Just got back from Istanbul last night. Jetlag would be an understatement. I traveled to Istanbul to speak at the first BEYOND Trend conference to share a perspective on wired U.S. teens. We stayed mostly around Istanbul for the week -- a city that in many ways reminded me of San Francisco with its hills and proximity to "the sea." We visited the Princes Islands, ate lots of kebab and dolmas and checked out most of the big tourist sites including the Grand Bazaar where I was talked into buying a small carpet, a couple of scarves and of course, Turkish Delight. I also met Ozgur Alaz (in the photo), a Turkish marketing blogger who has been reading Ypulse for three years. He shared how he has been building his own consultancy focused on youth in Istanbul. On Wednesday, I spent the entire day at their beautiful conference site right on the Bosphorus listening to a host of international speakers talk about trends. I only took sporadic notes on a couple of speakers but will attempt to summarize below.
One of the speakers was Edith Keller from Carlin International -- an international trend forecaster that has loads of clients and appears to specialize in design. Edith spoke in French so I relied on translation (my four years of French in middle and high school did not help). She spoke about what her company actually does to predict trends 3 to 5 years out. What I took away from this was that it's not just marketers but a team of creatives (with help from a historian, sociologist, and other experts) who basically predict what's next, package it in a beautiful book and sell this thinking to loads of brands. It makes you wonder if companies like Carlin, who have so many major brand clients, are actually predicting trends or creating them. She had beautiful Power Point though. Piers at PSFK launched a really interesting discussion a while back about trend forecasting with a post called "The Problem With The Trends (Business)" - worth a read.
The Turkish rep from Adidas spoke later that day. He focused on Adidas' core market (Gen X and Y) but also on how they are paying attention to the growing (global) aging population. Evidently most of Turkey's population is under the age of 25. He spoke about Gen X being defined through television as our medium of choice and Y being the Net. Apparently the desire for flexible office hours and more work/life balance is not limited to Gen Y in the U.S. He also talked about the lack of attention with so many channels and options specifically in sportswear where there are over 250K products introduced each year for whatever mood on whatever day -- "it's their choice to be in touch with you." He mentioned Adidas efforts to be socially conscious by supporting a local campaign to prevent drunk driving and creating a smaller more eco-friendly line (still hard to create sustainable products in apparel, i.e. costly). He talked about the move towards intelligent products (wearable technology) like a chip in shoes that adjusts the shoe according to the pavement) as well as miCoach, a new partnership with Samsung that involves tailoring music to your jogging rhythms. He also mentioned the need to create products you can personalize, i.e. miAdidas (like Nike i.d.). Oh and Adidas is also going to launch a big marketing partnership with Vespa in 2009. Cool.
I made friends with another U.S. speaker, Harley Cross, the founder of HintMint -- a very high end and packaged mint company that has done well with the Hollywood red carpet crowd and in high end hotels and galleries internationally. I love hearing other entrepreneurs' success stories.
My sense of what's different about Istanbul youth culture vs. in the U.S. is the role of family, community and tradition in their society (i.e. it plays an even larger role there than I believe it does here). While Istanbul is incredibly cosmopolitan and westernized, it is still a Muslim country (you are reminded of this when you see some teenage girls wearing colorful head scarves and hear the prayers from the Mosques echo across the city). I was curious to know how these traditional forces vs. the forces of more western individualism/consumerism are playing out within within families and between generations. My guess is that the former tempers the latter. If you were wondering about MySpace vs. Facebook, Özgür told me Turkey is more like Canada in that its tech savvy youth are on Facebook vs. MySpace (though MySpace is coming) and MSN Messenger vs. AIM or Yahoo!. I also sensed that there are lots of Turkish teens still logging on at internet cafes vs. a laptop at home, especially outside of the bigger cities. Either way, I think the portrait of wired U.S. teens I shared was not so different from that of teens in Istanbul. There was one Turkish teen in the audience, and when I asked if anyone had heard of Soulja Boy, he nodded his head immediately.
