GenDigital

Some Friday Food For Thought

TGIF...after a very busy week that included the Youth Marketing Mega Event and CTIA we thought it was time for a little decompressed fun and procrastination...so here are a few topics that grabbed our attention longer than they probably should have, but hey, it's Friday:

- Today is opening day for Will Ferrell's latest flick, "Blades of Glory," which should easily move to the top spot in weekend box office receipts. Ferrell is the eighth ranked celebrity according to our most recent Top Ten List Report.

- MTV Mobile announced some headline grabbing wireless ad deals at CTIA with Pepsi and Intel signing on as charter sponsors.

- A recent analysis of Nielsen's college viewing data essentially mirrors the majority of our television related data from our two main reports, bet our stuff is a boatload cheaper than Nielsen's, after all they are reportedly paying their new CEO $100 million...

- Michael Eisner, former Disney Chairman/CEO is looking a lot like a Web 2.0 superstar these days...His investment company has been on a tear lately pouring money into web video technology and media start ups, a baseball card company and even a web content production company...His first effort from the web production company he owns, dubbed "Prom Queen," is a video webisode series that will premiere on MySpace next week. Other than content distribution revenues the show is securing, it looks like they are doing branded entertainment product placement deals, with Fiji water, Teleflora and Victoria's Secret Pink signing on.

- Scouring through the trades for good, actionable news stories, we noticed a recurring theme similar to that of the cable news net's non-stop coverage of everything Anna Nicole...the whole Wal-Mart vs. Julie Roehm battle/conflict/future court case. I guess everyone must be really interested in this, because everyone from the NY Times to AdAge to Adweek have published multiple pieces on the drama. Personally, I would rather read more more market centric news and leave the drama and gossip for the Gawkers of the world. One story fine, two stories I'm still ok, but enough already...actually met Julie Roehm a couple of times when we working closely with Ford, she was the original brand manager for the Ford Focus when it hit the market in the late 90s. That was like three lives ago for her...

Finally, and this is personal more than anything newsworthy as it relates to the youth market, but as I mentioned at the start, it's Friday and we're changing things up a bit today (just for today)...got a new computer last week, brand of the computer is the same we've all had for a while, actually have no problem with the brand of computer, it's the operating system. Yes, it is a PC and I am not not following the market we cover who has transitioned successfully and happily over to the Mac...because it is a new computer it came loaded with Vista which, excuse my language, has a shit load of bugs that need to be worked out...every freakin time I open my Outlook I get the same annoying message that three very smart and very experienced IT managers can't figure out...The operating system has more pop-ups and permission windows than AOL did three years ago. I just don't get it really, may be I am extraordinarily naive, but shit, how could they ship something out (and they've already sold millions of copies) that has so many unresolved issues. My advice, hold out until that first service pack comes out, because it will be a big one, they have a lot of problems that need to be fixed...on that note, Happy Friday!

NBC Hit "Heroes" To Make Third Screen Debut

When it comes to capturing youth market viewers, it has been a great year so far for a re-surging NBC Television Network. The resurgence is lead by their fantasy drama "Heroes," which based on our most recent Top Ten List Report was the number three television show among males and number eight among females. In hopes of creating a multimedia franchise, NBC has partnered with with wireless game developer Gameloft, to develop "Heroes: The Mobile Game." For the most part the whole notion of playing games on mobile phones is more hype than reality. According to our research only about 4% of teens and college students downloaded and played a game on their mobile phone at least once in the past month. Pricing and availability are the big hurdles to overcome, but even with that said, we expect the number to increase to 7 to 8% by the end of this year, still fairly small in comparison to the 17% who downloaded a ringtone. 

Punk'd Signing Off

At one point, Ashton Kutcher's celebrity prank show was the most popular MTV original program among teens and college students, now after six seasons, the show will say goodbye with the final eight episodes airing next month. In MTV's overload style, the network will air a "sneak peek" marathon of all eight final episodes beginning on April 7 and will kick off the regular weekly airing schedule on April 10th. Given that this is the final season, viewers may be inclined to tune in a bit more than previous seasons, especially if Mr. Demi Moore is able to score some top celebs of the moment like Jessica Alba, Scarlett or Josh Henderson from Desperate Housewives.

