Gathering recognizable brands turned out to be a little more difficult than I thought. The Chinese Generation Y-ers I talked to interact with brands in a different way than North Americans. For example, clothing is usually brandless (or effectively no-name) and you go shopping at markets. For food, you usually eat at your schools’ canteen, a local noodle shop, or cook something for yourself. A big part of their day is interacting with items that can be considered brandless.

With that in mind, what follows is a composite of the different aspects of a Gen Y’s life in China, gathered from a handful of people aged 19-25.

Personal Healthcare

Personal healthcare is dominated by foreign brands.

Clothes*

The reality is that most people get their clothes at no-name shops. If you’ve got foreign-branded stuff, you’ve either got a little bit of cash or it’s a fake.

Breakfast

Usually, people make their own breakfast.

Commuting

Metro is really the only way to go. No one’s got a car unless you’re really rich. Besides, license plates are only available through auction.

Hanging out

KFC, Pizza Hut and Mcdonald’s are very popular in Shanghai. In contrast to North America, Pizza Hut successfully sells itself as an upscale, classy venue and people go to Mcdonald’s to hang out, study and chat.

Going online

Sony Vaios have roughly the same “prestige” that Macs have in the West. Apple is starting to make headway, but Shanghai is very much a Microsoft Windows stronghold (thanks to massive, massive piracy). Apple retains its pricing strategy (read: too expensive), and the benefits don’t connect with consumers. Basically, people don’t have enough money to be pretentious…zing.

Taobao is an online shopping platform that can be compared to eBay and Amazon. It’s so big that it’s currently beating Amazon in 2009 receipts.

Baidu is the major player in search, with over 70% market share. Google hovers 20% share.

Entertainment

The Lakers and the Rockets hold a significant mindshare here, due to fascination with Kobe and Yao Ming. PPS is a P2P app where you can watch tv shows and movies (works similar to KaZaa) and YouKu is the equivalent of the banned YouTube.

Connecting

Facebook never really took off here (and is currently banned). In its place we have two local giants in the SNS scene, RenRen and Kaixin (top right). The way it was explained to me was that RenRen is for “everyone” while Kaixin is for “white collars”. They were built as Facebook clones and are currently engaged in a membership count race.

QQ (middle, penguin) and MSN dominate the instant messaging scene, while everyone constantly texts with China Mobile, operator of the world’s largest mobile network.

The Land of The Clones

Brands are slowly and surely creeping into China. Local Shanghainese often tell me about how different everything was even just 5 years ago. Westernization is kept on a tight leash and there are cheap local alternatives to almost everything. Tech and Web companies are going to have an especially tough time, because of the nearly nonexistent IP laws in China and the home-court language advantage.

Globally, some things are the same, such as the constant need for connectedness. MSN spaces actually has a bit of a following here and it seems like everyone from the ages of 15-45 has a QQ instant messaging account. Pictures and statuses get thrown on the web on Kaixin and RenRen, just as we love doing on Facebook.

Kurt Greenbaum

Social Media Director (actual job title) Greenbaum took issue with someone leaving a vulgarity in his comments, so Greenbaum put on his best hall-monitor sash and sought out commenter’s employer. Commenter lost his job and Greenbaum gloats in his blog. Blog comments then fill with shock and anger over his breach of privacy policy (and smugness).

Anger snowballs until it hits social news sites, where at this point various people start to slander his name on twitter, novelty blogs and the like. In the course of about a day, his personal contact info (like his home address and his personal mobile) has been published on the web ad nauseum and his blog comments and Flickr account have been overrun with negative feedback. His Google results will forever have a permanent stain.

Fortunately for Greenbaum this is a fairly nerdy violation that this is restricted to social-media-savvy networks on the web (my mother has no clue what a privacy policy even is). But since his job is a “Social Media Director”, I hope he has learned a thing or two about damage control.

The Lesson
Be accountable for everything published on your website. Greenbaum wasn’t familiar with his own privacy policy and has incurred a lot of wrath.

HabitatUK and the Hashtag Spam

The marketing team at Habitat, a UK furniture firm, had a chat one morning…

Nigel: We need to be on Tweeter.
Geoff: You mean Twitter?
Nigel: Right! Whatever!
Geoff: I think my nephew uses that…
Nigel: Great! Throw some money at him and get him in here!