The CW pulls 'Gossip Girl' from the web (OMFG. This seems like a bad move to me. It's never good to give people something for free online and then take it away. Teens know how to watch TV using Torrents, too, ya know) (L.A. Times, reg. required)
- Bebo announces its 'Gap Year' winners (including one from Chicago who will join the globe trotting twentysomethings for this online reality series)
- 'Beyond the Rave,' ctd. (danah boyd commented yesterday that the series is vampire/horror and asked, "if you find out why the age marking, I'd love to know." I asked MySpace and got this response: "MySpace has strict policies in place to ensure that younger users cannot view mature material on the site. Due to content that is designed for mature audiences in MySpaceTV's new Beyond the Rave series, MySpace has implemented specific safety precautions so that the delivery of the content is limited to mature audiences." My cynical side, says it's really to make it even MORE appealing.)
- Rock The Vote & Wiretap (looking for youth reporters to cover the election...Plus the United Nations Foundation and Better World Foundation running a video contest asking youth to advise the new president on what he OR she should do on their first day at work. And download this compilation of Latino artists from iTunes for $3.99 to benefit Vote Latino)
- Eating disorders (can be contagious. According to this study...) (Reuters)
- Alicia Keys (in WeeWorld! Plus loads of brands lining up for WeeWorld's Prom -- you know your WeeMe needs whiter teeth, right?)
- Playboy snowboards (I wonder what female boarders will think of these...) (Jossip)
- Want you to want me (not the Cheap Trick song, but a very cool data visualization of what people are saying on online dating sites. Plus SubwayCrush - "missed connections" on the NYC subway system) (danah boyd) (SubwayCrush via Fimoculous)
P.S. Happy Passover to all of you in "the tribe" and anyone else who likes this holiday!
Something to cheer about? (personal care products targeting cheerleaders and other high school athletes with product samples and competitions. To me this is definitely marketing creep into schools/school activities. But since it's not going away, coaches should be talking with these students about why companies are inundating them with samples, i.e. marketing literacy. Plus J&J is expanding Clean & Clear for teen girls with "normal" skin, part of the burgeoning tween/teen girl personal care biz) (L.A. Times, reg. required) (Cosmetics Design)
- Trendrr (cool way to track what the internet is buzzing about) (via TrendCentral)
- LG15 lives! (or at least the actress who played Bree does -- starring in a new web series) (NewTeeVee)
- Soulja Boy analysis (pretty interesting article on the Soulja Boy phenomenon with proclamations like "the explosive popularity of that Soulja Boy dance partially reflects a change in how America raises our young") (PopMatters)
- Radiohead remix (latest way Radiohead is engaging with fans)
- Kids choose ("Kids Choice" - ratings way up over last year)
- BKFK on a partner spree (the kid idea/inventor site working with Do Something, Weather Channel, CosmoGIRL! and more) (press release)
- UK tweens on MySpace (we knew this, now there's research. Plus a nice commentary in response to the TIME.com piece on fearing UK youth called "Hoodies" or "Goodies" basically arguing for the grey area in between) (UK Guardian)
Emo bashing (in Mexico. This is really intense -- sorry I'm late on this story, but there has been a wave of violence in March against the "emo" community in Mexico -- this latest dispatch alludes to homophobic undertones) (Intersections)
- McDonald's behind 'The Lost Ring' (ARG game promoting the Olympics that we mentioned a while back) (New York TImes, reg. required)
- 69 percent of teen girls (play console games...I'm guessing that at least half of that percentage is on the Wii. Plus the video games girls play) (stat in Media Life Magazine interview on casual gaming) (Contra Costa Times)
- Trusting teen girls (interesting post over at Huffington Post about "Sophie" the troubled teen girl patient in HBO's "Addiction." Between having a mother who is a counselor and a husband who is training to be a shrink and all of my own ongoing head shrinkage, I just can't watch that show)
P.S. For anyone not on our Ypulse Mashup mailing list, the full agenda is now online with the speakers we've confirmed so far. Many more to come. Register now and save $!
We all know there is a dark side to social networking -- see this month's New York Magazine story about what the faculty discovered children of some of their wealthiest families were posting. But it doesn't get much darker than this:
A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged.
The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man, the al-Arabiya website reported.
The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the "strife" the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation.