Media Prediction Validated: NCAA Tourney Resonates With Youth Market

Every so often (some of our 1,000+ daily readers know we like to toot our own horn sometimes) we like to post something completely self-serving.  As you may remember, on March 6th we ran a post about the upcoming NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament based on an immersion we just completed. We noted in our media research report that we saw strong increases in planned viewership among teens and college students for the upcoming tournament. We also saw heavy gains for the number of teens and college students that planned on participating in online pools as well as consume online video-related content from the tournament, which now ranks as the second biggest social television viewing event of the year among the audience after the Super Bowl, by the way. Well, as luck (or precise skill, because our media research in my not so humble opinion is second to none) would have it, Nielsen came out with ratings on the first wave of the tournament. As it turns out, 18-24 viewership was up...drum roll please...14% from last year, a fairly significant increase, and certainly one that we were dead on saying more than a month ago. Oh, and by the way, total viewership was down about 3%, which can be attributed in the drop off of 25-54 year olds, which apparently don't feel the madness like they used to, or at least not as much as Gen Y.

Wassup With Flip?

A friend of mine, who is much more devoted to the media gossip and entertainment blogs than I am, forwarded me this link from Gawker the other day. I can't say I am regular reader of the blog (I prefer the trades like mediaweek, brandweek and adage), but sometimes (especially on Friday mornings after another crazy week) it's fun to see the f bomb dropped all over the place. The post was all about Conde Nast's new teen social networking site Flip.com. Like other Gawker stuff I've read, it wasn't exactly a creme puff post, but some of it did hit home. To promote Flip among "trendsetting" teen females, Flip retained the services of Mother, a UK-based ad agency known mostly for its creative prowess. As the story goes, Mother came up with the idea of sending out these very cool looking portable flash drives to 5,000 pre-identified trendsetting females, who most likely were derived from a database of Teen Vogue "it" girls, that is, the sister mag's database of influential young females. I would imagine that the drives were delivered to the young women with pre-loaded Flip related material, i.e. some of their trademark "Flip books." I think the challenge is more about getting those 5,000 influentials and their friends using Flip more so than just delivering them a cool little accessory.

Amp'd Takes Another $100 Million In...May Be Even More Coming Soon

Who said the MVNO space is sucking wind? In case you haven't heard, MVNO Amp'd Mobile, headed up by Peter Adderton, the founder of Boost Mobile, raised a ton dough to add to their impressive war chest. In just two years, yeah two years, LA-based Amp'd has raised just over $350 million including yesterday's latest round of $107 million. There were a lot of rumors circulating late last year regarding the MVNO's subscriber numbers. As you may know the company sells pre-paid wireless service with a heavy downloadable media component as their value proposition to the youth market. Well, anyway, rumors were floating around (many got picked up in some of major trades) questioning their actual subscriber numbers. Amp'd put out a press release last September saying they were on track to hit 150,000 subscribers by the end of 2006. The press release also highlighted the fact that the average monthly bill for an Amp'd subscriber was over $100, nearly double the average cell phone bill. That in itself is quite impressive. However, at this point I believe the question (or challenge more specifically) really revolves around the market opportunity. Is it an additional 1.0 million subscribers or 5.0 million subscribers? That's the $107 million question. Truth be told, with only 150,000 to 200,000 subscribers, Amp'd barely shows up on our wireless industry research, even Virgin Mobile has more teen and college student subscribers, but both are still very, very small compared to the big guys like Verizon Wireless and Cingular. So maybe that is their strategy, stay relatively small in the space, say $1.0 billion as opposed to $8.0 to $10.0 billion for category leader Verizon Wireless. Lots of questions still to be answered, but one thing I know for sure, they definitely have the most impressive list of institutional and strategic investors I've seen in a long time.

