Nielsen recently released their report “How Teens Use Media“, which covered the myths and realities of teen media trends.  The above chart does a great job of outlining how Teens interact with various types of media.  Personally I was surprised by some of the numbers:

• TV is still an overwhelmingly dominant form of media at 3 hours and 20 minutes.  That is greater than PC + Console Gaming + Internet + DVR + DVD.
• The same # of Teens “watch video on an MP3 Player” as “read newspapers.”
• 1 in 3 are using the Mobile Web (has your brand even thought about this?)

Often Brand Managers jump to the conclusion that Teens are using media in very differently ways.  But according to these numbers, there might just be more similarities than differences.

On November 6 & 7, the Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup East will be “where today’s top brand, corporate and social marketers, media professionals, educators and others gather to share successful strategies on marketing to youth with technology.”  The conference is put on by my friend Anastasia Goodstein and should be a great event that I highly recommend.  Hard Knox Life readers can use the special code KNOX to save 10% on registration.

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At BrandWeek’s “What Teens Want” Conference, my friend Tina Wells from Buzz Marketing Group just did a great presentation on teen trends.  In the presentation she covers what’s hot in music and technology, while also giving a comparison on why The Hills is performing better than Gossip Girls with teens.  Most interesting to me were the 6 key teen trends she highlighted including:

• Wharholism: Teens & their 15 minutes of fame
• Massclusivity: Teens want exclusive products designed for the masses
• Technoholics: Youth thrive off new technology
• Global Mobiles: Teens are globally connected, while the world is big & portable
• Insta-Messengers:  Teens consumer content instaneously and want immediate communication
• Transculturism: Merging and converging of cultures

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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.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this write-up in the LA Times about the partnerships brands are forming with Varsity Spirit to reach teens through cheerleading and dance.  Before moving down to my current role, I actually started this partnership for P&G, first signing up Secret as a sponsor and then expanding the deal to include Herbal and Cover Girl.  Cheerleading has exploded into the mainstream (look at Heroes with “Save the cheerleader, save the world”) and the girls are highly influential.  Frankly I am surprised more brands looking to tap into the youth market haven’t worked with Varsity to reach this group.