GenDigital

Looking For the Next Big Thing, Fashion Makers Head East...The Far East That Is

Interesting write up in the online edition of Business Week talking about the taste making prowess of Japan's youth and young adult market. It seems everyone from H&M to Abercrombie & Fitch are looking to Japan's youth to seize the latest global fashion trends. For its part, the facilitation of trend watching has sparked a new and growing business in Japan. For about $1,000 a day, companies can send their international buyers to Tokyo to shadow a Japanese fashion experts as they visit the hottest boutiques in the city. Armed with generous spending accounts, the foreign buyers snap up goods and send them back to headquarters for production and distribution. It sound a little bit like what all those knock off dress companies do on Oscar Night. Funny thing is, I don't think it's been too much of a secret that a number of global trends be it fashion or technology-related have their roots in the Land of the Rising Sun. So to say Japan is a "pilot" market for global trends is like saying A Rod (unlike the rest of the team) is having a good April, we kinda already know that.

Men's Health Creates Campus Extension

Men's Health, the 9th most read print magazine by teens and college students, has ambitious plans to introduce a new supplement dubbed accordingly "Men's Health On Campus" as students head back to campus in the fall. Right now, it looks like somewhat of a strategic experiment with only one supplement planned for the fall on about 30 campuses in 10 markets. Assuming they meet their objectives, Rodale, the parent company of Men's Health, says they'll go ahead an issue a spring supplement with hopes of turning into a regular quarterly thereafter. It looks like Men's Health On Campus will employ a similar distribution model of some other magazine brands who have attempted to reach the market as well. The supplement will be bundled within participating campus newspapers. Of course, their hope is that all students read their campus newspaper, which brings me to my next point. For years, the campus newspaper was a media consumption staple of nearly all students. However, in recent years, there has been some erosion in terms of regular readers since a lot of the information published in campus newspapers is now available online via the school's portal or other web sites. That's not to say the campus newspaper is a dead man walking, but hopefully the company did its research and found out who the typical campus newspaper reader is. The company says it will distribute a total of 500,000 copies and will also produce a corresponding web property.

Big Profits For Apple and Nintendo

Two technology and entertainment companies that rely on the youth market for their bulk of their revenues came out with especially strong financial results yesterday that ended up even surpassing optimistic analyst projections. Some of these performance metrics are just plain scary. Apple sold another 10.5 million iPods (that's over 100,000 a day) in the latest quarter bringing the total number of iPods sold to date to 100 million, yes, that's 100 million. It also looks like the Macbook continues to gain share within the personal computer market with the company selling 1.5 million in the past three months, an increase of 36% compared to an average growth rate of 11% across the entire computer industry. Looks like more great news for Apple and bad news for competitors like Dell and HP. Switching gears to Nintendo, which has literally been on a tear since last November, the company announced it sold nearly 6.0 million Wii consoles worldwide in the latest quarter with about 2.4 million being sold here in the U.S. What was somewhat surprising to us, is the continued global popularity of Nintendo's portable gaming system, the DS. The company sold an impressive 16 million DS units in the latest quarter.

Site Watch: Twitter

Social networking site Twitter has a simple question to ask, what are you doing? Really, it is as simple as that. Apparently, the procrastination tool has caught on with a lot of people, which you will see if you visit the site. At its essence, Twitter is an example of participatory social media in its finest hour to date. The site merges thoughts and feedback from member's friends and complete strangers all in one nice little display packet. Some people have already referred to Twitter as social media on steroids and several more people have talked about the future prospects for Twitter the same way people talked about instant messaging five years ago. As opposed to a busy MySpace interface, Twitter's interface is Googleque in the sense that is easy to use and ridiculously simple. The simplicity factor might just be the one that catapults the site into the upper echelons of social media users. The fact that Twitter's technology already scales to wireless devices like cell phone alerts makes it all the more alluring and traditional media companies are sure to be calling.

How Nintendo Took Sony and Microsoft To School

If you have a couple of minutes and follow the gaming industry, you might be interested in reading a Business 2.0 story on how Nintendo's underdog Wii beat up on the competition this past holiday season. It's a quick read and provides some good context as to what Nintendo was up to these past few years before the Wii came to market. As early as last October (about six weeks before the Wii hit the market) we were accurately able to forecast it's appeal among the youth market, especially teen and tween girls. Our annual Holiday Gift Wish List Report confirmed our forecast in late November and by January our trend calls were validated by the giant retail researcher NPD Group, who released scan data from the holiday shopping season. Popularity of the Wii shows no signs of cooling, if anything momentum has increased since the start of the year, it's still a relatively tough item to find in stores, and when they are available they don't spend a great deal on time on the shelves. It's great to talk about the console's unique attributes like the motion controller and the bundled Wii sports game, but we find the gender neutral drawing power of the console it's most prized attribute as a growing number of marketers and media companies utilize in-game advertisements to reach the youth market. With no real gender skew, you might find some L'Oreal placements next to the Red Bull ads in next year's new title releases for the Wii.