'Pokemones' (Chilean teens into fashion, technology and communication-free casual sexual encounters in public spaces but not as any sort of political statement....fascinating article) (Newsweek)
P.S. Last night I saw a screening of the short documentary film "Carissa" about a former child prostitute who went on to get an MBA from UCLA. It was very powerful. They will be making the film available with a curriculum for folks working with at-risk youth/juvenile offenders in about six months...You can email the filmmaker via the website for more info.
P.P.S. Eric Spencer interviewed me for his podcast about Ypulse....I'm at the end. He's funny.
I talk a lot about teens as "intuitive users" a lot, i.e. using tech to meet their core developmental needs vs. teens as techies (understanding how stuff works, code, etc.) or being aware of privacy settings, etc. I stumbled across some research today on Canadian teens I think supports this notion. It also shows that, at least in Canada, teens aren't spending as much time online as we think. From the Media In Canada article:
"What's surprising about our research is the extent to which it challenges conventional assumptions adults make about the technological sophistication of teenagers," says Steve Mossop, president of Market Research for Ipsos Reid in Western Canada. "The reality is they spend far less time online than adults with a very limited number of activities - like socializing, gaming and music - and their attitudes are surprisingly unsophisticated in terms of their lack of comfort with the technology, concerns about security and privacy, and importance of the Internet in their daily lives."
More than a quarter (28%) of online teens consider themselves to be very skilled or expert. Another quarter (24%) admit to not being skilled in navigating the net, while the remaining teens pegged themselves as fairly skilled. And while adults are going to a multitude of different websites for a variety of online activities, teens are focused mainly on websites that allow them to socialize, download music or play games.
In fact, online socializing is by far the overwhelming reason teens surf the net. The majority of kids surveyed (88%) have participated in an online social activity (compared to 70% of adults), and more than half (59%) visit online social networks or communities daily or a few times per week.
Our cellphones ourselves (lengthy Washington Post, reg. required, article with lines like: "Girls stare into their cellphone screens as if into the mirrors of compacts, looking to see a reflection of themselves in who has called, who has messaged. Parents no longer know who has a crush on whom -- boys no longer call the house." Plus "Teeny Shoppers" (a .pdf report on attracting teens to retailers via mobile. AdWeek offers piece on mobile's challenges. And USA Today on the college fight song ringtone that's ringing up the profits...)
- The 'American Idol' effect (bringing in younger audiences to London's theater scene) (Media Life Magazine)
- Sexual assault... (a "fact of life" for girls and young women at school in Canada - yikes!) (CityNews)
- Losing their religion? ("Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion," according to a new Pew report)
Instead of writing one massive Essentials post, I figured I would start with what's in my email and then do a separate post of links I have gathered. After today, I will have officially "dug out" from being gone. First up Ypulse reader Ashley sent this link to a post about whether TV for tots under 2 is a bad thing -- the gist is that a few educational DVDs won't ruin your child. It's written by Mallory Lewis, the daughter of the children’s entertainer, Shari Lewis (and Lamb Chop - does anyone else find it disturbing that the cute puppet is named for the food he will become? It's like calling a pig, "Bacon").
The Campaign For A Commercial Free Childhood sent an email about their latest target, Webkinz, for running outside advertising on its site. Izzy Neis explores this on her blog. Sites like Nick.com have advertising, too. I'm not sure where you draw the line on this, which kids' sites should or shouldn't run ads for movies, etc.
Ypulse reader and regular tipster Bob reminded me that yesterday blogs became tweens - or turned 10. Ypulse is still a toddler (will be 4 in May!), but it's an opportunity for those of us who do it to reflect on how we got started. I attribute my original blogging inspiration to one Robert Duffy, my Netscape carpool buddy back in 2000. He launched his music blog Donewaiting.com when we were working together in Columbus, OH, for AOL Web Properties. When I was thinking about how to start Ypulse, I thought of him, and decided it was a no-brainer. Thanks Duffy!
danah boyd forwarded this satirical video called Web Site Story spoofing the whole "To Catch A Predator" thing...it's both sort of funny and sort of offensive.
I received an email alert that Pew published its latest research on privacy revealing that most adults don't really seem to care about what they share online. According to the survey, "fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online." It's kind of interesting when you think about how freaked out they are about how much information teens are posting.
