mobileYouth®

Email marketing to youth is largely ineffective, internet ads peeve them and mobile CTR is in decline.

What I’m talking about here is using a medium in isolation.

Youth are highly effective at blocking out irrelevant marketing messages and single blast email or mobile campaigns in the vast majority of cases are irrelevant.

1 million messages a year

Why? It’s supply and demand. The demand for youth attention has risen exponentially. The average American sees over 3000 ads per day and spends 8.5 hrs a day glued to a screen capable of serving these messages – that’s 1 million ad messages a year! The supply of attention, however, is fixed. Any high school economist will tell you – that leads to an increase in price.

Marketers have traditionally responded to the rising price of attention by upping the volume; louder ads, ads occupying every single space of real estate available, ads mugging you on the street, ads in school playgrounds and yes, ads in urinals. Even though we’re seeing them, we’re not paying attention. The once big idea just got a lot bigger, and more in-your-face.

For most of us, advertising is annoying. When ads break up our listening experience, we get annoyed. When celebrities “hawk” more ad messages, we lose trust in the celebrities. When brands crash our events, they are pilloried in public. When brands invade our mobile experience, we expect monetary compensation (Blyk).

PAY attention

Notice it’s pay attention. We have to pay to watch these ads. That’s why the arms race is a zero sum game and advertising – as we know it – is an industry that will end up eating its own children.

Winning youth trust and attention means  earning the media not buying it. Funny chimps in commercials don’t mean earned media before you go there.

Youth memories are highly selective. Often we talk of youth being marketing savvy or brand cynical but this is often not the case. The answer lies within the mechanics; youth are often too young to understand the marketing process, their brain is simply responding to the need to be more selective.

The human brain is able to quickly discern between relevant and irrelevant stimuli at the subconscious level. We live in an era where we actively encourage students to not pay attention by allowing them to multitask during lectures. Bad habits are often hard to break.

Not only we spend less time attending marketing messages, we are quicker at gating out the stuff that doesn’t count; only 5% of the wall of noise is attended to – this neuropsychological phenomenon is known as gating.

Free isn’t the answer

In response to attention as your single largest cost within your marketing, some companies have been forced to reduce the price of their goods to zero (good overview by Seth Godin here). Why? Because the cost of attention is higher than the price of the product.

Going for zero is one way, not necessarily the right way, of redressing the balance. In certain cases, as with Blyk, even giving it away for free doesn’t work if the cost of attention is too high. Going mobile or facebook isn’t the answer – the price of attention is high regardless.

A more sustainable solution long term is to reduce the price of attention by building permission assets and partnership marketing. As Trent Reznor pointed out, it’s not about giving youth something for free, it’s about giving them a reason to buy.

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