iStock_000001715945Small.gif

This is a video of a Churchill Club panel (9/20/06) that I moderated called Next Generation Insights. It featured six Silicon Valley young adults whose ages ranged from fifteen to twenty four.

These are some factoids that I found interesting:

  • They send as many as 4,000 text messages per month from their phones.

  • They watch one to two hours of TV per week. And they use Tivo or a recording device to fast-forward through commercials during that short timeframe!

  • They all have iPods, and they are very loyal to Apple.

  • They buy approximately forty songs a month on iTunes.

  • Helio is the hot phone (though none of them had one). I had never heard of it before!

Here’s a good analysis of the panel. The bottom line message is that before you waste your marketing dollars, you should watch what the panelists had to say about these topics:

  • Their fascination with MySpace and FaceBook.

  • How they use their cell phones—and seldom use a landline.

  • How they use computers—and Microsoft Office!

  • The surprisingly high degree to which they resent being “marketed to.”

  • The even more surprising degree to which “old media’ like magazines (specifically Wired for the males and US for the females) are effective.

  • Their dislike of online advertising whether banner, pop-up, or an ad running before or after a free video clip.

When I asked how advertisers can get to them, there wasn’t a lot of good news. Product placement may work if it’s subtle (specifically in The OC, Tivo be damned), but it sure appears that most forms of digital/online advertising are dead in the water for reaching young people. This is a whole new world…


One panelist’s mom followed up with me and gave me this list of the sites that her daughter visits:

To put it mildly, I didn’t exactly have these bookmarked or in my RSS feeds. :-)


One more interesting point that has nothing to do with the panel. Note how useful it is to have tags in a video like this— that is, the difference between Veotag and GoogleVideo.