On a related note, Ypulse reader John wrote, "I was recently at a gathering of bloggers and online community people, and I found that everything they had to say rang totally true for me and my values except that none of them thought there was, or should be, any real right of privacy nor were they much concerned about it. They didn't see it as a problem at all. These 3 European guys attending were shocked. One of them said, 'do you have to go through what we went through in Europe in the 1930's and 40's to see why it matters?'"
From across the pond, the folks at UK teen mag Sugar informed me that they launched their social media effort called Sugarscape. From their email: "The site will allow teen girls to share and comment on webpages from around the web with their friends and other Sugarscape.com users. In addition to this, the site will also provide users with typical social networking tools such as profile pages, friends lists and public/private messaging."
Finally, Ypulse reader Melissa wrote to let folks know that the very cool non-profit org L.A. Youth is holding an event Tuesday, January 29th, 8:30 am-10am at their offices. Here's the description:
Interactive dialogue to focus on 20 year retrospective of "best of" articles, highlighting trends in youth-driven content as well as First Amendment challenges. Teens will also share concerns about issues confronting them in today's world. The dialogue will be moderated by L. A. Times Columnist Kurt Streeter. To RSVP, email Melissa.
Our latest guest post is from our friends Alan Rambam and Allison Mooney at Next Great Thing, the insights arm of Fleishman-Hillard's Youth and Mobile Marketing Group. I mentioned mobile (in the US) was finally moving beyond voice and data in the Ypulse [Y]ear in Review post last week, but Alan and Allison offer a detailed glimpse of what's next by looking to Asian youth who have always been on the cutting edge when it comes to mobile adoption. Remember, you can participate in the Ypulse Guest Post program by emailing me your idea, and a bit about your youth media or marketing background. You don't have to be a marketer to post! Ypulse welcomes posts from content producers, educators and non-profit professionals, too!
Looking to Asian Youth for 2008 Mobile Trends
Coolhunters have always looked to Asia for what's hot. Not just because youth in Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul are super-trendy, but when it comes to technology, these cities are far more enabled than we are. This is especially true when it comes to wireless technology.
Mobile is the new ultimate global youth convergence platform. Asian youth represent a fifth of the earth's population and many of them are leapfrogging past the Internet directly to mobile. The wireless handset is their "first screen," and it's merging with the Internet into one seamless communications medium. At NGT we've been tracking Asian Youth trends for years, and we will continue to look to them as a trend beacon for mobile in 2008. Here are a few key areas that we'll be watching:
Social networking sites (SNS) are as hot in Asia as they are in the States, if not more so.
Social networks are only successful if they capture the unique cultural nuances of the cities where they originate. This is extremely important in Asia where privacy is a big concern, and there is a high level of comfort with written communications over spoken word or face-to-face interactions.
SNS sites enable youth to stay connected to their ever-expanding networks of friends. It is only natural that they will be enabled on the handset -- a personal "always-on" communications device. We are just getting started in the U.S. with the mobile version of sites like MySpace and Facebook, which are getting increasingly easier to access and interface with inside the mobile ecosystem. However, these early applications have a long way to go in terms of connectivity and location-centric access that is a must for all brands, large and small.
In Japan, Mixi, the most popular SNS, hit over 100 million page views in one day last January. Softbank put links in its Yahoo! mobile portal to Mixi Mobile and others including MySpace Mobile and Gree. The mobile version of Gree, EZ GREE, surpassed 1 million members in October, and parent company KDDI plans to integrate more carrier- led mobile data offerings, notably location-based services, going forward.
Speaking of LBS, since Asia has much better GPS penetration, it's become the launching pad for this exciting technology. Take mincle, a mobile social mapping service that pinpoints and shares a user's favorite locations with others in real time. Viacom also decided to test the waters with its ad-supported mobile SNS, myMTV in Asia.
As social networks are melding with virtual worlds and games -- a trend that started in Asia -- avatar-based SNS are likewise moving onto the handset. Softbank Mobile's S! Town, launched last November, was the first 3D world for cell phones. Mobagetown and Chipuya Town are the hot properties right now. These Japanese social networks are centered on casual mobile gaming. Members earn currency to pimp their avatars by watching ads, interacting, and signing up friends. Mobagetown hit 4 million users this past March. As Chipuya Town's virtual world mimics the real one, offline purchasing is probably not far down the road for this and many other SNS/Avatar based services in Asia.
