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.
I’m glad someone is finally saying this, because it’s been a hunch of mine for a little while and I didn’t have the hard data to back it up. Great stuff.
Posted on June 3, 2009 by Ron
I heard people talking about this a couple of years ago, but lately everyone seems to be saying “they all text each other, so we should text them.” I’ve always believed that a teen texting her friends is way different than a university texting that teen unless and until there’s a close relationship there. I also wonder how teens react to marketing from colleges and universities—as opposed to brand marketers like Disney and Verizon.
Posted on June 5, 2009 by Michael Stoner
Thanks for sharing the data, Michael.
What’s really weird though is that these results totally contradict those from another study I included in my upcoming column about the mobile web:
35% of teens remembered seeing short code advertising—45% of them responded.
Moreover, any mobile marketer should be following the guidelines from the MMA including not sending text messages to cell phone users without their prior consent.
As a result, I’m not sure we should discard all mobile marketing at once even using text messages - just bad practices that don’t comply with the guidelines.
Text message marketing should be and is an opt-in channel. When used as intended, I’m pretty sure it can yield great results - and it will for sure in a couple of years max (playing the prediction game)
Posted on June 5, 2009 by Karine Joly
Karine,
I’m reporting the data I heard (interestingly enough, there was another report on a survey that had similar conclusions—and I just read the Noel-Levitz E-Expectations report, which also reports that text messages aren’t too effective with teens).
Several key points, though: you’re right that anyone who is using text messages should be doing it as an opt-in. I also note that these studies are done for commercial marketers; I’ve always believed that marketing a college or university is different in many ways than marketing soft drinks or mobile phones or athletic ware. One way in which it’s different is that in some cases and for some audience members, any sort of communication is reassuring and welcome. That’s not to say that colleges and universities should be texting everyone, but I’d guess that as students become more interested in an institution(s), the chance that they’ll welcome multiple types of contact, including texts, goes up.
Posted on June 7, 2009 by Michael Stoner