Carisa Explains it All
Posted in Brand Ambassador Programs, Campus Marketing (On & Off), Youth Culture Research on November 18th, 2008
YMC’s sparkling new website officially launched in September. The site may only have gone “live” a few months ago, but we’re already thoroughly smitten with our YouthBuzz Blog. It’s providing our team of always-opinionated youth marketers with a much-needed outlet. Now, when they start bugging us about a startling new insight, we always offer the same refrain: don’t tell us about it, tell the blog!
Because we’re each going to take a crack at writing when the spirit moves us, we thought we should formally introduce each member of the team. With that in mind, we’ll be profiling one of YMC’s thought leaders each month until we run out of smart people to brag about.
First up is Carisa Natvig, the undisputed dean of YMC’s college campus network. Carisa arrived at YMC after nearly a decade of work on some of the nation’s biggest brands. Holding posts in marketing, sales, client relations and event production, Carisa cut her teeth on the brands you interact with everyday. From Gatorade to MTV, Famous Footwear to American Eagle, Carisa’s worked alongside the best and brightest in the marketing world.
Carisa joined the YMC team three years ago. Under her leadership, our extensive campus network was leveraged for highly effective, peer-to-peer youth marketing. Year round on-campus marketing for Rockstar energy drinks, for instance, has grown each year by more than 30 percent while she’s been at the helm – with more than 75 colleges actively participating in 2008.
But you can only learn so much from a bio. To give you a sense of Carisa’s thought leadership in the youth marketing space, we asked her a few questions and let her tell it like it is!
What’s the core strategy you employ when marketing to a generation of media-savvy, inherently marketing-wary youth?
“You have to make your brand relevant – and you have to be realistic about what’s going to be relevant to a college sophomore or, say, a high school senior. This may seem simple, but it’s something that brands struggle with all the time. There’s an art that goes into matching the right product to the right audience with the right event. It comes down to knowing your audience extremely well.”
What role does interactive, web-based marketing play in reaching today’s youth?
“You have to be comfortable with playing on their turf. They live their lives in between Facebook binges, Twitter feeds and text messages. The trick is to turn their virtual networks into an asset in the physical world where our experiential marketing thrives.”
Given the amount of time spent online by today’s youth, do physical interactions become more or less valuable as a marketing tool?
“The fact is that a successful experiential marketing campaign is going to employ both the virtual and physical. With that said, the more the world embraces online marketing — and the clutter that comes with it — the more stridently our on-campus brand experiences stand out. If you can successfully create experiences that explain the essence of a brand both on- and off-line, you’re going to make a real impact. Which means happy students and happy clients.”
Describe Generation Y in a few short sentences. What makes them tick? What is one thing that people often misunderstand about today’s youth?
“Sometimes Generation Y gets a bad rep for being shallow or uncurious. They’re presented, at times, as flaky, pop-culture obsessed – as though they have few interests beyond the next ungrammatical text message. I don’t think that characterization could be further from the truth. This generation has an inherent sophistication. They have a global worldview, an incredible ability to synthesize little nuggets of information coming from across countless platforms, and – most critically for us – an eagle eye for marketing. Marketing is practically a native language for them. They instinctively know when they’re being sold to, and, more often than not, they just don’t respond to a traditional corporate pitch. They’re dubious from the outset – and its up to the brand to convince them they’re wrong. You also can’t pay them enough to pretend to like something — they aren’t going to shill for you just to get a free t-shirt. At YMC, we’ve found that the surest path to breaking past that distrust is peer-to-peer marketing. If you pair the right network with the right product, they’ll make the pitch for you!”
