TVloop Blog

Related to the last post here at the TVLoop Blog concerning teen TV-watching behavior, I just saw some research results from Panagea Media over at ADOTAS indicating that TV also continues to be at the forefront of driving teen brand awareness.  According to the research:

77 percent of teens and tweens rely on friends to find out cool new brands, followed by seeing those brands in the store, 71 percent, or on a TV commercial, 51 percent.

So word of mouth continues to be the primary method of driving teen consumption, which I doubt differs too much from adult behavior, but it’s interesting to see that TV is still relatively high on the list at 51%.  So once again, all of this talk about the death knell of television among this demographic is greatly exaggerated.  One of the more interesting points of the research is the piece about social networks.  Only 24% of teens/tweens surveyed said that they find out about new brands on social networks such as Facebook or MySpace, and only 29% said they were a “fan” of a brand on one of the sites.  I really thought both of those numbers would be higher if for no other reason than the amount of time teens spend on social networking sites.

So what does this mean for online advertisers and publishers?  Well for starters, I would love to see the breakout between teens and tweens.  Depending on the upper age range they targeted for the study, the differences could be quite large.  The thought process of a 17 year old differs significantly from that of a 12 year old.  As a result, their behaviors both online and off will be very different.  Whatever the case, I see the low percentage of users being influenced by social network advertising as an opportunity to get better at it.  Given the amount of time that this age demographic spends online, there’s no reason that social sites shouldn’t be first or second when it comes to driving consumer behavior.  The big question is whether that’s better done through word-of-mouth and sharing info, or through more traditional components such as display ads and brand sponsorships.  The answer is likely somewhere in the middle with a bit of a skew towards word-of-mouth.  Lots of progress has been made on this within the last year and I look forward to seeing how the industry continues to evolve.