Fixation with appealing to Yoof

The artistic director of the UK’s National Theatre (Nicholas Hytner) believes we are underestimating the size of what he called the "literature festival" audience because of the concentration on the young.

He has been saying the same thing for some while. Back in 2003 he said, "According to received wisdom, there's evidently a thing called the young audience and everybody accepts that it's a good thing. And there's also a white, middle class, middle-aged audience and it's a very, very bad thing indeed." He continued, "There is a real danger in relentless and exclusive focus on the nature of our audience....There's nothing inherently good about any particular audience. We mustn't judge the success of an artistic enterprise by its ability to pull in an Officially Approved Crowd (i.e. the young). "

A not dissimilar line of attack was launched by the director of the Edinburgh International Festival who said that many Britons were missing out on “incredible experiences” because of an entrenched suspicion of anything serious, highbrow or experimental. Coherent ideas and intellectual rigour had lost their value for much of society, he argued, to be replaced with a consumer emphasis on simplification and entertainment for its own sake, whether it be through football, pop music, the media or comfortingly familiar classical works.

For time immemorial each generation has had a good moan about the state of intellectual decay of their children’s generation. Also I guess, each generation has attempted to modify its culture to what it thinks will be interesting and engaging for their kids, normally with hopeless results.

It is all a matter of degree. A marketing hotshot in the theatre of TV world looks at their audience figures and sees that it dominated by older people and concludes one of two things. This is great and we had better ensure we respond to this audience, or, this is dreadful and we had better change our content to appeal to the theoretical needs of Yoof. I think we have had far too much of the latter attitude. Dick Stroud

What consumers want from online news?

Well you are not going to find out unless you have a subscription to the McKinsey Quarterly. But I do and I know.

I will give you a few clues. The answer has something to do income, education and age.

The bottom line is this. There are, according to McKinsey, seven types of online news consumer. The mega consumers, called “Citizen Readers” (18% of the readers) are top earners, the best educated and have an average age of 49 years. The news-allergic, the ‘Uninvolved’ (11% of the readers) are the dimist, poorist and are, on average, aged 39 years.

So the moral of this story is: don’t waste your precious marketing dollars on news related promotions to the young (ish). Dick Stroud

Young marketers at play!

The BBC’s Apprentice TV programme contained a hilarious set of scenes where the budding business geniuses went about selling a product to an older audience – a wheelchair.
This short video clip gives an insight into why so many companies screw up big-time when their young marketers try and sell products that are totally alien to them. I think it is amusing (understatement) but there is a serious message. Enjoy. Dick Stroud

The great generational robbery

This article appears in the New Statesman (The UK’s main left-of-centre weekly magazine).

It is the simple story of how mum and dad have mugged their kids and grandchildren. The IPOD (insecure, pressured, overtaxed and debt-ridden) generation versus the rich oldies.

How strange it is that when loads of articles like this keep appearing the marketing industry still maintains its love affair with yoof.

I was amused to see the article contains reference to what now seems to be a ‘fact’ that the:” 50-64 year-olds have the largest carbon footprint – 20% bigger than other age groups”. In a previous blog posting I pointed out the weaknesses in this research, but it makes a good headline and who really cares about the truth!

In my view this article understates the case – the generational wealth differences are going to be much larger. Dick Stroud

Tomorrow belongs to someone else

Yesterday’s FT article by Philip Stephens was about the problems facing yoof. Mr Stephens is a bit of doom and gloom merchant but there is some truth in his observations. (Sorry, it is subscription only).

Here are a few extracts from his article:

Britain's baby boom generation is gliding gently towards pampered retirement. The children of post-war prosperity have never had it so good. Alas, the same cannot be said with any certainty of prospects for our children and grandchildren.

During the post war period kids access to education was widening. Society would be ever more mobile. Children would naturally rise above the social class of their parents.

And now? Insecurity and inequality are the modern condition. Globalisation and its associated tumultuous advances in technology have generated huge rewards for the educated, the industrious and the fortunate. The gains, though, are unevenly distributed and obviously so. Economic insecurity is ubiquitous.

The most visible inequalities are horizontal, or intra-generational.

Half of Britain's £6,000bn of financial wealth, he points out, is in housing. Who owns it? The baby boomers. What is more, they bought their property cheaply and then saw their borrowings written off by high inflation. Half of the rest of this wealth lies in funded pension schemes. The beneficiaries? A post-war generation that now intends to exchange the security of jobs for life for over-generous retirement incomes.

Perhaps the ultimate selfishness has been the baby boomers' reluctance to disturb their present enjoyment by having enough children to sustain the population.

Talk to young people and you can sense the resentment. There is, I think, something else. For all that the baby boomers grew up in the shadow of the cold war, they were confident that the world belonged to the west. That has changed. Power is shifting to Asia. Tomorrow, in other words, belongs to someone else in more than one respect. That will be hard. Dick Stroud