In this vein, there is a huge opportunity for mobile to extend into real-life interactions and purchases. Driving this are Bar Codes, also known as Kool Tags (Singapore), Quick Response (QR) codes (Japan) and Semacodes (US and Europe). These codes contain information such as URLs that can be decoded using software on a camera phone. QR codes are very popular in Japan, often appearing in magazines, on signs, buses, even business cards. By allowing users to send out invitations via QR codes, Mixi Mobile was able to reach that impressive 100 million mark. We've had barcode technology for awhile in the US, but it's not widely used. However, today's new advanced and GPS-enabled handsets are stimulating demand for improvements in mobile advertising and media personalization.
NTT Docomo really made the "mobile wallet" a reality with its i-mode mobile payment system. The carrier collects user payments for vendors, and the money is automatically deducted from consumer's monthly bills. As one of our NGT correspondents in Tokyo told us, this method is incredibly popular among Japanese women. In fact, it can often be cheaper to buy products via mobile (not to mention easier!) We have heard some rumblings from a few carriers and brands that they are planning some very targeted carrier-enabled mobile purchasing pilots in the US in 2008. So, maybe next year you will be able to all of your Christmas shopping on the way to mom's house.
It's no wonder young people in Asia spend twice as much time on the mobile Internet as they do consuming traditional media. Not only can you shop, but you have that web wonder, the widget. These RSS-powered "tiles" will become the entry point to the mobile web with the iPhone, Yahoo! Go and startups like Zumobi leading the way. The next use of RSS is already manifesting itself in Asia with ticker tape news. These CNN-like feeds let you read the news in real time as it scrolls across the bottom of your phone. NTT DoCoMo was first to launch this subscription service on its portal. 18 months after launch, NTT DoCoMo reports that it has already 8 million paying subscribers to the service (16% of all subscribers). And you thought the iPhone was cool...
2008 will be a big year for mobile in the US as the proliferation of 3G handsets will bring about a host of new mobile applications and functionality. It is still going to be a slow adoption process here, but the move towards open platforms (Google's Android, Verizon, Nokia) will help to spur a sea change. In the meantime, we can peak into the future across the Ocean and look forward to the coming years.
Alan is Senior Vice President, Senior Partner, NGT and Allison is Director of Trends & Research, NGT.
Just got back from Istanbul last night. Jetlag would be an understatement. I traveled to Istanbul to speak at the first BEYOND Trend conference to share a perspective on wired U.S. teens. We stayed mostly around Istanbul for the week -- a city that in many ways reminded me of San Francisco with its hills and proximity to "the sea." We visited the Princes Islands, ate lots of kebab and dolmas and checked out most of the big tourist sites including the Grand Bazaar where I was talked into buying a small carpet, a couple of scarves and of course, Turkish Delight. I also met Ozgur Alaz (in the photo), a Turkish marketing blogger who has been reading Ypulse for three years. He shared how he has been building his own consultancy focused on youth in Istanbul. On Wednesday, I spent the entire day at their beautiful conference site right on the Bosphorus listening to a host of international speakers talk about trends. I only took sporadic notes on a couple of speakers but will attempt to summarize below. 
Instead of writing one massive Essentials post, I figured I would start with what's in my email and then do a separate post of links I have gathered. After today, I will have officially "dug out" from being gone. First up Ypulse reader Ashley sent 
Coolhunters have always looked to Asia for what's hot. Not just because youth in Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul are super-trendy, but when it comes to technology, these cities are far more enabled than we are. This is especially true when it comes to wireless technology. 
SNS sites enable youth to stay connected to their ever-expanding networks of friends. It is only natural that they will be enabled on the handset -- a personal "always-on" communications device. We are just getting started in the U.S. with the mobile version of sites like MySpace and Facebook, which are getting increasingly easier to access and interface with inside the mobile ecosystem. However, these early applications have a long way to go in terms of connectivity and location-centric access that is a must for all brands, large and small.
