Anastasia Goodstein runs one of the best marketing sites on the web from her base in San Francisco. Named Ypulse, the site provides media and marketing professionals daily news & commentary about Generation Y. She’s also supported by a team of roving teen reporters.
Q. Tell me about your site.
Ypulse.com provides daily news & commentary about Gen Y for media and marketing professionals. My readers also include some teens, teachers, librarians, youth ministers, etc. I see it as a place where marketing and commercial media aimed at youth intersect and hopefully interact with non-profit youth media. My teen contributors highlight non-profit media by and for teens regularly in the digital gaffiti category.
Q. What do you do?
I am also the manager of viewer created content at Current TV, where my job is to encourage young people to participate in this new television network.
Q. How does your job and the site overlap?
I actually keep my blog and my job quite separate, although Ypulse helps me stay on top of the latest trends in youth media/marketing and pop culture, which definitely helps me at work. I forward lots of articles!
Q. What do you think the key trends and issues today in youth marketing?
The big trend is definitely user generated content or consumer created anything. D.I.Y. products, media and advertising is what’s hot now. From Nike I.D. to Toyota Scion to Current TV…Old media are also finally adopting wireless strategies (delivering their content in a mobile format) and even blogging. And viral marketing is both a trend in youth marketing and an issue for the space. There has been lots of coverage (including on Ypulse) of viral marketing techniques involving minors and what the social and ethical implications of doing word of mouth marketing are.
Q. What brand is getting it right when it comes to youth marketing and why?
Levis Antidote in Europe. I posted about this on Ypulse and will be writing a longer piece about what they’re doing for George Soros’s Youth Media Reporter. Levis is basically becoming a supporter of youth media and culture throughout Europe — They are letting young people take the lead and staying out of the content, instead acting as a both a distribution platform and funder.
Q. What brand is getting it wrong and why?
I would say P&G’s Secret Sparkle totally screwed up – marketing to children (CARU made them stop) and just using blogs in a really lame way by having the different “scents” post about the product and its
advertising.
Q. Three top tips you would give a brand manager new to youth marketing?
1. Involve teens in whatever you do.
2. Do not do anything sneaky or fake, they see right through it.
3. Support artists and culture they care about. They’ll show up and thank you for it.
Photo by Andrea Scher
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