GenDigital

Super Bowl: The Single Biggest Television Event of the Year

To supplement our monthly Insights Report which comes out tomorrow, we administered an online survey with a portion of our proprietary panelists earlier this week regarding the Super Bowl. For all of the hype and frenzy around the Super Bowl, this part is no joke: an overwhelming majority of teens and college kids plan to tune into the television event of the year. What's more, many will be sitting alongside friends and family at informal social gatherings, and believe it or not, looking forward to watching the commercials too. Here are some of the results of the survey we conducted on Monday:

- Plan to watch the Super Bowl: 73%

- Watching the Super Bowl with at least two friends or family members: 61%

- Looking forward to watching the Super Bowl commericals: 43%

- Have already seen a preview of a Super Bowl commerical(s): 9%

- Not rooting for either the Bears or the Colts, just looking at the afternoon/evening as a time to hang out with friends and family and have a good time: 58%

MTV Looks To Avatars To Stimulate Digital Growth

There is an awesome article about MTV's latest digital efforts over at Wired. Out of everything I've read about the company lately, this article seems to sum up their challenges and opportunities for that matter better than anyone else. I first posted about their foray into the world of avatars when they announced plans to launch Virtual Laguna Beach a few months back. To date, they have already signed up 300,000 members to the virtual world, not a bad start at all. Clearly the pressure is on the company that for the better part of the past 20 years have been nothing less than the world ambassadors of coolness. The push into the world of avatars and so called MySpace 2.0 initiatives might just be the route the company needs to take in order to succeed in the digital world, because so far, efforts like their broadband network and the integration of the varied number of Internet properties acquired over the past two years, have come up short in expectations by many.

Can Bauer's New Cocktail Serve Up A Winner For Twentysomethings?

Talk about a contrary strategy...Bauer Publishing, the German publisher responsible for titles including the recent hit InTouch is now off to conquer twentysomething women. Huh? Did I read this correctly? At a time when most major publishers are scaling back their print operations and boosting their digital investments, what could Bauer be thinking in launching another weekly title? Apparently, they think that have the special sauce to do just that. Cocktail will offer twentysomething women a combination of celebrity news, relationship tips, health and nutrition content and fashion and beauty info...so, basically everything except travel and finance content. As soon as the announcement came from Bauer, a backlash of negative comments and doomsday predictions followed. Before everyone closes the door on them, remember this was the same company that introduced a successful celeb title into the mix when practically everyone said the category was already over saturated and this is also a company that has figured out how to sell at the newsstand, which in itself, is no small feat.

Nielsen Gets College Viewership Going

Long a sore point for the television networks, especially the youth focused nets like MTV and Cartoon Network was the fact that Nielsen did not have any college students at school in its sample. As of today, Nielsen has finally answered the complaints by introducing its new college student viewing measurement. How much of a difference is it going to make right off the bat? For some nets, probably not that much. From what I've heard and experienced first hand, several advertisers and their agencies already go above and beyond the Nielsen numbers and estimate additional college student viewership. The viewership is based on internal research sources and other third party research sources as well. Hopefully, the Nielsen college numbers will validate those sources.

Site Watch: myYearbook

myYearbook, the social networking site started by a teenage brother and sister combo, announced it hs raised $4.1 million in venture funding from blue chip venture capital fund U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital. According to the site, myYearbook already attracts over 5 million unique visitors per month and has 1.7 million registered members. The release didn't say what the funds would be used for, but with 1.7 million members and over 5 million uniques, there bandwidth costs have to be pretty significant. The site offers of the standard goodies of any major social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. The unique selling point is focusing (for the time) on the teenage audience although it looks like they have offerings for college and recent grads as well, but it looks like most of their users are teenagers, which should attract a strong advertiser base with those user numbers. However, in their press materials (not unlike any other youth focused online media property) they stress advertiser integration as opposed to standard banners. I didn't see any examples of this on the site, but have heard from a couple of other people familiar with them that they have worked with some of the major movie studios on a few deals so far. If the site continues to gain traction, I would have to think someone like MTV and Fox, who continue to bolster their interactive offerings, will come calling.

Gen Y: Entrepreneurs in Action, May Be?

