The cast of Twilight explains MuchMusic

So I’m watching Live @ Much right now and Sarah is interviewing the cast of this upcoming movie Twilight. Now, I haven’t read the books so I can’t authoritatively comment on the plot – can a commenter fill in here with plot please, Robyn or Kevin maybe? – but it seems to be about a girl in some rainy NorPac town who falls in with a crowd of sultry vampires. The movie is cast with models, not actors. Seriously. This is exactly the same route that Ashton Kutcher took, and last night I watched him on Real Time with Bill Maher – what an Amtrak performance.


But this crowd outside the ChumCity building at Queen and John is going absolutely insane. Like just total hysteria. Sarah is interviewing four cast members: three waif model-looking girls with gorgeous locks, and this foppish good-looking British guy who obviously is the object of everyone’s adoration and mania. He has his head in his hands most of the time and it makes me think he’s either jet-lagged or looking to score more coke. His name apparently is Robert Pattinson.

Sarah is now asking them “how are the vampires in this movie different from the vampires in other movies?”

They reply, “our vampires aren’t just villains, you get to see how they live, you know, they’re like, real people” – wow, deep.


Ok but really what is this saying about MuchMusic? It’s a scene that we’ve seen a million times before at MuchMusic: screaming fans and unsubstantive questions from vapid veejays.

But teens don’t like this, do they? Ok they do, but the ones watching at home are saying to themselves, “yeah, I love MM and I love the movie Twilight, but I’d sure as hell never be one of those losers screaming downtown in the rain.” The teens watching at home are still as engrossed with the content of MM but somehow can relate to the medium in a more marketable way. MuchMusic has crafted themselves as a youth culture powerhouse, a federal reserve for the distribution of what is meaningful and current.


See, MuchMusic creates a reality-based stage for the lowest common denominator. Teens love the lowest common denominator. It’s a way to feel intellectually superior to the depravity going on live on location but still get your fix of brands, celebrities, mundane issues, and relatable content.


I really don’t like the content on MuchMusic, but I adore the marketing. It’s just so blatant and pervasive. Even during commercials they’re now having trivia and showing a tiny square of live video feed. It makes you sit and watch. Brilliant.


MuchMusic markets to teens through creating a connection point with them. Note that I’m not saying they’ve created a ‘channel’, a ‘brand’, or a ‘programming schedule’. MuchMusic is a connection point with teens because it’s integrative across a variety of different media channels (tv, sms, video, web, etc) and has a high degree of interactivity with its viewers. The identity is founded upon strong young-culture acknowledgement (not debasement) and a recognition that commercialism is almost a partnership between the viewer and the channel.


Do the viewers know this? I’d argue that yes, they know they’re being sold with commercials targeted to them and content styled and translated to resonate. But they really don’t care about that. It’s being sold on a lifestyle and an identity that they affiliate with and like anyway.

So I actually now want to go see Twilight. Apparently so do all of you!

Marketing to youth: Part 2: TRANSPARENCY

We’re at Day Two of the Analysis of Youth Marketing. Today we’ll examine transparency, a critical factor of effective marketing to youth.

Youth value authenticity and reality. These qualities permeate their online and offline lives where ‘defining oneself’ is as much an act of self-expression as a pastime and filler of spare time. Customizable iPod skins, modular and unique Facebook pages, and rich media applications that allow users to generate their own content are embedded in the social lives of youth. These examples – emphasizing the personalization of youths’ consumer lives – aren’t exactly shocking when you consider how Gen Y was raised. Highly involved baby boomer parents have cultivated our individualism and forged a sense of self in Gen Ys that could cut through concrete.

The relevance for marketers is that this personalization is never unauthentic. Gen Ys are encouraged to be themselves and put their stamp of individual approval on every aspect of their lives. So for a brand to masquerade as something it’s not or to primp and posture itself as ‘hot shit’ to an audience that has not yet validated that assertion can mean brand seppuku.

