ANA Marketing Maestros

Generation Y Marketers

By: Irina Skaya

If you grew up during the MTV era, love everything digital, and began exercising your financial power early, you’re probably an echo-boomer.  We’re also known as Generation Y, millennium generation or baby-boom offspring. As an extremely diverse group with a lot of buying power, advertisers are naturally attracted to us. As a tech savvy group, we refuse to purchase anything if we’re confused or have unanswered questions, which makes it challenging for advertisers to engage with us.  We usually have short attention span and get easily bored or frustrated with ads- many of us are now marketers ourselves.

ANA is conducting a survey on brand management. We are looking for Echo Boomer client-side marketers (born after 1982) to participate in this survey. Preliminary survey results can be viewed here. 

The survey addresses three major themes:

• Technology usage and media habits
• Attitudes towards brands and marketing
• Attitudes towards careers in marketing

To participate in the survey, click here.

Technorati tags: Generation Y echo boomers

HP Marketer: Not Convinced Second Life Has Value

By Will Waugh

Eric Kintz over at HP comes to life with a Top Ten List on why he's not sold on Second Life as a marketing channel. Most of the marketers I have talked with that have experimented with SL say that they are not actually expecting to make a ton of money, but rather create a channel for communication.

His Top Ten (more comprehensive explanation at his blog Marketing Excellence):

#1. The technology is still too complex

#2. The model is not yet scaleable

#3. The subscriber statistics are misleading

#4. The model’s scaleability is further threatened by a corporate IT backlash.

#5. The content is primarily adult oriented

#6. Brands are underestimating the investments required.

#7. Brands are not staying true to the Second Life values.

#8. Second Life experiences are not integrated with the overall brand experience.

#9. Potential revenues and profits are limited.

#10. I barely have time for my first life……

Lenovo' s online marketing chief Dave Churbuck reminds me of a November post on this very same topic.

Technorati tags: second life marketing

Twitter Wants to Know: What Are You Doing?

By Kaitlin Villanova

Want to learn exactly what your consumers are thinking and doing and when? Twitter.com allows for that kind of intimacy. The community of “connected” users can communicate to friends their up-to-the-minute activities via IM, text, or email. Think of it as shorthand blogging.

Rather than writing a blog about how you are eating lucky charms cereal, then searching online for an image of the familiar leprechaun on a red box, just text message your Twitter account and save yourself a whole lot of time.”

Some Recent Twitter posts:

“BTW [by the way] I am in the apple store right now”

“Going to get a haircut, it is so warm out”

“Designing second life for you!”

Blogger Kevin Dugan writer of Strategic Public Relations Blog admits “Thousands of geeks texting random thoughts and keeping us up on their mundane status probably has value.”

Example of Twitter's usefulness in the community from Israel Hyman's Twitter microblog:

Robert Scoble wanted to have Kathy Sierra’s speech from SXSW (South by Southwest a music festival in Austin Texas, that has attracted a strong following amongst web creatives and entrepreneurs) so he asked via Twitter if anyone had a link to the audio. Within a couple minutes, someone gave him a link, which he posted via Twitter, and a few minutes later I was listening to the talk in Arizona. Twitter is microblogging at lightning speed. It’s an “always on” chat room.”

Now that you  have a better understanding of Twitter, it’s your turn to upload an image, invite friends, and answer the twitter question: What are you doing?

Technorati tags: twitter community social networks

Who Knows Media -- Marketers or Agencies?

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

By now you all have heard about Jim Stengel’s speech at the AAAA Media Conference in which he talked about Second Life and our own ANA CEO Bob Liodice’s avatar! But here is something you have not heard about and something which struck me as a very telling paradigm shift: There was the 40-something Global Marketing Officer of The Procter & Gamble Company, a somewhat conservative company, telling the audience of media mavens about the importance of Second Life to P&G. When Mr. Stengel asked for a show of hands from the media types to see how many had visited Second Life then how many actually had created an avatar, very few folks raised their hands! This confirms what I have heard from many advertisers in my own ANA work about "enhanced" television – more and more advertisers are leading their agencies into new media, not the other way around. When I started out in this business in the mid 80’s as an assistant product manager at The Frito-Lay Company, we expected our advertising agencies to be innovative and inform us about what was hip and cool – now it appears to be the other way around and the "clients" are the ones who are personally and professionally experimenting with new media forms and directing their agencies to look into them. What a difference in the last 20 years!

Technorati tags: media marketing procter & gamble second life