Young people make up almost half of our population. To the marketer, that means billions of malleable minds with malling money — and the willingness to buy almost anything.
For years, companies have cashed in on this market. Notice that almost every ad you see on TV is directed toward tweens and twenteens. Kids will, in fact, buy crap — especially if it’s celebrity-endorsed crap. A testament to marketing success: it is impossible to live anymore without a Gerald Anderson pencil.
Are there Gerald Anderson pencils? There must be. Anyway.
For the longest time, the formula has been this: Take a product and make it look real cool. “You have to make people believe they need something,” a brilliant marketer once told me. “But you have to be slightly out of their reach,” she says.
Cool, therefore, has always been by virtue of the unattainable. Like, the average Let-Let (an actual name) knows she can’t ever get it on with Gerald Anderson. So she buys a pencil. It’s a balance many companies struggle to find — a paradox, if you will — products have to be reachable enough to get and unreachable enough to want.
New Formula
The formula still holds true today, but it has become increasingly hard for marketers to use it in our hyper-charged world. Blame it on two things:
One is the barrage of information over the Internet. Kids today see so many products that they’ve become desensitized — privy to the tricks of advertising. With the world at their fingertips, nothing is really unattainable.
Second is the tragic story of New Coke. In the 1980s, threatened by the success of Pepsi, Coca-Cola decided to change their formula and dub it “New Coke.” Taste tests prior to their launching it showed a preference for the new formula (over Pepsi); but in their focus-group discussions, a small, vocal minority rejected the new formula and were able to influence others.
New Coke
New Coke, as we know today, was a million-dollar disaster. Coca-Cola ignored the vocal minority, who, unfortunately, in the real world, also had the ability to dissuade other consumers. The minority made New Coke un-hip. It became the butt of late-night jokes; it became the object of parody. Sales of New Coke were something to laugh at.
Only months after New Coke was launched, Coca-Cola was forced to revert to their classic formula, quickly regaining their market share — but the humbling lesson of the story is: no matter how much money you throw into a marketing campaign, it is impossible for companies to create cool. Consumers do — and they can make or break your company.
New Coke made consumers realize this.
Make Company
Fortunately, though, kids today are more interested in making companies. Young people love brands, they love stuff, they love Gerald Anderson pencils. When faced with a product, kids are more likely to try it than outright reject it — evidenced, for example, by Britney Spears reaching number one on the iTunes charts.
Apple, while we’re on the subject, is a company that has driven itself solely on kids’ consumer mentality. In the ‘90s, instead of gunning for Microsoft’s mass market, it focused on two demographics: creatives and high school/college kids. This paid off. When the iPod was launched, it was embraced tightly by these two markets. These markets made it cool to have an iPod, and so Apple fever spread.
New Formula
So, the new formula that has emerged worldwide is putting the consumer at the center of the marketing campaign. It started with tags (italics added): “You decide.” “It’s your world.” “The only paper you read from cover to cover.” These, as opposed to the brash tag-lines of yesteryear — embodied most in “Just buy it.” I mean, “Just Do It.”
Lately, marketing campaigns are being put in the hands of consumers themselves. Take the local Ray-Ban’s Rockstar model campaign — where consumers send in their best Ray-Ban-whoring photos to win awesome prizes. Or take the TV show Be Bench/Model Search. Or Nokia’s mobile film campaign.
Virals
Along this line is the viral video. Once upon a time, ads were things you had to sit through instead of listening to the Pacquiao fight over the radio. Today, ads are things you forward to your friends over the Internet. Virals are ads so funny — or so weird — that people pass them around. Examples are the Mentos-in-Coke viral, and the shoe ad that shows a guy making a basket from across the court.
Advertisers are now putting themselves at the mercy of the consumer’s mouse click. With TiVo, YouTube and Internet streaming, you can no longer force people to sit through ads. But people will — if the ads are good enough.
What this is is a total reverse of the original marketing formula. Again, before, the key was to create a cool, confident consumers will come. Today, there is no set key — you just have to hope consumers find you cool.
Now You See It
That hardly means death to marketing, though. Campaigns that are at the mercy of consumers are incredibly successful. The reason for this is that consumers are more likely to stick with product they feel is part of them — a product they feel they helped build. When a product is rammed down a buyer’s throat, it remains a thing. But when a consumer sees something and goes, “That would look good inside my throat,” he will get others to see the same way.
Of course, there is a way to build this kind of awareness without marketing. Starbucks, for example, spends very little on marketing — instead, it chooses to open stores on every street there is — because it is confident that consumers will come to their stores, like what they see, like what they taste, and then come back with five of their friends.
Investing in your product is marketing in itself. Our world is filled with information. Kids consume information. If something exists, they are bound to know about it.
Now You Don’t
But there are still clever ways to create “That would look good inside my throat” awareness, with the aid of marketing magic.
Enter stealth advertising.
The norm for marketers, once upon a time, was to make sure your logo was mucho visible. Stealth advertising is the opposite — its object is to hide the brand, letting consumers find it themselves (which they often do).
Films, TV programs — especially reality shows — rely on stealth advertising. They cost producers nothing and augment production expenses in ways studios cannot.
Let’s say you’re watching a film, and all of a sudden a Ford car comes into frame; the Ford logo in the foreground. That is stealth advertising. Let’s say, on your favorite Friends episode, Ross downs a bowl of Kellogg’s cereal. That is stealth advertising. Or, remember the election banners that read “Ang gara ng buhay”? Yes, that was stealth.
The C2 refrigerator in the PBB house is stealth. The entire Transformers movie (watch it again) was full of stealth. Even one of this year’s best independent local films, Endo, has a scene where the leads buy a pack of condoms and settle for Frenzy — because it’s “like you aren’t wearing anything.” Stealth.
Super Bro
And, just a few weeks ago, our local MTV started airing an awesome animated music video — it features a hero-character named Super Bro. Super Bro goes around the city to the tune of Stonefree’s Ayos Ka Bro, saving random people from random disasters.
No logos, no direct mention of the company that paid for it; there isn’t even a reference to what the company sells. But Super Bro is an ad for Smart. “Bro” is a word we use every day — thanks to the video, we now associate it with a superhero.
Does Smart Bro look different to you now? Thought as much.
Reaction-Ale
The rationale behind stealth marketing is this: Today’s over-saturation of goods makes it hard to build a brand. In order to set a product apart, it is now important to make it part of lifestyle, culture, speech. The best way to do that is through osmosis — Why go through consumer’s throats when you can seep through their skin?
So, the movement in marketing has gone from focus on the brand to focus on the consumer. Consumers are in control of the products they buy; and now, they are in control of the ads they see (and how they see them).
A basic adage of business is, “The customer is always right.” It’s a good idea to make marketing about them. Business should also be about them.
Conclusion
But advertisers still have the power to dictate discourse — with stealth advertising, most especially. This has led to questions about regulation — should people know when they are being shown an advertisement? Is there a line between building awareness and brainwashing?
These questions, of course, are far from being answered.
Personally, I don’t think advertisers are at fault — and I most definitely do not think ads should be regulated. But I do think that we should talk more about media literacy.
In sum, let’s do as we are doing now: let’s talk about marketing openly. Let’s give kids the brains to discern.
Kids are capable — they do, after all, create cool.
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What do you think? E-mail the author at pepediokno@gmail.com.