That is probably miles (or 1.6 kilometers) away from what actually happened, but it might as well be true. The company soon started spamming Twitter hashtags for completely unrelated topics. In short, they used the popularity of topics like the Iran election protests and iPhones to advertise a sale. Their tweets showed up at the top of the heap for these hot topics, at which point everyone called them out for spam on an ugly scale.

The Lesson
You target in the real world, you should target (even more) when using social media and relating to Gen Y.

United Airlines

United breaks some guy’’s guitar in transit. Guy makes a music video about poor customer service and zero restitution. Gen Y digs the message and spreads it throughout social networks (see: How Things Get Popular On the Internet) and ends up reinforcing the stereotype that United Airlines has awful customer service.

The Lesson
Don’t break anyone’s friggin guitar. United really could not have done anything here outside of improving their customer service, which they said they would do in predictable, standard corporate-speak. The real lesson here is that with the web, you don’t know who the influencers are, so you better step up your customer service game and make sure everyone is happy.

photo by Cathérine

Afterward, I reflected on all the ads that were thrown in my face that never even got a chance, thanks to my shark-like instincts to kill anything that looks like an ad. The year 2002 was an especially good year to hone this skill, as it was around that time that those annoying spy-cam ads spawned instantaneously all over the web.

Who actually clicks these ads?

I tried to visualize who was clicking those slap-the-monkey, punch-the-boxer ads. And who was clicking those unbearable inline text ads (the kind that creates links from random words in a blog post).

A rough answer to that question is as follows:

• people ages 25-44
• sub $40′000 income
• frequent auctions, gambling, career services sites

I found it strange that these were people who spent 4x more time online than regular users, and yet they were clicking more. Wouldn’t they develop banner blindness? That just goes to show that exposure doesn’t equal savvy.

Are they stupid?

Is it really fair to say that they are stupid? From the comScore piece, this “clicking” demographic strikes me as the same type that compulsively buys lotto and sweepstakes tickets. These folks don’t know how to handle their money, are lower-middle-class, and spend way too much time on the internet.

Their wanton clicking (with no commensurate increase in purchases) would certainly lead some advertisers to call them stupid, as in, those darn people who cost me money but never buy anything. The real losers here are the advertisers: clicks buy traffic, not intentions.

Gen Y, The Anti-Clickers

Word-of-mouth and Google are basically all you need to know when Gen Y is looking to buy a product. When I was in the market for a DSLR, I asked around, got some opinions and went to look up reviews on the cameras I shortlisted. After some searching, I went out to a brick-and-mortar store and bought it. Ads never played a part in the entire process.

It can be said that previous advertising had thrown Canon and Nikon as the two main contenders for my money, but I could have easily been swayed by good reviews for a Sony on a third-party, neutral website. (I ended up buying a Canon).

It’s incredibly hard to reach Generation Y through online ads, even when you hit them where they hang out.

I’m definitely on-board with those that say that the pay-per-click model is dead, or needs to die.

Further reading:
The end of the free lunch—again (The Economist)
Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet (TechCrunch)

Photo by Davichi

How do things get popular on the internet?

I’ve created the graph below to help explain the phenomenon.

The answer, put simply, is nerds.

The word nerd gets a bad rap. Basically, anyone who frequents a social news site is a nerd. Nerd just means that you are tech-savvy and internet-literate. I’m proud to be a nerd. Nerds have first-dibs on information, and information is power.

In the graph, coolness is a reference to when you are laughing at the joke. Have you heard the joke before, did you get the joke right as the punchline was delivered, or did you laugh once the comedian left the stage?.

The graph shows that nerds are the ones telling the jokes.

David After Dentist: A Case Study

Let’s take a quick look at a real-life example of this model: David After Dentist.
You can watch the video here.

DISCOVERY
David’s father uploads the video on YouTube on January 30, 2009.

SOCIAL NEWS
Video is picked up on Digg on February 4. It gets 10,000+ diggs.

FACEBOOK
Social news site users then pass it on to the general population through instant messages, Facebook walls, emails. It gets talked about at coffee breaks everywhere, Did you see that video of the kid after the dentist?

MAINSTREAM NEWS
Wall Street Journal writes about the video on February 9. Time Magazine does an article on the video on February 11.

SOCCER MOMS
On March 26, The Today Show interviews the family who made the video.

Why Nerds are so important

For every David After Dentist, there are a million non-starters that never even come close to pop culture stardom; they get filtered out during the Social News stage. Nerds whittle away all the meh content and highlight the gems. When it comes to the internet and user-generated content, nerds are the gatekeepers.

