GenDigital

2012 Youth Macro Trends, Predictions & Insights

With 2012 on the horizon, we're pleased to present our annual Youth Macro Trends, Predictions & Insights report for the coming year as well as revisit a handful of trends and predictions from last year's report to see how they have played out over the course of this year. Rather than providing an exhaustive list of rather meaningless trends, our main objective is to provide a select number of actionable views that have multiple implications across various industries and product categories. If we did our job correctly, there should be something in here for everyone, and we hope that something results in a conversation starter, a strategy meeting, or if nothing else, a definitive edge on the why behind the what for all things youth-culture related.

2012 Youth Macro Trends, Predictions & Insights

The Gamification of Youth Marketing & Media

Check In & Buy

The Future of m-Commerce

Tablets Everywhere

Moving Towards The Cloud

Twitter As An Exclusive Social Alternative

Digital Entrepreneurialism

Mining Social Influence

Visual Gratification

2011 Recap: Convergence Everywhere

2011 Recap: Fashion Gets Personal & Athletic

2011 Recap: Purpose-Driven Cause Marketing

2011 Recap: Social Shopping: Click, Shop, Talk & Buy

Q1 2010 College Top Ten List Report Highlights

Another quarter is almost complete and that brings us a new wave of Top Ten. College is the first to come out this week followed by Kids and Teens next Monday. For some reason, may be it's just the simplicity of the report, Top Ten garners more press mentions than any other YT report, go figure, but I think the concept of ranking against a particular topic is something that most everyone can relate to pretty easily.

Moving onward here, the Q1 wave of College Top Ten was tweaked a bit as the celeb category was broken out by more general Hollywood celeb personalities and sports-specific personalities. We'll also continue to rotate between most socially responsible companies/brands and favorite sports-related activities. When all is said, we covered a total of 12 individual categories including favorite TV shows, magazine titles, musical artists, movie & DVD titles, male Hollywood celebs, female Hollywood celebs, sports celebs, video game titles, web destinations, clothing retailers/brands, footwear brands and sports-related activities. To read the full background and view the table of contents, click here. For non Youth Trends subscribers, Top Ten can be downloaded/purchased for $399.

Some topline highlights:

- TV: relatively unchanged at the top compared to Q4 '09, White Collar debuts among males and American Idol makes a surprise appearance among females

- Mag titles: six of the top ten titles among females are trending downwards on a sequential basis, sorta sums of the category's picture fairly well

- Musical artists: goo goo for Gaga and welcome to the list NeedToBreathe

- Movies & DVDs: V-Day performs as expected, no let up for The Hangover

- Hollywood/sports celebs: Jessica's back at the top, LeBron is still king and Elisha debuts for the first time

- Video game titles: COD Modern Warfare 2, 'nuff said

- Web sites: check out Sporcle, it's legit...

Q4 '09 College Top Ten List Highlights

The Q4 '09 wave of College Top Ten is out and available to download. You can view the report background and full table of contents here. Top Ten provides an authentic top of mind look of what's most popular among young people (college students in this case) with respect to pop culture topics including TV shows, musical artists, video game titles, web destinations, celebrities and other lifestyle-related areas.

A few brief highlights: in the realm of TV, for the third straight wave, The Office was the top pick among college males, while Grey's was once again the top show among females. Glee debuted as the third most popular TV show among females, while MTV's Jersey Shore came in 9th among males and 6th among females.

For the second straight wave Taylor Swift was the most popular musical artist among all students, while Breaking Benjamin, Lady Antebellum and Justin Bieber appeared for the first time. Twilight stars continue to dominate the celebrity rankings with Robert Pattinson leading the way along with Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart.

On the retail front, fast fashion is still where it's at as evidenced by the performance of Forever 21, but Urban Outfitters is picking up momentum as well as premium yoga wear retailer lululemon. Finally, we included a new measurement for the Q4 wave as college respondents provided their choices for the most socially responsible companies or brands. Leading the socially responsible pack was Ben & Jerry's followed by Burt's Bees and Coca-Cola.

To learn more about Top Ten, you can visit the Youth Trends site.

One Plus One Might Not Equal Two For MTV's Urge and Real Network's Rhapsody

According to a report yesterday, MTV has struck a deal with Real Networks to merge its digital music service, which has yet to gain any real traction, with Rhapsody, the digital media service operated by Real Networks with a hope of posing some sort of challenge to category killer iTunes. The service will get a big push starting with MTV's Video Music Awards on September 9th. In case you can't tell, we're skeptical on a positive outcome for the deal. Granted, MTV's service has been bundled with Microsoft's Windows Media Player for quite some time now, and the reality is that it has had very little impact on usage to date. The fact remains they are chasing down a competitor that has 90%+ market share so going after less than 10% seems more like a pipe dream than a sound strategy.

Is Advertising The New Radio?

Those folks that work in the music departments at major ad agencies are now referring to their musically-enhanced spots as the new radio. The saying goes, the jingle has replaced the single. Cute, right? Anyway, it definitely makes a lot of sense, radio consumption across the board is down because of the proliferation of portable digital music players, the growth of satellite radio, and simply the fact that lots of young people would rather throw a CD in their car stereos that tune in to 20 minutes of commercials every hour. So, it should make sense that record companies like EMI are announcing strategic partnerships with big time ad agencies like DDB in order to get preferred distribution and access to client spots. There is more than one way to peel an apple.