CBS's CSTV Unit Snaps Up High School Sports Site MaxPreps.com

CBS's CSTV (College Sports Television Network) has announced plans to acquire fast growing MaxPreps, a leading high school sports online network. We've been following MaxPreps ever since they upgraded their offerings to include video programming and highlights. Terms of the deal were not released. In our November Insights Report we detailed the market and market opportunity for organized high school sports, which also includes parents and coaches. At the time of the report's release, we estimated that there were 6.5 million high school students nationally who participated in varsity and junior varsity sports. What's more, as you've probably seen from some of the videos circulating around YouTube and on some of the cable news nets, the people (parents and coaches) around organized youth sports are extremely passionate to say the least. MaxPreps gives CSTV an instant head start within the high school market ahead of competitors like category leader ESPN and Fox. CSTV can also help the MaxPreps platform blossom into other sports besides football and basketball which are its bread and butter sports, especially given the fact that CSTV features a number of "niche" sports like lacrosse and wrestling that don't have the same participation numbers that football and basketball has, but speaking from personal experience, have just as much passion if not more among the participants and their supporters.   

15-Year Old New Yorker Steps Into Pro-Environment Lime

A 15-year old New Yorker by the name of Avery Hairston is quickly making a name for himself and his pro-environmental organization, relightNY, by signing on high profile corporate sponsors and picking some nice ink. His organization's mission is simple and to the point: "to educate and inspire people to take action and live in ways that protect the earth's environment for current and future generations. One of Avery's initial objectives is to lower carbon emissions released into the atmosphere. To accomplish this, he proposes using a light bulb that requires less electricity than a regular old incandescent bulb. Through donations and corporate sponsors, relightNY plans to first distribute the energy efficient CFL light bulbs to lower income families in New York City. As the organization gains awareness and additional partners that can provide expertise and value, I would think they would look to repeat the action in other large U.S. cities. This is an incredible illustration of a social trend we've now been tracking for the better part of the year: instead of all lame nicknames bestowed on Gen Y (think the "me" generation, the unwired generation, hey, even our lame tag line, the digital generation) given the overwhelming social, political and economic importance of environmental-related issues, these guys and girls might just end up being most commonly referred to as the Green Generation, which is more than fine by me, because at some point in the not so distant future, someone will have to save our planet and who better than this 15 year old New Yorker to be our steward.

Youth Retailer Steve & Barry's Cuts Deal With Sarah Jessica Parker

Former Sex & The City star Sarah Jessica Parker, whose character on the show was known for her voracious consumption of luxury goods is hooking up with popular youth-focused discount retailer Steve & Barry's to create her own clothing line. The new clothing line, dubbed "Bitten," is scheduled to launch on June 7th. Steve & Barry's have been growing like gangbusters over the past five years. They currently have 200 stores nationwide and there are aggressive plans to open another 100 locations this year. Their value proposition to consumers is quality merchandise at deep discount prices, which was Sarah Jessica's main draw to the opportunity. Although they don't advertise too much, the retailer drew a lot of attention last year when they partnered with Knick basketball star and born and breed New Yorker Stephon Marbury to create Starbury, a $15 pair of basketball shoes that the Knick star actually plays in.

Social Networks Will Play Integral Part in '08 Elections

I was waiting for a major media outlet to pick up on what is sure to be one of the most talked about marketing strategies related to the upcoming '08 Presidential election, the role of the leading social networks like Facebook and MySpace in revving up support for the candidates. The NY Post is out with a story this morning about what MySpace is up to. The Fox-owned property has launched impact.myspace.com which features videos from the candidates as well as information for its members on voter registration. Guess which candidate has the most friends listed on their MySpace page? It's Barack Obama with just over 66,000 friends. I thought the best quote in the article came from MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe who said "our digital candidate banners will be the yard signs of the 21st century and our political viral videos and vlogs are the campaign ads of the future." His statement seems to be dead on. With millions of young people logging on to sites like MySpace and Facebook several times a day, no candidate can afford not to have some sort of interactive presence on them. I am just waiting for the day, and I am sure it will happen at some point, where the first presidential debate will take place and be hosted on one of the leading social networking sites. We have yet to ask any of our panelists questions regarding the Presidential election, but now that a foundation is being set, the timing seems right to gauge some opinions later this month, so stay tuned for more info.