Intangible Teens
Kathy O’Meara looks at the teen market, a valued group of consumers so hard to influence they make the Scarlet Pimpernel appear more ubiquitous than David Beckham

Intangible, impervious, intransigent – positively incorporeal, getting a marketing message to today’s elusive 15-24 age group requires a skill set of Leviathan complexity. Some marketers are now said to be employing young people in the belief that they will benefit from their unique insight into this frustratingly elusive demographic.

Others are tentatively treading into unchartered territories such as guerrilla marketing, website avatars, celebrity endorsement or SMS text messaging, with variable results.

Marie Diver of Universal McCann, who buys media for X-Box, said 15-24 year old, advertising-savvy adults are a challenge to reach with effective communications both in media terms and creatively. They are fickle consumers of traditional media and tend to be out and about. As they are lighter users of TV, it proves more expensive to reach them.

Diver said that up to recently, there was little by way of radio station choices for this audience, but now the likes of Spin, Beat and Red FM fill the void. In print there are few Irish titles targeting this audience. While cinema still proves to be the effective channel for reaching youths, digital is the only media that is showing real growth, Diver added.

So what are the problems in targeting the new social paradigm? What distinguishes the 2007 dude from the nineties troglodyte? Easy, more leisure options. Social networking sites Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube have changed the teen mediascape.

Add into the mix electronics which further eat into downtime and compete for attention – Gameboys, PSPs, X-Boxes; there is the time spent podcasting, blogging and texting. So all of this results in a schism twixt audience and message delivery.

Time poverty. The final wave of Decode research highlighted lack of downtime, mainly because of high levels of employment and this is a big concern. Forecasts projecting that Irish youth will move from being a volume market to a premium market have been right.

Cynicism. A recent study conducted for Permanent TSB/For