Ruckus Moves To Ad Supported Free Downloading Model

Hoping to make a bigger splash in the digital music downloading category, Ruckus Networks has announced a new service that allows students with a validated .edu email address to download music for free. Yes, there are some restrictions that go along with the service and there are some big shortcomings (in our opinion) as well. The Ruckus plan was pitched to the four major record label companies and some independent labels as well who have all agreed to participate in the new service as somewhat of an experiment. The experiment really is based on the fact that the service will be deploying an advertising supported model rather than a subscription based model. Will it pay off? Initial reaction would be no. The validated college student with the .edu address can download music for free to their computers. That's all nice and good. But the real value for the student is to transfer the music to their portable device, which in nearly nine cases out of ten mean transferring to their iPod. Here is the first hurdle for Ruckus. The transfer option is not free, it costs $4.99 a month, still a great deal, but the kid will still be laying out some dough after being pitch a "free" service. Second problem, and clearly the significantly higher hurdle, almost the size of the Empire State Building, quite frankly. The transfer service is not compatible with the iPod, thus shutting out about 90% of all prospective students. So, really the value for Ruckus is to reach students in their dorms or off campus residences when they are studying or hanging out. If that's the case, chances are the window that is playing the music from the Ruckus service will be minimized while the student is performing another task, consequently "blocking out" all display advertisements.

Gen Y's Version of New Kids on the Block

This is not your daddy's rock band. According to the New York Times, there is a very healthy, growing music scene in New York lead by musicians who can't even drive legally let alone vote or drink in the bars they are playing in every weekend. After reading the article twice, I came away with some thoughts and takeaways that are extraordinarily parallel with the current state of youth sports and other extra-curricular activities that Gen Y tends to participate in, including theater and dance. This is a fact: there are several groups of very, very talented musicians under the age of 18 making their way around the New York music scene, many of which are sons and daughters of celebrities, so no doubt, there were probably a few strings pulled at the beginning, but clearly some of these kid bands have talent and their own organic following. This is a fact: More times than not, parents of Gen Yers want their kids to not just be "good" at something, they must be "excellent" or "very special." Whether it is junior football (where there is always the threat of a parent "confronting" the coach on the lack of playing time their kids gets) or theater (the parent gets upset when their kid gets a small part in the play), there are some definite similarities all revolving around something we call "unique success" (if you are a Youth Trends client, you'll know what that terms means later this month when we release our next Insights report). The difference however, and it is an important one to take note of, deals with a sense of open creativity, a culture of creativity, if you will. Many of the parents of these grungie teenie bopper rock stars were once (and many still are) grungie, artsie, creative folks themselves, and they seem to have encouraged/pushed their kids in the same direction which, will probably end up being an advantage if you were to make a direct comparison between the kids involved in the NY music scene compared to those kids involved with a particular individual or team sport or the theater. This is all fascinating stuff, someone could write a book about the parents of Gen Yers and their must-excel-at-something-even-it-if-kills-them children.

High School Musical Hits The Road

The enormously successful Disney High School Musical franchise is about to get even bigger. No doubt that Disney/Buena Vista music execs looked at the success of the American Idol national tour as precedent before making their latest moves. Notice I say moves...So here's the deal on the first one, the mega hit movie (a sequel is in the works, of course) and corresponding multi-platinum soundtrack is taking it to the road for a 40-city live tour beginning right after Thanksgiving in San Diego. The Cheetah Girls, another successful tween targeted Disney TV musical is already in the midst of a sold-out 60-city tour, which, according to my eight-year old niece, "was so very cool." Perhaps we are getting a glimpse of the Disney multimedia franchise strategy of the future: from on-screen, to in-store and in-person.

AOL's Loss is MSN's Gain

Network Live, the partner company to AOL responsible for last summer's wildly successful live stream of the Live 8 concert series on AOL has ended its relationship with AOL and moved on to a new distribution deal with Microsoft. Network Live has renamed their operation Control Room and its first featured online stream will be a John Legend performance on October 2nd from the Royal Albert Hall in London. The company plans to make 36 live concerts available on MSN's online platform over the next couple of years.

Can SpiralFrog Take Share From iTunes?

According to research firm NPD, iTunes has a 67% share of the paid or legal digital music downloading category and according to our latest research, iTunes share of the category among teens and college students is closer to 77%. Regardless, as I've said many times before whether it was Urge or any other newcomer, breaking in to this category would be tough. A relatively new outfit, called SpiralFrog, has decided to skip the paid part of the downloading game all together and instead use an advertising-supported model. Pretty aggressive and pretty risky. Of course, you need a music company (ideally one of the big ones) to believe enough in the model to sign on as a distribution partner. Yesterday, the company announced its first big distribution deal with the world's largest music company, Universal. As you can probably guess, the terms of the deal weren't released, but I can't imagine any gigantic guaranteed payment to Universal, I think the music giant is looking at this as more of a test at this stage, regardless of the press hype around the announcement, which was enough to send Apple's shares down 2% yesterday, a bit of an over-reaction, in my opinion.