To be less wordy, this means that brands that are not transparent about themselves do not succeed in a youth market. Why? It’s the same reason why we hate posers. They’re just lame.

Here are a few signs that you marketing reeks of lame-i-tude and is not transparent enough:

• Excessive use of teenage slang and speech patterns
• Portrayal of teenagers by 25-30 year old commercial actors
• Pompous style that suggests that your brand is cool and is somehow an authority on what youth like

But it’s not just trying too hard that can get a brand in trouble.

For a marketer to be transparent with youth consumers requires full disclosure about the purpose of the communication, the intended action to be taken by consumers as a result of the marketing, and the future relationship that the marketer would like to develop with them. There’s no way that this can all be communicated in one unique touch with a consumer, but if the style does not suggest that everything is on the table, then the youth consumer has no interest in even including the brand in their lives.

Remember, youth receive thousands of competing messages a day. Why should we listen to you in particular? The hook is as much excitement and buzz as it is the ability to portray yourself as a real brand with values that we can identify with.

So let’s analyze:

Who is transparent: Coke, Nike, Converse, Marilyn Manson (actually yes…when has he not



…btw, I’m a huge Manson fan. Watch one of the most offensive moments on television here.

Who is not transparent: NKOTB, High School Musical (despite its massive popularity), Dove (Unilever also makes Axe…think about the contrasting brand values), Rogers Wireless



…boo. Too much product placement, too distant from reality, too offensive to youth sensibilities. I do not identify with these actors. My friends do not identify with these actors. Missed. The. Mark.

Instead, let’s see a great example of an on-message commercial that has zero pretenses and speaks to the needs of young buyers:



(Or maybe I just like the beat…)

To marketers, the value of being transparent is that they can devote less time to embellishing false claims and more time to doing what the brand does best. Less energy is wasted thinking about how to tart up the brand to appeal to youth consumers and more energy is spent thinking about how to effectively develop meaningful relationships with the right consumers.

Youth are fickle and will as quickly drop you from their consuming lives as you were added to them. Marketers must expect and be prepared for this. You can be delightfully surprised when your brand actually achieves a modicum of traction and staying-power among this highly mobile and dynamic demographic. Transparency – underscoring the honest and authentic description of a brand in marketing communications – is essential to for any youth audience.

Tomorrow we’ll analyze participation, the second critical variable in marketing to youth.

been on message or uncompromising in what he says?)

Marketing to youth: Part 1: INTRODUCTION

I really don’t mean to frequently piss and moan about how marketers just ‘don’t get it’ when trying to connect and build relationships with Gen Y, but it’s a topic I feel really deserves more analysis.

With very rare exception, young consumers will affirm that they are not affected by marketing – that somehow they are able to discern truth from fiction, pitch from pulp, and weed out messages that are irrelevant and uninteresting to them. I’m not disputing that youth are adept colanders of information. Our generation has a remarkable capacity to handle multimedia simultaneously and segment our attention among multiple competing sources. Consider how easily we browse the internet, talk on the phone, on MSN, use Facebook, and watch streaming video at the same time. Marketers have difficulty among this cacophony so the typical response is to scream louder at youth consumers, thus adding to the noise and the overall muting of each marketer’s message.

Hear that humming noise? I know the under-25 readers of this blog hear it. Yeah…it’s the sound of a thousand different marketing messages competing for your attention. No wonder Gen Y considers themselves savvy and selective when it comes to consuming. They are able to pick and choose among an immense spectrum of brands competing for their attention and money. Who’s the boss? You.

So when analyzed in this sense, it’s no wonder that youth consumers think highly of themselves when it comes to knowing what to buy and the perceived insignificant impact that marketing has on them. They are (and always were) the authority on what was bought and what was not.

