The Screen Babies

Teenagers and those in their twenties are growing up with more time watching screens than any other in history.  Teens are spending as much as 13 hours a day online, matched by a huge growth in the mobile market (as many as 80% have a mobile phone, and emarketer reports that US mobile Ad spend will more than triple between now and 2013, expected to reach $ 1.56 billion).  This trend is changing the belief and behaviours of this generation. 

Beliefs in Baby Boomer and even Generation X revolved around the fact that TV programme information and News articles could only be found in print media, and through teletext, or maybe on the radio, but this was almost always based on the fact that you had to go to a particular location (your living room TV set; radio or to a shop to purchase the TV guide/ Newspaper).  This drove a behaviour that certain types of information would only be available during certain times of the day, and vast quantities of broadcast information was never seen or heard.

Fast forward to today.  Generation Y and Generation Z (who we like to call ‘the screen babies’, because of their obviously linked inclination) are growing up with all of this information at their finger tips (literally) accessed through the tap, tap, tap, and a swoosh action on one of the (growing in popularity, and increasingly wide spread) button-less mobile devices (pioneered by Apple in 2006). 

Recently we were asked at Naked Generations to help a client think about how they could make a seemingly ‘dusty, dry and old’ conversation with a disengaged audience come to life on a handheld mobile device such as an iPhone.

A little bit of digging revealed the size of the prize in this market for the (12.6 million UK) Generation Y audience they were after: £31 billion a year!  With the company’s track record with other generations we could reasonably assume they would capture roughly 10% of this audience (they had achieved just below that sort of market share with previous generations, and they would be a ‘first mover’), and so a £3 billion a year prize lay in front of us.  Astonished that no-one else had engaged this audience on this topic we set about designing the social tools that they would need to succeed.

Social applications were the heart of it. Those which informed other ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ of the user, of this particular iPhone application, about the choices they were making, live.  This in turn would spread to user’s networks through the Facebook status updates or tweets – drawing tens of thousands of other Screen Babies to their website and mobile application.

 When companies engage Generation Y through mobile they are reaching them on a medium that they intrinsically know and trust.  It’s one that they are a ‘native’ to, and so leaves them feeling as though they will have the upper hand – they can’t be cheated. They feel they know the medium better than the corporate. The fear of the asterisk factor (being stung after signing up to something) is reduced.  Not only this, but they are able to access it whenever is convenient for them – on the move (bus, plane, train) or at home; and share it with friends/ followers through the social elements.  So, what’s your application?