GB: Music is social currency, used by youth for communication.

Dan Whiley, VP Commercial - Digital Media, MTV
Charlie Henderson, Director of Business Development, Motorola
Nigel Sheldon, Director of Digital, Starcom UK

GB (to the audience): What's the social value of music to young people?

Answers from delegates: clothing, listening to pirate radio, defining meeting places, karaoke, taking drugs, photos from TV, being in a band, DJing, tattoos, festivals, roller discos, choir, gigs, posters, kissing the TV, merchandise, political statements, many more.

GB: The Ghettoblaster was the predecessor of the iPod in that it was a status symbol. MP3 took some of the overt displaying of music (through physical items) away. How are companies using this to engage with young people?

DW: It all boils down to community.

GB: TOTP used to be the main event of the week, stimulating discussion the next day. Now it's been edged out - why?

DW: They didn't do anything wrong, they just got old. MTV invented music TV but has stayed fresh. MTV has many sub-brands now: 9 or 10 in the UK.

GB: But the mobile industry uses generic brands.

CH: I listened to music I didn't like, because I wanted to be part of a community. Kids are playing music out of their phone speakers in order to identify themselves and make a statement: this is the most important thing for them and music right now. Big headphones are cool right now: again, a display behaviour. Things aren't cool when everyone has the same thing: there'll be a backlash against the iPod.

GB: Youth are buying products that fulfil social needs, not those the industry is wanting them to meet. The Motorola V3 is a basic phone: 50-60m+ sold (equalling all makes of iPod). (To me, this indicates the power of good industrial design and marketing).

CH: Some people bought a silver RAZR, then upgraded to black, then pink, then went back to silver because it's now retro! The mobile industry doesn't have strong enough brands to appeal to youth alone. Therefore in the accessory business, we have to partner with appropriate other organisations. Motorola has no credibility in snowboarding, so we partner with Burton. (Demonstrates a musical jacket).

GB: The record labels have experienced MP3, for better or worse. How do they see mobile?

NS: Personalisation, the desire for simplicity, etc. are important. Overall experiences are important, beyond buying CDs: living Glastonbury, say. Mobile delivers a number of new behaviours: people being more in control, with more intricate behaviours. My teenage son moves from texting, to online, to IM, etc. They multitask better. Ad ad agencies and media agencies, we have to look at how we reach consumers in this context.

GB: UGC and social media are buzzwords, but how do we make them work around mobile and music - with technical, legal, etc. limitations and bearing in mind the important role that (worried) record labels have?

NS: It's quite intangible for most people. There are some interesting services out there (but he doesn't give any specific examples, grr).

Video of youth interviews: some have ipods, some have phones. Some like convergence, some don't.

DW: People don't want to pay for music on the phone, because they don't want to pay for music full stop. Kids don't differentiate between devices or channels as much as we do, such distinctions are artificial. Youth don't work with technology, they just take it for granted. They don't know what "community services" or "web 2.0" are, but use them nonetheless. Mobile music is just music.

CH: As a large technology company, we often invent without considering relevance.

NS: 8-10 year olds are different to later generations. Adults presume kids are distracted, but they have a different mindset. Observe them to understand them. Test and experiment.

Question from audience: operators don't get the fact that to appeal to market niches, they are not appropriate brands. Vodafone are not cool.

DW: Everyone is concerned about technology, we're more bothered about the screen. We don't care whether it's 3G or DVB-H.

Question from audience: isn't the key now to encourage downloads, through content discovery, personalisation, recommendation?

DW: Why do you want them to download music? That's taking a traditional model and trying to replicate it in a medium that may not suit it. Why not stop looking for the killer app, and recognise there may be 4 or 5 new opportunities. The internet may not be the sole answer. Steve Jobs did a good job of creating the digital download market by selling the record labels something they understand: "it's like a CD without the plastic". So, the next step: how do people interact with music as a whole?

 

Panel session 1: "Marketing to youth: how do we engage consumers?"

