mobileYouth®

Answer: you don’t.

Yesterday I had a great conversation with Claire Lamont from Smak. To put this into context, I met Claire when both of us were leaving our respective presentations for a large mobile company based near Toronto earlier this year. We got chatting about the challenges facing non-traditional agencies in convincing large brands to evolve their marketing out of the comfort zone and into a mix more relevant to young consumers.

There is a conversation happening around the world that is taking place in most creative agencies and digital planners and that is “How do I make Cheese cool?”. (Replace “Cheese” with any product or service that isn’t fun, fresh and funky like Red Bull, Monster or Zumiez).

And it’s a conversation led with the wrong question – because this isn’t about selling Cheese – this is about dealing with the daily challenges faced by your customer. Traditional creatives scratch their heads over this problem because their whole business ethos has been based around developing clever or humorous content. That’s why you give the problem to them, they’ll tell you the answer lies in a fun or funky ad campaign…maybe even on Facebook or mobile?

As Dan Pankraz pointed out in his excellent starter post, “Create Culture or Go Home” – marketing needs to evolve from simply seeing youth as a destination for the message to seeing them as partners in production (Listen to the Radio interview with Dan here)

Procter & Gamble got it right with BeingGirl.com. They weren’t selling tampons to teenage girls they were addressing the myriad or issues facing female adolescents and giving them a community,a platform through which this exchange could take place. P&G were using marketing to create context not content.

Similarly, Smak in partnership with Taxi dealt with the issue by not using the marketing to create “fun & funky” content around cheese – it simply wouldn’t work (although it’s been done by countless agencies). The answer lay in dealing with the challenge – youth want to belong and want to be significant. When Red Bull organized the 1976 games they knew this wasn’t about energy drinks, this was about context. Similary, the Dairy Farmers or Canada could benefit by not impressing upon youth the DFC brand, or worse funking it up  – what was that worth anyway.

So, the idea for a Cheese Rolling contest was born – and a great one too. Events are a tough nut to crack. Many shy away from the idea of “creation” because they associate creation with money – yet it’s more a case of creativity as opposed to throwing money at the problem. Ian Votteri should know – he spent 12 years growing ESPN X Games from an event where companies were unsold on the idea to one where brands were queuing up to be involved (Listen to Ian’s interview on Upstart Radio here).

Well done Smak, you could have so easily been involved in a project sponsoring a food fair or a student event – throwing money at the problem rather than creating something sustainable.

Here’s some video from the day – you can see plenty on Youtube and I’m sure 2010 will be a bigger event still.

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