I saw the new Degree Girl commercials for the first time last week and then came across the NYT’s coverage of using cellphone language in advertising.  In my opinion, Degree delivers one of the lamest campaigns I have seen in awhile and one that shows that many marketers don’t understand youth marketing.  If you look through the Degree Girl website, you find a site filled with “teen-like” misspellings including skillz and SMS language of OMG.  The site does flow well and the promotion they have with Ashley Tisdale is pretty interesting.  But they fall on their face because they are trying to force themselves into youth culture and they lose all authenticity because of it.  Ironically the site replicates many of the same ideas/executions we did for Secret Sparkle Collection back in 2004/2005.  At the time, the work was well received but we quickly realized that we had to evolve in order to truly understand the youth market.  It looks like that is a lesson Degree hasnt learned yet.