[b e s ty - // u p d a t e s]

Do Marketing, Promotions and Advertising execs, sitting in offices the world over, really know how to target our own generation? And when I say target, i mean in an effective way that changes the way our generation looks at a product, service, or anything in general.

The short answer, I suspect from many, would be resounding 'yes.' Our own generation, Generation Y (or however you would like to name our generation) seems to bear much of the world's marketing force, and we do indeed buy. But does this necessarily mean that we are impacted or affected by advertisements, or are we making our own assessments of products (as an example) and buying things purely on our own assessments, with maybe a little help from the advertisements we see every day?

I must admit, there have been some marketing campaigns that have caught my own eye, and one of them was "The Zero Movement" for Coca Cola Zero in Australia. I won't go into whether the way Coke carried out the campaign in its early stages was ethical or not (as much of its advertising looked very much like a grassroots campaign, when it really was not) but it did catch my own attention, as I'm sure it caught many people's attention.

So, where am I going with this?

when it comes to NGO's, international campaigns and causes, they too must compete with corporate advertising, which often has a lot of money behind it. So, say with campaigns such as Make Poverty History in Australia, the ONE Campaign in the US and other such campaigns, do they need to rethink how they connect with young people, and how they stir interest in their own campaigns?

In my own opinion, young people can no longer be targeted and spoken to through traditional media sources, from the daily newspaper to even the regular TV ad. It just doesn't cut it anymore. Instead, to effectively create interest in, engage and involve young people, advertising, marketing and promotions has to take on a whole new level. Take, for example, street art. Or stencil art. Or street media publications, independent of major commercial media firms. Or even the odd TV ad that doesn't take the form of the tradition, 30 second ad, aimed at a generic audience, and seems to assume that the audience is either completely dumb or not educated (to be blunt.) Think guerrilla marketing.

And I'm not talking about viral marketing! I'm talking about targeting young people in an engaging and NEW way.

This is the challenge faced by MPH, the ONE Campaign and others. Its something that I think (Product)RED is able to do effectively, as far as I have seen. It's also something that NEEDS to be done.

Our generation wants to be involved, wants to be active, wants to be engaged. But it also doesn't want to be treated as if they don't know anything. They don't want to be subject to marketing that is generic. Different subcultures require different types of advertising and marketing. If it is right, people will become curious and investigate more. If it isn't, however, we will just pass it off as another generic advertisement, not applicable to us.

Social movements that are changing the world need to consider this: the way they approach the world, and approach generation 'Y', needs also to be world changing and original.