Here on the blog, I often spend a lot of time discussing YMC’s use of digital tools for marketing brands to a Gen-Y crowd. Because I’m fascinated by emerging trends in interactive marketing, I’m always chiming in with my opinion about the success (and failure) of recent digital campaigns. Gen-Y lives and breathes digital, so I make it a point to be right there with them — even if that means tweeting like there’s no tomorrow. (As I’ve said a few thousand times now, if you’re one of the Tweeting Millions, you can connect with me there; I’m @paul_himmelfarb.)
But YMC’s first love is experiential marketing — physical, on-the-ground events that get students engaged with brands in an authentic way. We’ve just wrapped up the Spring Break season, and we’ve compiled a video that documents the work we’ve done with ROCKSTAR Energy Drink on the beaches and nightclubs of the world’s best spring break spots. This is our second year working with ROCKSTAR, and we saw some really great numbers this season: per-destination impressions increased by a pretty dramatic 312%. In total, ROCKSTAR generated an estimated 1.3 million impressions, and got about 60,000 cans-in-hands from the Spring Break portion of the annual program. This all was designed to run in tandem with the on-campus campaign that I mentioned in the post last week.
But the numbers alone don’t do justice to the campaign — this campaign was all about creating the ROCKSTAR atmosphere, about bringing the brand to life. And whether it was at the beach, a night club, a pool-side bar or a concert, we did just that. Check out the video below and see the campaign in all its energy-drink-fueled glory.
As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, last week saw some of the best minds in youth marketing flock to San Francisco’s temperate confines for YPulse’s 2009 Youth Marketing MashUp. Our very own Carisa Natvig, youth marketer extraordinaire, was there and in fine form. As I shared in my post, she gave a excellent overview of YMC’s work for ROCKSTAR Energy Drinks on college campuses throughout the country.
The immortal and indispensable YPulse has recently added a post that links to the many, many blogs that covered the event. If you couldn’t make it out to San Fran, this is the next best thing.
This week, from June 1st to June 2nd, marketing luminaries from around the country flocked to San Francisco for YPulse’s Youth Marketing Mashup. The conference, which featured keynote talks from MTV Network’s Kate Connally, Disney Online’s Paul Yanover and the author Donna Fenn, covered every conceivable corner of the youth marketing world (as evidenced by the overflowing schedule). But if you were one of those who couldn’t make it out to the city on the bay, don’t dispair! YPulse’s conference also happens to be an exceedingly well-documented affair. Navigate your way to the conferences stand-alone site, and feast on the wealth of content — live blogs, transcripts and video streaming abound.
Not only was our very own Carisa Natvig there, but she spoke to the conference about the work YMC has done for ROCKSTAR Energy Drinks. Over the course of her talk, Carisa walked through the ways that YMC has used student reps to integrate ROCKSTAR into the day and life of college students nationwide. She reported a total of 13 million program impressions — which is definitely a number we’re proud of.
Because we love sharing, here’s a short slideshow we produced to help Carisa tell ROCKSTAR’s story. And believe it or not, all of the photos used were taken by our student reps, often with just their camera phones — it doesn’t get more authentic than that.
While we at YMC most often focus on engaging with the high school to post-college set — those often called Generation Y — we’re always looking for insights about the generation behind them, the so-called Gen-Z-ers. According to demographers (and the legions of youth culture bloggers), Gen Z covers those born between roughly 1992 and 2010. If you want a (very brief) but insightful look into what this up-and-coming generation of consumers think about television, check out this video from Dave Knox at Hard Knox Life. In about 45 seconds it demonstrates that TV’s pop-culture reign may not be indefinite…
Many hearty thanks are owed to Dave Knox of Hard Knox Life for compiling a genuinely must-read post. Using reams of data taken from the Nielsen Global Online Media Landscape, Dave paints an empirical picture of the future of online media. If you’re in the interactive marketing space like YMC is, it’s full of some pretty interesting numbers. The post — and the Nielsen Report — are certainly worth reading in their entirely. But here are the key take-aways as I see them: marketers need to ready themselves for integrating mobile, digital and physical media. In this brave-new-world, it’s going to take all three, working in tandem.
Digital Content / Online Video are among the fastest growing areas of the Online Media Landscape:
The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003.
Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same period.
In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 percent, the number of streams grew 41 percent, the streams per user grew 27 percent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 percent.
One of the more interesting trends in online video is the increasing attraction to long form videos: the total minutes spent watching long-form (average of six-to-eight minutes) is considerably more than minutes spent on short-form, and has grown about 20% in the first two months of 2009.
Mobile is finally taking its rightful place in the spotlight:
In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via their devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74% between February 2007 and February 2009.
While historically US has been behind in mobile adoption, the US is now one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18% of subscribers accessing mobile Web. This is the highest penetration of mobile subscribers among the markets Nielsen reports mobile Internet adoption.
Penetration of smartphones doubled between Q4 2007 and Q4 2008, from 7% of U.S. mobile subscribers to 14%. Penetration of faster 3G devices now stands at 37% of handsets in use in the U.S
iPhone users are unique in their use – a hint at the mobile media behaviors of users of next-gen phones to come. iPhone users, for instance, are more than four times as likely as a typical subscriber to use mobile Internet, six times as likely to use mobile applications and six times as likely to consume mobile video.
12 million U.S. mobile subscribers access their social networks over their phone. At the end of 2008, Facebook was just slightly ahead of MySpace in terms of unique mobile users: 7 million compared to 5.7 million. Mobile usage of social networking sites grew 260% during 2008 in the U.S.