Organizations Head Down To VA Tech, Campus Newspapers Let Us In On Their Opinions As Well

As students from Virginia Tech head back to class today, they will notice a lot of new faces on campus. Organizations like the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Second Harvest Food Bank, among others, have all sent staffers down to Blacksburg as the university attempts to digest the tragic events that occurred a week ago today. It looks like the Red Cross has the biggest presence on the Virginia Tech campus by providing mental health services like counseling to students, faculty and the first responders who were on the scene last Monday. Anecdotally, we received a ton of emails from panelists last week asking if there was a way they could get involved and help their peers. Ironically, we started receiving these emails about the same time we as a company were trying to figure out a way that we could help as well. I think the underlying theme is really about the sheer number of young people out there who feel a sense of obligation to help out, which speaks to the broader macro trend of volunteering and activism we've been following for the better part of a year and a half. For somewhat of a reality check, I would suggest you visit some of the leading campus newspaper web sites to see how student reporters and writers are discussing last week's events and contrast those articles and opinion pieces against what the major news outlets are releasing. The most impactful story I read so far was written by a young man named Dan Sheehan writing for the Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech's campus newspaper. His opinion piece, titled "Let Cho die as he lived, anonymously," speaks to the growing chorus of students not just at Tech, but across the country who have expressed outrage that the major media outlets have focused so much attention on the killer, essentially turning him into a celebrity, which is what they believe is he wanted all along, otherwise, why would he send a carefully constructed media package to the most watched evening newscast? For me, this opinion piece really hits home, and I think for those of us who follow the youth market, it is something we need to take to heart. The student writer has, for all intents and purposes, eclipsed what all of the "noted" therapists and psychologists have been saying on-air over the past week, in that we'll never know why he did what he did, but it happened and nothing can be said now that will even remotely justify the actions he took.

mtvU Partners With ROO For On-Demand Broadband Video Network

Yesterday, mtvU announced a new partnership with Internet video technology company ROO to create a customizable video player that will be available to more than 500 college newspapers that are part of the network's College Publisher unit. All told, the 500 online college newspapers reach approximately 5.0 million students a month. At first glance, the new customizable video player should provide some value both for their readers and advertisers. As just about everyone knows, this audience is consuming gobs of online video content, so the move by mtvU seems like a natural extension. I would have to imagine that the participating college newspapers are pretty psyched as well, since now they can add a scalable video platform to their content offerings. It should also really increase mtvU's value proposition to marketers as they will soon be able to offer a video component to their standard display placements, plus they can charge a premium for video ads. If you are talking about reaching a highly targeted audience of 5.0 million uniques every month, then all the better. 

YT Tween and Teen Lifestyle Report Coming Soon

We'll be releasing the spring wave of our semi-annual Tween and Teen Lifestyle Report next week. The report is a combination of two interview types we conducted with the market, the first being a telephone-based interview while the second was two-sets of focus groups conducted in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta. Over the next couple of weeks, we will highlight some of the findings from the report, which covers over 100 individual topics. What were most proud of in this wave is our new innovative analysis of television and online media consumption. Essentially, we are now able to bring together on a micro level (individual programs in addition to the network) and the associated online component. The objective is to go above top-line reporting where we say X% regularly watch Naruto on Cartoon Network and X% visit the Naruto channel on Cartoon Network's web site on a regular basis. Instead, we are looking at the audience by defined segments that include time spent against individual on-air programming and their associated action(s) online or on other platforms like mobile. These findings are beneficial to both media companies and brand marketers because we can now accurately measure more of the coveted so called "360 degree" view of consumer behaviors by on-air programs alongside online and digital assets. We believe this type of analysis is crucial as a growing number of broadcasters pitch multi-platform deals as this season's upfront gets underway. You can email me for more info, but needless to say, we're very excited to get this report out.

Disgusting Application Service Provider Looks To Capitalize on VA Tech Tragedy

Although most of the talk this morning regarding the tragedy at Virginia Tech revolves around NBC's decision to air some of the material the killer sent in, a friend of mine forwarded me this link to a press release that was issued yesterday by an application service provider called US Netcom. In no small way, this company calls out the president of Virginia Tech as being wrong on understanding the potential impact of mass communication services, which is exactly was this classless, integrity lacking company is pitching to educational institutions. Although the first comment is insensitive based on timing and borderline rude and inconsiderate, wait to you read how they close out the release. And I quote:

"There is a tragic lesson for every educator of every school-age student: AllCall or other notification services can save lives. If it had been in place at Virginia Tech, the situation could have been, and probably would have been, much different."

Call it outrageous, call it extremely untactful, whatever, I think it is complete bullshit that a company can be so stupid to actually release something like this. Beyond the stupidity of the company, I am somewhat dismayed that the distribution service they used, Business Wire didn't object or question before releasing it in some way. There has to be some sort of quality assurance on their end as well, right, or I am being overly idealistic for a change? I know from feedback in the past that there are several higher education administrators who visit this site, if I were you, I would question any call coming into my office from this company, just a personal opinion, but for academic institutions that always boast excellence and integrity, any objective individual would have to question the morals and values of this outfit. 

MTV Goes Platform Agnostic in Upfront Presentation

Executives from the leading broadcast and cable television networks are out in the marketplace pitching their new program schedules and advertising opportunities to the media buying community as part of the $9+ billion annual ritual also known as the upfront buying season. Like last year, television executives are focusing on their interactive and digital assets as a centerpiece of their offerings rather than an afterthought. When it comes to the youth market in particular, all eyes are on MTV who unveiled a platform agnostic pitch to advertisers yesterday. The company spoke of several new and innovative advertising placement opportunities, an extension of their branded entertainment offering and exclusive ad ownership of individual programs. Clearly a lot of these opportunities can show up on-air, online or via wireless devices, which speaks to the whole 360 view everyone is talking about but few are actually doing (ESPN being the one company that comes to mind that can truly execute against this). But I think the real story and bottom line for MTV, is that whole thing surrounding the lose of Myspace to Fox and their tangles with YouTube has ultimately served as a wake up call for the oringial purveyors of the coolness factor. They are back to innovating and truth be told, they have a lot of smart people over there that are extraordinarily focused. You can say they were asleep at the wheel for a little while, but they're up now and just down three more Red Bulls, so look out.