EightBlack.

Mass marketing is dead.

What the internet has given everyone is the ability to hang out in their own communities. Most large marketers dont understand this.

We often refer to these places as “portals”.

Here’s some examples.

I think currently in Australia that Optus has the stronghold over the youth market. They either got lucky or were clever and cracked the code with their product placement. Most kids are using Optus as their mobile provider because one of their friends told them about it. Also, the operators quickly cottoned on to the idea that if you allowed people to talk for virtually nothing if they were all on the same network (ie Optus to Optus) then the floodgates would open.

MSN is the platform of choice for instant messaging (hint, Microsoft - use this knowledge to your advantage when you are trying to market your new Windows Live Search product)

If ever there was a tribal community its the teenagers of today.

I turned 40 this year and thought I was still relatively connected to generation Y but I’m afraid thats not the case.

We have a good family friend who is 19. She came to help with the kids when my wife went to Singapore for work.

Firstly, dont assume kids these days have just one mobile phone. A lot of have 2.

My MSN account has about half a dozen people in it.

19 year olds have 40 or 50.

They’ve also lost the ability to communicate in English - there’s a whole new SMS/text/Instant Message language to understand if you want to communicate to this market.

Kids will text while they drive, they’ll text each other while watching a movie, they’ll certainly text while at Uni (or in school) but thankfully most secondary schools have banned phones from being used in class.

I’m convinced there are significant opportunities via the mobile handset. They’ll get better, quicker, faster in terms of accessing the internet, they’ll store more music, batteries will last longer and they’ll connect or syncronise effortlessly to other devices.

Our client, Hutchison, are betting the ranch on 3G. They’ve already invested more than A$2 billion here in Australia on their network and while talking with them this week, learned that Hong Kong (head office) have just given the Australian team another $2 billion to really get things moving.

As a prominent US senator once said, “1 billion here, 1 billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money…!”

Apple and Motorola are currently working on Apple’s idea of a mobile device. Hooray.

The challenge for all marketers today is capturing our markets attention just long enough for something positive to happen.

Because while the internet has opened up an entirely new world, it has also facilitated in a massive information overload.

Newspaper websites scream at you with banner ads, with pop ups, with information on just about everything.

The key is simplicity. Thats why Google works. Its why the iPod went ballistic.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 7:45 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.