What the “youngins” want to hear and how they hear it best

by Next Wave Team | Mar 1, 2007 | Ad Agenices in Dayton, OH, Brand Relevancy, Change the world, Creativity, Differentiating Your Brand, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Marketing & the Web, Practical Marketing 101, Secrets of Great Advertising, Web strategy

Went to the Dayton Ad Club today- yeah, the people who continually threaten to throw us out- to hear Clint! Runge from Archrival speak.

Very cool insight into the “Millenials” or “GenY”- and a nice presentation. I was excited to go and check out their site- which would of course be web 2.0 to the hilt - since these guys “got it”- well, no joy:

Archrival / We Help Brands Attract Young Consumers

Sure- they have RSS, and a “blog”- but so little content that is actually able to be spread.

Just like the Burger King site- or so many other agency sites, if I find something interesting on the site- I can’t mail it to you. Too bad, because the work they did on the TipTop upscale apartment building is something I’d want to share with others. Luckily, they built the site for the client better than they built for themselves- so you can check it out: http://www.thetiptoplife.com/

Clint! must have seen the branding campaign by Hamilton! Ohio a few years back- which map makers refused to acknowledge. In the days of Google, it’s a cool way to get your google rank up.

Some key concepts that struck home about the millenials:

• Give them experiences to talk about- not products.
• Be optimistic and positive- the days of sarcasm are fading.
• It’s about we- more than me.
• Computer/phone first lines of communication- forget traditional media.
• Recommendations from peers are more powerful than anything you can try to ram down their throat.

Also loved his comment about “Entertainment debt”- where you feel that you are behind when there is too much stuff cued up on your TiVo or in your “to watch” file. I can relate. Also, as MySpace becomes more and more commercialized- we’ll see more people kill their profiles as they move to more specialized and hip communities. As to marketers jumping into MySpace- get your own space- and make it fun- that boat sailed a while back.

As a side note- the woman sitting next to me recognized me as being from the agency that lists all the adveritisng agencies in Dayton on our site. Of course, she had just completed her job search and was working for one of them. Congrats for being a smart job seeker.