I am still catching up on my holiday reading which is why it took me so long to find an article in DM News titled “Let your audience determine your media“ The article was written by Mickey Alam Khan, who is editor in chief of DM News. The “expert” that that Mickey Khan interviewed was Jim Nail, Forrester Research veteran and now chief strategy and marketing officer of Cymfony Inc., a media monitoring and benchmarking service in Watertown, MA.
It is Mr. Nail’s belief that consumers can be broken into three broad categories:
The younger consumers under 24 are living their life on MySpace, YouTube and other social media. It’s not certain that they’re entirely ignoring traditional media. We’ll find out in about five years as they get out of school and move into the real work environment.
I love the statement that “It’s not certain that they’re entirely ignoring traditional media”.
I guess that Jim Nail has never read anything that Tom Hayes has wrote at TomBomb.com about the Bubble Generation or watched the video that Guy Kawasaki produced of this panel interview of the Bubble Generation. It is very clear that consumers under the age of 24 are ignoring traditional media completely or they are using tools like TiVo and iPods to avoid direct contact with traditional media tactics like commercials.
The middle group, consumers ages 25-35, are equally comfortable in both traditional and new media. Study how they use each medium and in what combination to see how the media world will evolve.
Finally, there’s the 35-plus crowd. “We’ll always have both feet firmly planted in the traditional media world and only adopt new media for very specific types of tasks and when there’s a really compelling reason,” Mr. Nail said.
So the over 35 crowd have very little interest in social media? I guess Mr. Nail did not look at the comScore report in October that showed that more than half of MySpace visitors are now 35 or older, and that more than 40% of the visitors to Friendster.com and Facebook.com are over the age of 35.
Social networks are graying as older and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. Successfully marketing to members of a social network can be difficult especially if you are relying on outdated data or opinions.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
maggie fox 01.07.07 at 8:53 pm
Great coverage - and really, what was he thinking???
john cass 01.08.07 at 2:27 am
There is some research to suggest that younger people are paying attention to local television news. That’s traditional media.
Also maybe Jim is thinking that consumption patterns will change as people get older or change their life styles. Unlikel, you might think, but I recall my recent study at Northeastern University. I was working with a group of undergraduates who were unfamiliar with blogs or corporate blogs. In fact they held some of the same assumptions the the cliche predicts the boomers might hold about blogs. Blogs are run by a bunch of teenagers, and I am quoting there. I think community and social networks have a lot to do with people’s media consumption. Everyone is realizing the benefits of using the internet for news, its instant and up to date. That’s not to say that current media consumption patterns amongst the young will be hard to change. I do think Dave you might ask Jim for an interview and get his clarification on these issues. After all his company is based upon the premise of measuring online media.