens think, using these examples:

• TV is not dead to teens: 75% prefer and/or believe it’s appropriate for brands to reach them via TV ads.


• Teens are not interested in interacting with brands on social networks-at least the way brands represent themselves currently. Teens use social networking sites to connect with friends and do things that are fun-they don’t relate to brands online. Only 30% of teens have “friended a brand” on a social network.


• Official company websites aren’t dead: 80% of teens have gone to a official company’s product site and used them to make purchase decisions.


• Only 10% of teens approve of advertising in video games—teens just don’t believe that having advertisers in a game makes it more realistic. Carter said that ads for Burton snow boards in a videogame about snowboarding could make sense, but only because they’re in context.


• Teens aren’t interested in or receptive to ads in text messages: only 10% of teens approve of texting by advertisers; this ranked dead last in approval ratings by teens in what was acceptable in communications. Carter said that he believes this is mostly due to the way that current advertisers are using the medium, but it’s currently the case.


• Teens still read magazines: magazine ads receive high approvals and are the second-most-effective medium in reaching them.


• Teens say that the most effective advertising includes “people who look like me.” Only 20% prefer ads with celebrities or athletes as endorsers. The most memorable ad among teens was Verizon’s “can you hear me now” guy, Carter said.

In the Fuse study, 83% of those surveyed were average or heavy users of the Internet; 80% were average or heavy users of TV; 63% were average or heavy users of email; and 47% were average or heavy users of social networks.

Of the 80% of those surveyed who visited an official product website, 80% somewhat or strongly agreed that the site was valuable.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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