The Kids are Alright

Being old and weary, I have to use blogs like the excel­lent Ypulse to find out what the beau­tiful people are into nowadays. The only hip I ever get close to is a hip oper­a­tion. Today, it points me towards this press release from the American Marketing Association. It’s not all good news for brands trying to get down with the kids by investing in social media:

Most adults feel that a company that uses customer-​​created advert­ising is more customer-​​friendly (68 percent), creative (56 percent), and innov­ative (55 percent). However, young adults are gen­er­ally more skep­tical than their older coun­ter­parts. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 are more likely than those between the ages of 25 and 64 to say a company that uses customer-​​created advert­ising is less trust­worthy (21 percent versus 10 percent, respect­ively), less socially-​​responsible (20 percent versus 10 percent, respect­ively) and less customer-​​friendly (13 percent versus 5 percent, respectively).

Younger people gen­er­ally still trust com­panies that use social media more, of course, just not as much more as older people. On average, a fifth of them — over twice the number of adults — actually view such com­panies as more untrust­worthy, irre­spons­ible and unfriendly. Couple of pos­sib­il­ities here:

1. The young people who are more scep­tical of com­panies that use customer-​​created advert­ising are scep­tical of advert­ising full-​​stop. Don’t care who creates it.
2. They view the customer-​​created thing, in par­tic­ular, as a con. That the com­panies who engage in this are not being honest about trying to sell them stuff — it’s not just salesy, but manip­u­lative too.

Maybe the answer is both. Great that there are such healthy levels of scep­ti­cism on this con­ten­tious issue. Might remind you of Virgin’s run in with the young scal­ly­wags on b3ta.

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Possibly related:

• MySpace — Not for Kids
• Kids, eh
• Free Tickets for Behavioural Targeting