In previous generations, the ones doing the content filtering were mostly corporations and Big Media. With Gen Y and its connectedness, that influence has trickled down and spread out. Social news and networking sites have democratized the process, making Generation Y the first generation where broadcasters can actually be the last to hear about newsworthy items.

The other day, I wandered into a 7/11 wanting chocolate. I didn’t know which candybar I wanted, I hadn’t decided. And so I stood there, in a colourful aisle surrounded by candy and snacks, looking at boxes and boxes of chocolate bars, mulling over my decision. I surveyed all the screaming colours and smiling cartoons, eventually deciding that I wanted a Kit-Kat.

As I was reaching for the candybar, I was blindsided with a flash of introspection. Out of all the options, why was I picking Kit-Kat?

It was as if all the candybars in that 7/11 were a million tiny marketing execs, dressed in suits in their candybar colours, all yelling at the top of their lungs, clamouring for attention like stockbrokers right before the closing bell. As my hand drew closer, the tiny red marketing men of Kit-Kat cheered and claimed victory, the losers threw a tantrum, moaned, and went back into a huddle to figure out how to yell louder at the next guy who comes down the aisle.

Consumers are horribly undermatched

So much time, energy and money is spent in our society to funnel consumer behaviour into a desired course of action. People devote entire careers to figuring out how to make people buy their candybars. Marketers are in meetings, watching people in fake shopping labs, staying late at work away from their families, so that they can learn how to make strangers think that Axe Bodyspray will increase their virility or that McDonald’s is an essential part of every childhood.

I became horribly sick at the thought that I was starting a career where my sole purpose would be to make people believe that they can’t live without Brand X.

It was in this moment that I realized marketing is evil. Whenever you step into a grocery store aisle, your wits are against the wits of millions of Marketers, armed with consumer tracking studies and pilot tests and multi-city research and loads and loads of statistics.

Soulless Commerce

Manipulation and fakery of the finest details takes place on a daily basis so that Jane and Joe Consumer will pick Brand X.

I thought about all the 30-second ads on TV, and all of the focus groups, rewrites and reshoots that go into them in an effort to exert maximum consumer influence.

I thought about all the billboards and posters on the street and in magazines and how incredibly manufactured it all was, how the models in the pictures were hand-picked from thousands, then tweaked and photoshopped, optimizing appeal for the target audience.

I thought about the creeping, unstoppable march of marketing into our personal lives, and how any blank crevasse of public domain is being claimed under the flag of Advertising. Those miniature yelling ad execs are not just in our grocery aisles, they’re on our gas pumps, in our tv shows, and even on our parking stripes.

I thought about how powerful brands have become, from Nelly naming his daughter Chanel to basketball teams named Burger King Whoppers.

I thought about how nothing is authentic anymore. Marketing has reduced everything to design-by-focus-group and popular culture is usurped to increase Brand Awareness and ROI. Everything wonderful and real became reduced to soulless statistics.

All I wanted was some damn chocolate and instead I got depressed about my career. I needed to take a step back.

The Necessary Evil

Marketing is a field of mercenary psychologists. We are people who are continually trying to figure out what makes consumers tick, so we can get more money. I thought: Is that really so bad? Isn’t that the essence of business?

Marketing is inevitable. There will always be competition and there will always be a need to prove your worth in relation to competitors.

Farmers in tribal villages, fourth graders battling for class president and entrepreneurs seeking funding all rely on marketing. The American health care debate is a fierce battleground of ideologies, and both sides need marketing. Marketing answers the consumer question: Why should I pay any attention to you?

If I lived in complete isolation from media my entire life and wandered into 7/11 looking for chocolate, I, as a consumer, will still use marketing to guide my decision. I may not have been exposed to ads, posters and billboards for the candybars, but I would evaluate packaging…shape…name…price… to make a choice. All of that is marketing.

The Root of Evil

The ugliness of Marketing is that it cheapens so many things, all for an extra dollar. Remember Chocolate Rain? Marketing execs found something that was popular, so they decided to throw money at Tay Zonday and make Cherry Chocolate Rain:

At 8 million views, I’m sure it achieved Coke’s marketing objectives. But there is something disheartening about taking something organic and authentic and slapping brand names all over it.

Gen Y and the Push-Pull

Marketing works when an intersection exists where the brands push and the consumer pulls. Generation Y is living in a time where for the first time, the consumer can control the corporate push. Tivo and Adblock are testaments to this ability.

