Capturing youth… if only it were as effortless as the countless advertisements for skin regenerating concoctions would have you believe. Youth in a bottle; what more could media planners ask for? Thankfully for us at Communicate, it’s not that magical, which makes life far more interesting.
Youth is the elusive and fleeting slice of life everyone wants a piece of. For advertisers, that slice is the one with the most potential and the most exciting prospects; Advertisers want to target their brands at kids and teenagers and retain them for the future. The hope is, when the excitement of youth fades and those kids become adults, they can also become long-term brand ambassadors.
But as stimulating as youth can be, it’s also a moody and complex time in one’s life. And media planners need to be well aware of all the pitfalls that come with dealing with such a temperamental group. For starters, who can blame the youth of today – with so many mediums and brands and messages coming at them – for having shorter attention spans than previous generations? Breadth of choice has made younger generations far pickier and educated, forcing brands work much harder to target their desired audience.
Communicate spoke to several UAE-based planners about how to plan for youth, how to gain youth’s attention, and how to keep it. Planners from agencies like Starcom MediaVest Group, Leo Burnett Dubai, MPG Middle East, and BE International sometimes have differing tactics, but they share a common goal: they’re all working to reach that fickle youth population for their clients.
“Targeting youth of any age is simpler than most people think,” says Shadi Bteddini, president of BE International. “Yet marketers tend to complicate it, as most of them over-analyze it and forget about the basics when it comes to the target they are after.” In fact, Bteddini believes that youth are just as concerned with current events as older generations are, albeit in ways that are more relevant to them. “The beauty of young audiences today is that they are more focused and clear about what they want and what they don’t want than adults are,” he says.

ATTENTION GRABBING. But how do you capture their attention in the first place? Houda Tohme, media planning director at MPG Middle East, says that is the first key step to take in order to have kids grow up to become your brand ambassadors. The danger is that, with so many brands trying to speak to kids and with so many mediums coming at them, the target audience can grow jaded.
“The attention span of kids is becoming very minimal,” she says. “There are so many ways to target them, but how to keep them is the question. What we find really important in planning or advertising for youth is that nothing should be ‘normal.’ It should always be about innovation, something special, and something they can interact with. Also, it has a lot to do with their peers; if one of their friends is using this product or wearing that perfume, that’s a way to catch them, and we continue to build on that.”
Nicolas Chidiac, strategic planner at Leo Burnett Dubai, warns that the whole “down with the kids” attitude just doesn’t fly. “The first thing you might want to do is recognize that you’re not nearly as hip, cool or relevant as you once thought you may have been,” he says. Consequently the second thing to do is kick anyone out of the room who feels the need to remind everyone that the first thing they need to do when planning for youth is ‘be cool.’”
Chidiac also says planners should stay away from numbers. “Stop paying for pieces of research that tell you that Saudi youth want to express themselves and like their mobile phones,” he says. “Most traditional research will start you off some place right, but not necessarily some place interesting. The best place for us to start is by trying to establish a holistic view of youth’s behavior – not just intellectualize it, but feel it and experience it for ourselves. Ethnographies, maintaining an informal network with socially aware youth, recruiting interns, visiting schools, observing youth behavior and habits online, tracking what macro trends are fuelling their behavior, all these help us see things from human eyes as opposed to marketers staring down at a piece of turnkey research that cost $20K.”
At Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), regional planning director Mark Hamilton says that, with youth being one of the most challenging demographics to reach in terms of their short attention span and avoidance of ads, the agency ensures it reflects a number of key elements in its communications. “We need to ensure that we speak their language,” explains Hamilton. “If we want to make a meaningful connection, then our targeting needs to accommodate a number of unspoken rules – young consumers seek greater personalization, customization, engagement, participation, entertainment. Above all, we need their respect. A brand that respects those rules will be rewarded. Those advertisers who ignore them do so at their own peril, and are likely to be dumped because they will be seen as irrelevant.”

RIGHTLY OR WRONGLY. So which brands do it right? Chidiac cites products like Barbican and Chevrolet among those regional brands who have engaged youth, and uses the example of Mobily in Saudi Arabia as a brand that has successfully catered to kids’ social needs. The mobile operator tied in with Saudi football team Al-Hilal, and created a special prepaid plan for Al-Hilal fans called the Blue Wave. “If we’re both fans, we get discounts towards one another, we have content we can download and exchange, etc,” explains Chidiac. “Al-Hilal is this thing that generates so much enthusiasm, and Mobily have given people something to do with that enthusiasm.”
Bteddini says that the way BE International approaches youth in Saudi Arabia is different to how it works in the UAE, because of various factors involving restrictions and freedoms and available mediums. But Racha Makarem, Publicis Groupe Media (PGM) research director (MENA), says there is one medium which overrides this hurdle. “Digital holds no borders, and is a space where youth can roam relatively freely,” she says, “which may explain why there is such a strong affinity and invested ownership with this target group and this medium.”
Tohme says it is now a fact that the Internet plays a major role in targeting youth, and goes so far as to suggest instant messaging should be the lead medium here, as it provides a one-on-one interaction. And while Chidiac hesitates to advocate a specific successful medium, he says digital has made its way to the top. “I think the most important thing is to create enthusiasm and allow kids to get involved,” he says. “The online space has been a great place to get kids involved. Having said that, there are a lot of brands that unfortunately haven’t generated much enthusiasm, even though they are in the online space. Those are the kind of brands that will set up a Facebook fan page and leave it. Why should I become a fan? What have you done that’s so interesting? That’s where a lot of brands go wrong.”
Hamilton agrees that digital is increasingly becoming the choice for young consumers, because of its ability to offer personalization, feedback and a call to action. And, he points out, digital’s impact and performance can be measured directly – making it a prime choice for advertisers.

CIRCUIT TRAINING. “Circuits of Cool”, a recent study conducted by MTV and Nickelodeon in association with Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, which studied the habits and behavior of 18,000 young people from 16 countries, revealed that despite the increasing adoption of a digital lifestyle, most of what young people do hasn’t drastically changed in the last 15 years. “The reality is that youth in this region still watch television, listen to radio, read magazines, go online and frequently consume indoor and outdoor communication,” says Hamilton. “To reach them and target a campaign effectively requires the right balance of integrated communications, ensuring that this audience which is heavily fragmented is reached optimally.”
Bteddini agrees that other media should not be forsaken for digital, except maybe for print, which he says is to blame for its own failings with youth by assuming young people do not read. “Targeting youth today has to take place over many touch-points and not through a single medium, as most think,” he says. “Television, radio, shopping malls, football stadiums and school campuses all represent great mediums for reaching them. A careful and calculated fusion between the virtual and the physical world has to take place to inspire and influence today’s youth.”
Regional planners are increasingly aware of the importance of engaging younger generations, and catering to their social needs for self-expression, belonging, and having a call to action. And it seems planners are also more attentive to the fact that one medium is not the be-all and end-all of communicating with youth, but that using the many mediums available to them is often a more comprehensive way of getting kids attached to their brand. Chidiac thinks there are three disciplines of youth marketers in the region.
“There are the superficial mimics who have gone so far in underestimating youth’s intelligence that they feel the best way to garner youth ‘cred’ is by sticking a bunch of smiling kids carrying their products in layouts,” he says. “Then there are the trend mimics, who fill their campaigns with Ebonics, street art, graffiti, hip-hop, banners on Facebook and put their ads on YouTube; I think most brands fall in this category. But the great youth brands of today transcend advertising by catering to kids’ need to connect, stay connected, and share experiences.”