Richard Sandford, Marketing Manager, Nokia
John Baker, Head of Interactive, OgilvyOne
Rhys MacLachlan, Head of Broadcast Implementation, MediaComUK
Tom Johnstone, Senior Planner, AMV BBDO
Dusan Hamlin, CEO, Inside
Richard Marshall, CEO Rapid Mobile

GB: "Entrepeneurialism is the last resort of the troublemaker".

GB: The major form of engaging young people was TV, but this is changing. In the 60s/70s, youth were exposed to about 70 ads a day compared to shy of 120/day now. But the recall rate has halved in spite of this. What's going on here?

RM: A degree of overexposure; people are blasé about it. Kids know how to read media in a way we didn't when we were young; they can spot condescension and people trying to be "cool". They're cynical consumers with more disposable income than previous generations.

GB: Is this a global trend?

DH: Yes. Youth have so many more ways to express individuality right now (reminds me of quote from an article from Adbusters: "millions of people expressing their individuality in the same way").

Comment from a kid in a MobileYouth video on SMS marketing: "You get all happy thinking someone loves you, and they just want you to buy something". Internet advertising is "quite annoying".

GB: Children aren't jumping into advertising.

TJ: "Youth" is a deceptive term; young people are increasingly segmented. Channel 4 research split youth 14-19 into 17 different tribes, shoehorning these into a single bracket doesn't work. e.g. indie kids explicitly don't want flashy phones, they want something with a camera to upload to Flickr/YouTube. I did some work with youth in Moss-Side recently, their favourite ads were the Marks & Spencers food porn ones, because they didn't feel they were being sold to - and they were hungry :)

RMcL: It needs to be personalised and relevant (yawn). We need to do an ROI model - Return On Interest. (How is this in any way interesting thinking - surely we should take this stuff for granted nowadays?).

GB: As an industry we're approached mobile from a reach perspective. Look at Jones Soda, which does a turkey and gravy flavour at Xmas. "We own the meat flavoured drink market", they say :) Their customers send in photos and they put these photos onto the bottles: the customers own the product, they think... and product development and marketing are integrated to the point where they might be the same thing. Is there a risk that young people will hijack the brand?

JB: 2 teen magazines have stopped printing in the US in the last year, which indicates a shift away from traditional media and towards different ways of youth communication. You can be the court jester (funny), courtesan (sexy) or courtier (being really seriously useful) in marketing to youth.

RMcL: If you give one mother a good experience, she'll talk about it. We can't control word of mouth (yawn).

JB: The phone used to be a shared resource. Nowadays everyone owns one and communicates lots of different ways (yawn).

Question from audience: would teenagers be more receptive to advertising if they were paid to view it (with free texts or airtime).

RMcL: Yes, this is a "Return on Interest".

RM: Watching adverts is part of the bargain for TV viewers. SMS marketing is like "chugging": unwelcome and ineffective, but gets through to some people. Making it useful is part of the key.

First up, an introduction from Graham Brown of the Wireless World Forum:

Children don't know the rules we set for them; this is why they defy convention. SMS grew thanks to young people "breaking the rules". MMS was an attempt to increase per-message fees. Some real views from youth follow, highlighting social value of mobiles for youth (duh).

Lifetime value of a young mobile customer in the UK is $20,000. This decreases as they get older. We need to connect with them earlier because this is when they build up their brand associations (catch 'em whilst they're young!). Lots of quite complicated graphs. Lost revenue through churn is far more of a revenue opportunity than increasing ARPU incrementally: mobile telecomms runs at double the churn rate of the typical service industry.

It's Never Been Built Before: "In software development, if you're repeating the same project over and over, you won't have a job for very long. At least not on this continent. If all you need is a stock airplane, you buy one. We're paid to build high-risk, experimental airplanes."

Adam Curry's The Zen TV Experiment: "Rather than breaking the chains of ignorance, political domination and illusion in our Platonic cave, something insidiously similar yet different is going on. Instead of actually turning away from the shadows to see the realities, instead of actually leaving the darkness of the cave and going up into the sunlight, we merely watch an image of ourselves doing this, we fantasize about doing it and think it's the same. "