Reaching Out to Youth Requires … Youth
By Phillip Raskin, Managing Director and Market Leader, Burson-Marsteller Seoul

“Nothing about us without us” has long been a battle cry for activist groups fighting for respect, from civil and gay rights to neighborhood development and people with physical and mental health issues. Their logic was that they needed to be involved in decisions affecting them in order for policies to be effective.

While perhaps not nearly as compelling from a societal standpoint, much of the same could be said about today’s youth, especially in terms of marketing. Umpteen hours have been spent dissecting the finer points of our digital age, but one of the simplest truths is this: because of it, youth are no longer the objects but the creators of and participants in their own outreach.

It is perhaps quite logical – for people under 20, digital is an eternal truth. Many of them have been around computers, CDs, DVDs, mobile phones and videogames their entire lives1. They are not just “comfortable” with technology – it is an essential part of who they are and how they interact with others and the world around them. And they would be completely different without it.

All that technical knowledge allows this group to have a lot more control over their marketing. Where in the past, communication was largely one-way, centered on a lot of small ways to get youth involved, such as a mail-in contest or event, today’s youth are doing things communicators never dreamed of ten years ago, with programs like mash-ups, video blogs, personal music mixes and even re-edited movie clips. They are taking ownership of the outreach, and in effect, creating their own campaigns.

Youth today engage in what’s often called “digital grazing” – tasting different pieces of input, from instant messenger to mobile texting to digital video to websites to music, often all at the same time. During this process, they are viewing and using bits and pieces of things at will, doing what they like with them and then spitting them back out to the world. They take clips they like and post them on their own blogs, they send songs or jokes or cool things to each other; they share mobile phone pictures with their boyfriends and girlfriends. Today’s youth are spending inordinate amounts of time online, CyWorlding, FaceBooking, HiPiHi-ing, Twittering, MySpacing, blogging and just plain connecting with each other.

Making things tougher is the fact that this group’s antennae are also quite attuned to anything that even remotely feels like marketing. However, the difference between them and their parents is that youth don’t mind being influenced so much – so long as the influencing is cool and relevant, or has some benefit that they want. They freely accept sponsorship and commercialism, and understand they are being targeted, but they do want that outreach to be as interesting, or at worst, at least not condescending. So many times, they’re actually doing it themselves – sharing interesting things with each other, and in a relevant and (to them) acceptable way.

Because of that, one of the best things communicators can do is join in – give them tools to work with. Of course, this is difficult, because from day one we are taught that our job is to control the message. But the reality is that it’s already out of our control. We used to try and tell the youth what was in, now, hip, groovy and that maybe we’d invite them to join in. Today, they’re generating the excitement. And we’re lucky just to get to watch.

Burson-Marsteller’s proprietary Youth-Fluentials research focuses on understanding this connection, and how word-of-mouth and other modern grassroots phenomena develop. A recent edition of the study shows that this vocal, viral group has a lot of say in how their first-degree relations (friends and family) think, behave and act, including things like what TV mom buys for the house or where dad will take the family for dinner.

Here are a few examples of good youth marketing at work. Sony Entertainment Korea recently ran an interesting youth-based campaign, using subway stations to promote their DJ MAX game for their PSP (PlayStation Portable) handheld videogame system – basically one of those games where you have to push the right button at the right time in beat with a song. Booths in each subway station had different songs available for download, so teens were going around Seoul and getting off on and on the train just to download a particular song. Gamers hung out a Sony booths in the subway stations while downloading, meeting and talking to other gamers, and even recommending specific booths to visit.

Another example is local electronics giant LG, which sponsors a mobile phone texting championship – not only endorsing but celebrating one of the most favored forms of communications for the under-25 set. Fittingly, the fastest thumbs last year belonged to a 13-year old girl.

However, perhaps one of the most interesting examples of youth marketing comes courtesy of professional goth, Trent Reznor and his industrial musical ensemble Nine Inch Nails. To promote the group’s newest recording, a dystopian exploration titled “Year Zero,” they created a fan-friendly scavenger hunt that played right into their target audience’s behavior and beliefs. T-shirts sold on the prior album’s tour had seemingly randomly highlighted letters, which spelled out “I am trying to believe.” Sure enough, savvy fans who typed www.iamtryingtobelieve.com into their browsers were taken to a website depicting a horrific future 15 years hence. Though several other related sites were discovered by fans clever enough to look up IP addresses and other links, none directly mentioned the band. Following that, a series of USB keys were left in public place, including restrooms at venues where the band was playing – each contained unreleased (and DRM-rights free) mixes of new songs, with further clues.

What made the campaign really work was understanding that the target audience for the group would engage in exactly the right behavior to create and amplify word-of-mouth – going on chat rooms and discussing clues and conspiracy theories, sharing songs and files, linking web and video – and thus exponentially increase the reach of the campaign. Rolling Stone magazine even called it an “innovative promotion,” providing a guide for the confused casual observer.

Finally, lest marketers think dystopia, or at least a totally different reality, is just fiction, maybe a peek at www.threebillion.com is in order. Three billion gets its name from the three billion (yes, billion) people on this planet who are currently under 25 years of age. There you can find almost anything on what’s happening in youth communications today. They even have a video, which you can view here, full of startling revelations; such as the fact that 61 percent of these three billion live right here in Asia, or that while 67 percent of young Asians have downloaded music in the past month, only 27 percent paid for it.

With numbers like that, the statement goes from “nothing about us, without us” to just “nothing without us.” Communicating with youth in they way they want to communicate – or, more accurately, cooperating with youth – is all the more critical for today’s communication professional.

Wisconsin’s (U.S.) Beloit College publishes the Beloit College Mindset List every year. Originally intended for prepare professors for the worldview of a typical 18-year old American incoming freshman, the List is now annual fodder for media outlets with its bold proclamations such as “there have always been CDs” and “Disneyland has always been in Europe and Asia.”