Chapter One…
We are mobile youth. We are 1 billion strong. We are Kaori, Amy, Kiran, Kan, Eduardo, Josh, Mohammed, Andrei and all the other stories, ideas and concerns that weave into the mobile youth mesh.
We are not your plain vanilla Madison Avenue picture of what youth marketing should be. By 2012 one in every five of us will live in India. When we don’t spend on chocolate it’s because we’re spending $20 a month on mobile. Record labels talk about youth piracy as a major threat to music but they need to look at the 30% of wallet teenagers spend on mobile each month as the biggest cause for their decline.
For years marketers stuffed us in powerpoint presentations in convenient segments, tales of “fun, cool” and (the latter buzzword) “personalization” alongside stock photos of happy kids skateboarding, high-fiving and hanging out with their text books.
It was also so very convenient.
If they signed up a million of us to their database and 1% responded to their messages, they’d have 10,000 purchases a month! But, they forgot one vital detail… what about the 99% failure rate?
When we decided we’d had enough of their constant noise we became selective with the messages we wanted to listen to. Everyone was telling us to look at this, come to this event, watch that, download this application. We’d sign up for a music service and they’d rip us off with the small print. We’d sign up for another and find that their “web service” was infuriating so we gave up. We’d find out our favorite t-shirt or sneaker was made with the sweat of some poor kid in Bangladesh.
We turned off, started taking our attention elsewhere. But they followed us. When we stopped reading their magazines they began invading our online communities. When we got bored of TV, they started shouting at us from billboards in urinals, playground swings, the rear of bus headrests and on the back of till receipts and photocopied paper. When that wasn’t enough they started invading our conversations and popping up with advertising that was supposed to be relevant to our IM messages and emails.
If this is about building relationships – is this how they treat the people they care about in their personal life?
Now, we have a lot of money to spend.
$300 billion to spend on mobile services so you can imagine we attract a lot of attention.
And it’s not just what we spend – it’s what we influence; we came up with how to use SMS and IM, invented Facebook, made the MySpace founders rich and showed the future of the music industry to the record labels before they had even thought they had a future. We also influence our parents, our friends and the media. We got Obama elected, haven’t yet dirtied our credit records with any toxic sub prime loans, hold the cards when deciding which car our family will buy and are fawned over by recruiters in search of “talent”. And, although economic, social and technological factors will come and go there is one truth that will remain timeless – we will be here long after you’re gone – still spending, still changing, still influencing.
So no wonder they’re after us.
We’re the reason why their CEO can face the board on Monday and talk about a “growth story”. We’re the reason why the CEO can justify the billions of dollars spent on licenses and technology because it’s us (eventually) who’ll be using them. We’re the reason why the record labels are in an irreversible decline because they treated us like criminals.
We’re one third of your customers, half your future profits, 2/3rds your marketing and 90% of your insight.
We carry a lot of responsibility and everyone is out there trying to persuade us to part with our dollars to make the decisions a bit easier. In your day, you trusted the glossy brands, the centre spreads, the billboards thrust high above the skyline. When we see that, we turn off… it’s just another big brand splashing out their cash trying to grab our attention.
Now, we’re not so interested in the big statement.
Just because they say they’re a big brand, doesn’t mean they’re out for us. We’re interested in the brands that are real, authentic and have a history. We want brands that care about social values like the environment, child poverty or teenage homelessness. We don’t talk to brands that gatecrash the party, rather those that sit and chill a while, brands that give something for us to play with – no I don’t mean yet another application to download but an event, a cause, a reason to be. I want the CEO to be on youtube apologizing for the poor service and saying “sorry…we screwed up”.
We are the same youth yet we are so different. We are grungers, skate punks, ragamuffins, dweebs, yamanba, bikers, MCs and the thousand other tribes that create the fabric of the youth social universe.
We are unique in our symbols, our leaders and our definitions but we are ultimately no different to when you were our age.
When we shared files, you swapped tapes. When we networked on Myspace, you went record shopping with your friends. We spend hours texting and on the phone, you drove your parents crazy hogging the landline. You distrusted governments, we distrust companies. We are united in our shared human needs to belong and be something but divided in our views on what youth today want.
Perhaps it was all those conferences you went to. When all along you knew it was about looking good in front of your mates and hooking up with girls you got lost in all that tech-talk. Killer apps, value chains, market segmentation and all that. In fact, the more you tried to improve your marketing, the less time you spent with us such that now you can’t remember the last time you spoke to one of us.
It’s not an unusual story. It’s the story of every marketing executive who’s passionate about customers and what she does but constrained and converted by the very DNA of the organization and industry that she operates in. In a market where the competitive landscape is increasingly defined by one factor alone – consumer insight – “mobile youth” aims to challenge the concept of what insight into the lives of young consumers really is and how we can make significant steps towards understanding what youth really want.
You’ll find the answers take you back to where you began – when you were younger and unburdened by industry self-talk, when the naivete of youth meant possibility and constantly asking the question “what it?”. This book is their story, not ours – not the industry’s.
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