This selective screening just causes brands and Marketers to yell even louder, causing an escalating arms race between push and pull. This is a strange battle because ultimately marketers and consumers need each other.

Is Marketing Evil?

Is marketing evil? Absolutely, but only in the same way that the gun or the printing press is evil. It is a tool that takes whatever form its owner wants it to take. Power is afforded to whoever uses it.

As the threshold of marketing and corporatization pushes deeper into our personal lives, the only hope I can have is that in my lifetime, I don’t see parents selling naming rights for their children to GoldenPalace.

photos by s2art, marketingfacts

Living in South Korea, where cellphone penetration is nearly 100%, the culture of electronic communication is astonishing. It’s normal to see 60 year old women texting effortlessly or 9 year olds using their phones to take pictures and videos of anything they find remotely amusing.

This culture of hyper-connectedness has made me keenly aware of communication habits, both my own and of others. My cellphone usage has sharply increased during my time here, despite having a smaller circle of friends than back home.

Gen Y Never Eats Alone

I realized that with all the avenues of communication available, I’m never, ever really alone. If I’m having lunch by myself, I’ve noticed that I’ll send text messages to people in order to relieve the silence. If I’m bored on the subway, I’ll call or text someone.

If I’m working on something on my laptop — at least one IM program will be open. Sometimes I’ll sign on and passively leave it in the background. I’ll happily oblige if someone engages me in conversation, but I’m content with simply being available.

In my unscientific poll of some colleagues, it’s clear that I’m not alone in doing this. Viewing it objectively, it looks like a strange behaviour. What’s the point of all this seemingly needless connectivity?

The Facebook High

This always-on mindset could be indicative of a generation with low self-esteem. I still remember the days before ubiquitous cellphones, email, IMs and social networking. If you wanted to get in touch with a friend, you’d have to hope they were near a landline or you would go to their house. If you couldn’t connect with them…no fuss, no big deal.

But now that we can connect with our friends (and expect to hear a response anywhere within 24 seconds to 24 hours), we’ve tied our ability to connect into our self-identity. Because we are used to being surrounded by people — from our helicopter parents to our always-available peers — we have become dependent on their communication and addicted to their contact. Are we a generation that self-medicates its emotional issues by sending out texts?

Our personalities are now inextricably linked to our cellphones and Facebook walls. Notification of a new text or message can trigger a dose of excitement, a microsecond-high that makes you think ooh, what could this be? That’s why some people (affectionately known as “Facebook whores”) are so addicted to Facebook. It’s constant reinforcement that says yes, I have friends, and yes, I have social value.

The desire to be liked is certainly not unique to Gen Y. But this is the first generation where you can actually measure your popularity. Just count the text messages in your phone and see how many Facebook friends you have.

Pic by lst1984

Inevitably, some pictures I’ve seen — mostly the ones from parties — have resulted in some less-than-flattering photos of my friends. Not surprisingly, these pictures have been detagged.

Detagging is the process of disassociating yourself with a picture on Facebook, in such a way that it is not linked to your profile in any way.

Generation Y Can Pick & Choose Memories

Forgetting about your ex has never been more convenient. Have some text messages that make your heart cringe? Delete them. Really sappy Facebook photos that you wish you never uploaded? Detag them. Does your ex’s IM status talk about their new beau? Block then delete the contact. They never existed. It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, lite version.

Oh God, That’s Detag Worthy!

It’s common knowledge by now that Gen Y is narcissistic. But whenever I see it play out in real life, I’m still floored by just how obsessed we can be when it comes to our peers’ opinions and our image.

Whenever I’m at a bar or club and I see a group of Millennials snapping pictures, the same thing always happens. After someone takes a group photo, the picture-taker will automatically let the people in the picture review the photo. If someone says it is not acceptable, the picture is deleted and the pose is re-shot.

If an ugly photo ever sneaks its way onto Facebook, it is simply detagged. With privacy settings, the self-conscious have even more control about who can see what pictures.

Damage Control In the 21st Century

Can you really blame Generation Y? If Gen X-ers had an embarrassing photo, only a select few people could see it, and then any evidence could be physically destroyed. As our lives go digital, all it takes is one person to Right Click Save As and your shame can become worldwide. Extra difficulty if the incriminating digital evidence is a video.

I bet Star Wars kid would do anything to get a chance to detag.

Thanks for the pic, blythe_d.

