Trend Forecasting — Kids Marketing

Up to the moment consumer intelligence on kids and young people seems to be an increasing obsession these days for brand owners and advertising agencies. They're seemingly desperate for insider information and intelligence on the life of the latest generation — referred to as everything from N‐Geners to Millenials — who rather than challenge society like their forbears seem to define it, in these youthful times. Nowadays everyone from the President (be he Gore or Bush), to Hip‐Hop artists wears Levis and Gap. The last decade saw the commercialization of youth culture (how alternative is a bank sponsored dance lent at an MTV festival?), the alternative and underground became mainstream and the social construct, which stated that you were only young between the ages of 16–24, has been disproved. Teenagers, whilst being in the spotlight as never before, have increasingly had their culture stolen from under their noses by older (and younger) people, whilst ten year olds are demonstrating brand adoption and rejection attitudes that we'd have associated with a fifteen year old, only a short time ago. To clarify the current Life of Kids it is therefore necessary to gain the latest real‐life case histories and learning's, as opposed to mere statistics that give us huge amounts of cold data re: population demographics, growth rates, income levels, behaviour patterns and the like. Therefore, the first global kids marketing conference was held in Lisbon in October, where leading industry figures from the brand owner and agency sides came together to share information. Speakers included those from MTV, Leo Burnett, BMRB International, Cartoon Network, Polaroid, Informer, Chupa Chups, Applied Research & Consulting, B2B, Pokemon and the author.