In case you didn't notice, the whole idea of entrepreneurship among Gen Y is big, or at least that's what the NY Times wants you to think. The story was fun to read for some comical relief, although, truth be told I am not taking it too seriously. Too many blanket statements are made and the examples used by the writer were, quite frankly, not demographically representative of the overall Gen Y population and thus, way, way off reality. To tell you the truth, I hate this kind of shit, because we'll end up getting a few calls and emails regarding "entrepreneurship and Gen Y" and have to attempt to clarify it and put it into some sort of context. Are there budding tween, teen and college businesses, yes, absolutely. Are you going to tell me that there was no such thing as a business idea launched by a college student twenty or thirty years ago? You've heard of Michael Dell and Bill Gates...right? Oh, and by the way (bad mood today), if you are going to use examples of teen run businesses, for the love of God, don't use the business started by the trust fund baby from Palm Beach who is attending a "New England" boarding school. If you want to get a more accurate depiction of today's college student who has career related stuff on his or her mind, check out what Business Week did.

CBS Turns To UGC For Super Bowl Contest

What's bigger than Desperate Housewives, The O.C., My Super Sweet Sixteen and The Simpsons...combined? The Super Bowl, of course. An illustration of how in vogue user generated content has become over the past year, look no further than CBS, home of this year's Super Bowl, the largest single television event of the year. As part of this year's Super Bowl, you may have already hear about some advertisers turning to consumers for content creation, such as Chevrolet. Now, CBS is getting in the game as well so to speak. CBS, leveraging their broadband network inntertube and the number one video site on the Internet, YouTube, is promoting "15 Seconds" a contest where participants have just 15 seconds "to tell the world an inspirational message." CBS will pick the winning video message which will appear during their daytime coverage of the big game, which starts at noon EST, about six hours before gametime.

Minigames Are Nice Fit For Wii Gamers

The Wii from Nintendo, the much talked-about next generation gaming console system that hit stores shelves three months ago with a bang has found a new friend with a game genre known as the minigame. Typically found in collections of tens or even more in some cases, minigames are quick, skit-like games where players complete relatively simple tasks. Based on the innovative motion sensing controller the Wiil system boasts, the genre has been a hit. If you check out the site Gamefly (a gaming title popularity tracking service) you'll notice several titles are minigames. Why is this important? Well, based on the latest research from our proprietary panel, minigames in particular are attracting a demographic segment that Wii had hoped for in the first place: teen and young adult women. It will be interesting to see how this whole thing progresses throughout the year, but it's apparent from the game developers especially, that they're not wasting anytime in introducing a ton of new mini titles this year, many of which will be specifically for play on the Wii system.

Word of the Day: Mososo

Today's word of the day: MoSoSo. The word is short for mobile social software, that is software that is usually installed on a mobile phone that helps facilitate social encounters. These social encounters have a distinct terms associated with it and will become one of the buzzwords this year: mobile social networking. The concept of mobile social networking is very simple: the association of a time and location with one's social network. Keep an eye on some of the first location based services to hit the market, including Dodgeball.

New Niche Magazine Targeting Muslim Teens Debuts

With the exception of a few entertainment and fashion titles, the magazine category, the teen magazine category to be more specific, continues to hemorrhage readers and ad pages. So, one would think this would not be the most ideal time to launch a new title...right? Not exactly, last summer, I profiled Quince Girl, a new niche title targeting Hispanic teen females and now, according Mediapost, there's a new title out called Muslim Girl Magazine, targeting who else, teenage Muslims living in the U.S. According to the article, there are about 400,000 Muslim teens living in the U.S. I get the whole concept about Muslim Americans being a disenfranchised audience segment and there is an opportunity to fix that with this new targeted title, but I have to question the overall size of the audience segment. The publisher is quoted in the article comparing the Muslim teen population to the Hispanic teen population. I don't think that is a very fair comparison, although it's probably the only one she could come up with. The reality is that there are approximately 9 million Hispanic teens living in the U.S. or about 23 for every one Muslim teens. That's scale, that's real market opportunity for brand marketers and media companies. Anyway, we'll see how it goes, the bi-monthly pub is available by subscription for $19.99 and will also be on newsstands. The company publishing the magazine expects a circulation of 50,000, or just over 10% of all teen Muslims nationally.