Youth Marketing Company Gets It Right
So we finally got around to reading today's MediaPost newsletter and, upon opening it, were instantly attracted to an ad for alloy media + marketing which is promoting its 2005 College Explorer Youth Study. The ad, with the ubiquitous, exposed hottie-belly, is accompanied by the headline, "It's not what you think. It's what we know." The ad then animates to a frame promoting the study. This ad does three things brilliantly. It grabs attention. It debunks stereotypes. And it promotes a study that, one assumes, paints a realistic picture of the college market rather than the standard, Spring Break, thong-wearing, sex-crazed image we're all so fond of writing about. Of course the full image on the study order page sort of brings it all back home.
Knowing this site's audience, Alloy should really be advertising that study here.
Comments
I sat through Alloy's "young adult immersion" a few months back, and I must warn you: expect stereotypes. It's all stereotypes, and all the kind that have been with us for decades, through generation after generation. Alloy will try to tell you that they know some secret to "kids these days", but that's pure BS. Alloy will try to tell you that fads are trends, that the idea of a teen rebel is somehow new and exclusive to the current generation of teens. Alloy can't see its way through the trends it is "immersed" in; Alloy is high on its own fumes. They divide young adults into regimented silos, which are helpful only for the terms of their presentation. In practice, it is the same stale demographic information you've seen time and time again. So you'll get macro-level reports of a few fads and a lot of data that is more than three years old (the first slide of data was over five years old - if you're talking about trends, you're nothing if you're not up to date), but not much in the way of significant insight -- remember, Alloy wants you to pay them to recite their BS to you, not to learn for yourself that your guess is as good as theirs.
Well, thanks for the real story, getreal.
Check out agencies like Mr. Youth and CornerStone, they have been chopping at Alloy's heels for the last two years and seem to be the ones that truly get it. It seems that developing a huge publicly traded behomoth is counterintuitive to true street-level understanding of this demo.