How do you find these elusive gen y’ers and get your message in front of them? They don’t have land lines or addresses that are reliable. They quickly stopped sharing their real email address long ago. They now skip commercials when they watch broadcast. They gave up on radio. They are too busy texting to look up at your billboard or bus stop. How can you put your brand message in front of this audience - and how do you get them to interact with your brand where they are?
Increasingly marketers and advertisers are trying to break into social networking sites and the gadgets that are the tween to young professionals lifeline - their mp3 player, cell phone, or combined. Creating applications or user experiences in these spaces are difficult. Beyond ring tones and games, the average cell phone is a tough play. You can sponsor content and create some voting mechanisms to attach to a broadcast spot. Even when it does move to broadcast, it will be less interactive - unless the GPS signal can be leveraged for messaging. Then there is the iPhone.
The iPhone is ‘it’ right now and adoption of the Apple/AT&T subscription is growing at around 2MM subscribers per quarter. It’s got a ‘cool’ factor as well - as long as it is on the cover of Business Week and Fortune, it will be a favorite of the mahagony desk. Creating an app is easy - creating an app that appeals to the masses, properly connects the brand with utility and generates buzz and downloads is very difficult. If you can pair a good/fun/relevant idea with your brand, develop an application that gets you in the space.
Facebook has exploded since its opening and its another space where life plays out for this demographic. Creating an environment that doesn’t seem contrived and lends itself to pass along and referral activity is a feat few have been able to accomplish. You can’t be to self-serving yet you are the one spending the money to develop the campaign. You also can’t control what direction it takes. You can only steer it - too much interference and they will see right through it. They have to adopt it and make it their own. The pay off has to be good for them to share it with their friends. A recent Whopper campaign by Crispin was a great example. The idea was they were giving away a free whopper if you un-friended friends. It connected the brand to a value proposition but also created a situation where you had to put a value on your friends. Would you dump them for a Whopper? Then they tracked how many friends were dumped - 200,000 - proving the whopper to be worth more than some of your friends on Facebook.
The formula for creating a winning campaign in this space is not defined. Risk taking and creative thinking are required to develop something that will move the masses. While creating a daily planner app might be most useful for your brand selling daily planners, if you switched it up and created a shared social calendar where friends could pencil in social engagements on each other’s date book - it might just create the winning app and buzz you are looking for.