Gone are the days when you would pick up a magazine and read a professional review column, thinking it was the be-all-end-all say on a product. These days, people are putting their trust in blogs, choosing peer opinion versus expert opinion.

Word-of-mouth is not new, but this is new territory for companies constantly jockeying for the market’s attention. Trying to tap into something as organic as blogging has proven difficult. Sponsored blogging company PayPerPost ran into trouble when Google decided that sponsored blogs were unworthy of front-page rankings. The sponsored blogging business model still remains controversial and has yet to see full-fledged mainstream adoption.

The recent news about Bike Hero being fake reminds me that Gen Y has extremely fine-tuned BS detectors — it seems that we think something is even remotely fake, it probably is. It’s almost disillusioning and insulting to think that agencies are continually trying to camouflage adverts. Why pretend to be something? The magic is always lost when you discover something to be a lie, even if it’s just a YouTube video or a funny blog.

It’s a very fine line between corporatizing something natural versus being a contributing participant. For brands trying to infiltrate Gen Y and its media, the key factor is, and has always been, sincerity.

Thanks to Alx for the pic.

It goes without saying that broadband is an unstoppable game-changer in the world of media distribution. We’ve gone from a vilified Napster to the legitimacy of XBOX Live.

Living in the South Korea, the country with the world’s fastest broadband, has really opened my eyes to the gravity of the broadband’s coming influence. You can think of Asia and North America as alternate futures in the story of Big Media vs Broadband.

Since the internet is so fast here — at least 5-10x faster to download music and movies — it’s painfully easy to consume media without batting an eyelash or thinking about payment. Sites that provide links to streaming media (SurfTheChannel is a hit with expats) are extremely popular since they give you access to North American TV shows, so you never have to miss an episode even if you’re halfway around the world. On the other hand, Hulu, NBC’s answer to YouTube piracy, is inaccessible anywhere outside the United States.

In Asia, Broadband wins…along with rampant consumer piracy. As I teach English to South Korean youth, I’m given insights to a generation that seems like it was born with WiFi capability. Whenever I ask about a popular song or band, the kids tell me that I should go on the internet and download their albums. Whenever a movie comes up in a lesson, they tell me that they downloaded that movie or watched it streaming online. There is no resistance or moral hesitation to consuming online media without payment. The kids do it as a reflex, a completely natural instinct.

However, media companies in South Korea have adjusted. Cellphone ringtones make almost as much money as CDs. Kids will use media however they want to and the companies have deftly acted to offset the losses.

Having a chance to live in South Korea has given me a glimpse of what awaits North American technology culture. Cellphone ownership in urban areas is virtually total and in-car GPS systems double as televisions.

Big Media should keep a close eye on how South Korean media has diversified. They can redirect their sinking ship — the hope of reviving CD sales — to a win-win opportunity. They diversify income streams, and we can all go back to liking the music industry.

As long as they don’t try to resurrect boy bands.

Gen Y has learned that normal parental behaviour involves constant checking-in and hand-holding. For better or worse, that’s another article for another time.

Imagine the big-brother-like level of coddling Generation Y will bestow upon its children. Armed with technology, our ability to stay informed about everything our children do will be almost total.

At least Gen X had freedom
I stay in touch with my parents through email regularly. The great majority of my peers do the same. Everyone in my immediate family has a cellphone and we call and text each other almost daily. A smaller slice of my friends have their parents on Facebook and on their instant messenger, also using those channels to stay in touch.

This might seem like too much communication — but the thing is, I want my family to know what’s going on with me, and I want to know what’s going on with them. In conversations with some Gen X peers, the last thing they wanted is for their parents to be able to keep tabs on them. To quote one directly:

If there needs to be a leash of some kind, I want the longest one possible.

When Generation Y has children (and some already do), technology is going to play a massive role in the way they interact with one another.

Gen Z: nowhere to hide
For example, if we ever became the slightest bit worried about where our kids are — we’d just call them on their cell phones (which, in the near future, will likely have GPS-tracking functionality). So I might not even need to call them, I’d just push a button and some kind of interface will show me where my kid is on a street map. A lot of parents add their kids to MySpace/Facebook/IM to monitor their activity, a trend which will continue in the future. This gives us information above and beyond your whereabouts — we’ll know who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about.

Gen Z: don’t even think about lying to your Gen Y parents, we’ll have documented evidence. Of pretty much everything you do.

cute kid at the park courtesy of mikebaird