Now, let’s stop thinking that we’re immune to marketing. Obviously you make one decision over another and one brand out of the 100 competing for your attention ultimately gets it. What has made you select that one company? Is it your friends? Youth consumers are information seekers as much as they are willing participants in a culture of conformity and popularity. They’ll be high frugal and choosy about where to spend dollars, comparing features and specs for many types of products, but they are also highly influenced by friends, perception, and traditional marketing techniques that rely on primacy, recency, and spontaneity.

And what about things we allow into our lives but that we don’t purchase. Those who say marketing is only meant to make us purchase things that we don’t want/need are missing a whole other perspective. What about all the marketing that goes into intangibles: who we vote for, what social causes we get behind, what environmental issues we choose to devote attention to, what neighbourhood in a city we choose to live in, what free online applications we choose to use, what songs we download and don’t pay for, what tv shows we stream, what slang we choose to adopt, what celebrities we identify with, what courses we choose to take in school (yes…industrial and professional associations make big investments into educating and funding school programs so that their profession has a future harvest of labour). How can youth now honestly make the assertion that they are unaffected by marketing?

With that aside, I propose to help articulate some ground rules for defining modern youth marketing. Over the next four days I’ll be writing about four important concepts that are essential for marketers to realistically engage youth consumers:

Tuesday: TRANSPARENCY
Wednesday: PARTICIPATION
Thursday: RELEVANCE
Friday: UNIQUENESS

We’ll look at examples of marketers who have done things right and those who might need a little work.

It’s funny when people say that they are immune to marketing. Maybe they’re immune to screaming advertising, but not marketing. As an eternal optimist, I’d like to believe that a better understanding of how marketing affects Gen Y will ultimately precipitate fewer irrelevant ad blitzes by out-of-touch companies looking to increase market share, but greater tactical executions which companies use to deepen and nurture relationships with their best customers.

Although they’d never admit it, Gen Y customers reflect positively on marketing that is relevant and meaningful to them personally.

Why we should market to children

Last week's issue of Marketing Magazine had a great editorial piece from Eric Conroy about advertising to children. Unfortunately, MarketingMag.ca is not a very good website and try as hard as I did, I was unable to find a link to this article. For your copyright-violating pleasure, please enjoy the article as a scan to your right. Just click the pic and it opens in a full size page:

It points out some key considerations about why advertising to younger generations cannot be extricated from their media consumption. Young kids have been reared on a healthy diet rich in internet, television, mobile-and phones, to say nothing of the advertising that they ingest daily on the back of cereal boxes, candy bars, and pop bottles. Essentially, it's difficult to take the position that we should stop advertising to kids when they advertising has allowed them to lead the informed, highly networked lives that we want them to. For example, consider why content is free on the internet - it's a media model (you pay for ad space online). If kids are going to see content online, they're going to see ads. This principle can be applied to essentially every form of content they consume.

But I digress. Conroy's central premise is that the attack on advertisers as venal, despicable coruptors of children's minds actually draws attention away from the real issues of underfunded schools and after-school programs. The same issue of Marketing Mag explains how in April 2007, 16 food advertisers (representing 90% of advertising on kids' programming) banded together to promote higher standards of active living and healthy eating. These CPGs, including Kellogg's, Unilever, Pepsi, Hershey's, and McCain's set protocols for the kind of messaging included in their marketing. Some even stopped marketing to children completely. So if the ad-people are on the winning side, despite what a sluggish and reactive MPP might believe, then what's really the issue being debated???

...

Issue: Why do I have to parent my children? Can't someone else do it for me?

Yes, the real issue here is that parents cannnot stand to hear their children whine for Gusher's Fruit Snacks and the latest Bratz doll. The real issue is that children are treated like little emperors and have been afforded all the lattitude in the world to participate in the family grocery purchases and consumer budgeting decisions. The real issue is a mass internalization of the feeling that 'why should I tell my kids they can't have something? Can't advertisers just stop marketing it?'

We don't live in Communist China. Stick to your guns, marketers. Placate the parents and educate kids by promoting the right lifestyle values, but making concessions to this pseudo-parenting nonsense is ridiculous.