Despite what parents want or understand, Gen Z’s devices are an important conduit to their friends and to the world … and that’s not going to change.
Tag communication
The second in our series on Screentime: If GenZ are being productive on and offline, they feel they deserve a break, and for these teens, the screen is the break.
The first in our series about GenZ and Screentime … To adults and parents it’s a constant battle. For GenZ it is their everything.
For Gen Z, making phone calls is not a thing, they primarily use social media to communicate.* During the Pandemic, many gamers have substituted videogames as their go-to hangout space with friends.
In the COVID-19 Era, Gen Z & Millennials use technology as a connector more than a means to an end.
BY TIM BARKER
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH – 02/28/2010
There was a time when Sarah Truckey had a close relationship with her blog. The St. Louis-based freelance writer visited it every couple of days, sharing stories and thoughts with anyone willing to read them.
But today, the intervals between visits are growing longer as Truckey, 25, increasingly turns to social networking site Twitter to talk to the world. She likes the way Twitter limits entries to 140 characters, forcing her to keep those missives short.
“The blog posts wouldn’t necessarily get me in trouble. But I would end up revealing more than I should,” Truckey said.
While not ready to abandon the blog altogether, Truckey does represent a growing trend in the world of blogging. Young people just aren’t as interested in them as they once were. And it’s yet another example of the way rapid changes in technology — and the way we use it — can transform you from trendy to dinosaur seemingly overnight.
MySpace? Out. Facebook? In. Using a cell phone for phone calls? Out. Using it to send a text message? In. E-mail? Outside of scammers and spammers, does anyone use it?
OK, there’s a bit of hyperbole there. But it’s clear we live in a world where our ways of communicating are changing so fast that it’s virtually impossible, particularly for older adults, to stay current.
And certainly there are times when keeping up can be critical. As the parent of virtually every cell phone-toting teenager or young adult knows, you learn to text if you want to keep in touch.
Still, there’s no reason to obsess over every new communication development, said Dean Terry, director of emerging media at the University of Texas at Dallas. Some basic familiarity with social networking and texting may be all you need to get by. It’s not as if the old ways will just die out.
“Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t keep up with everything,” Terry said. “We still have radio. We still have plays. And we still have novels.”
In so many ways, it is the nation’s army of teenagers and young adults that’s deciding for the rest of us what’s cool and what’s not. Those decisions can, and often do, change quite quickly.
“Adults are always playing catch-up. And unfortunately, when we get there, (teens) may have already moved on,” said Gary Rudman, a California-based market researcher who specializes in teens.
Just look at what’s happened to blogging, an area that’s still growing in popularity with older Americans, just as it’s losing steam with the younger set.
The percentage of older adults — those over the age of 29 — who say they maintain a blog has increased from 7 percent to 11 percent since December 2007, according to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Meanwhile the ranks of bloggers in the 18-29 age group fell from 24 percent to 15 percent during the same time frame.
The drop has been even greater among teen bloggers. In 2006, 28 percent of online teens said they blogged. Only 14 percent say the same thing today, according to Pew.
Social networking experts cite some pretty simple reasons for the decline of young bloggers.
Some suggest that it’s tied, at least partly, to the decline in popularity of My- Space, the one-time king of social networking. In recent years, social networkers have made a decided shift to Facebook, which puts more emphasis on short status updates and less emphasis on blogging.
“Because of what each site offers, that really changes what people do,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist with Pew.
Others say blogging simply doesn’t match well with the preferred communication style of young people, who like quick exchanges via text message and Facebook status updates. Some even suggest that young people might have skipped blogs altogether if they had arrived at the same time texting was taking off. Many young people just don’t have time in their lives for blogs.
“We used to think of blogs as short little blips of commentary. But now they seem very long,” said Terry, from the University of Texas. “If you are updating your Facebook or Twitter all day, then in some ways you’ve gotten it all out. You’ve said everything you wanted to say.”
Some attribute the decline of blogging and MySpace — and anything else being abandoned by young people — to the desire of teens and young adults trying to carve out their own space.
Rarely are they happy to see that space infiltrated by parents and grandparents.
“As soon as it becomes too popular, they want to move on to something else,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University in Washington.
Not everyone buys that.
“That’s been the routine theory about why MySpace lost ground to Facebook,” said Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. A lot of adults are using Facebook now. And I don’t see younger people leaving in droves.”
And really, it’s not necessarily the end of the world even if the youngsters do run off to greener pastures.
Rebecca Hanes, 36, of St. Louis, has been blogging for five years. She actually has a pair of blogs, including one she describes as “a big ol’ bowl of soup” in terms of content.
Hanes shrugged off the news that young bloggers have been dropping left and right. She says she has no plans to abandon her own little slice of cyberspace: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s probably something I’ll always have.”
Do teens constitute an audience for marketers when they’re visiting social sites?
Oct 5, 2009
NEW YORK Teenagers are a mystery to most adults. New technology and media are another mystery to many adults. Combine these mysteries and you have ample opportunity for adult misperception of how teenagers use and feel about new technology and media. Some recent research works to get beyond popular misconceptions and provide a look at how teens actually engage with these things, including the advertising they encounter along the way.
Based on quantitative and qualitative research conducted between January and April, a report released last month by GTR Consulting confirms the conventional wisdom that teens are deeply involved in social networking. But it raises serious doubts about how congenial a medium this has been for marketers trying to reach the teen audience. Asked to cite the online activities they indulge in during their free time, 66 percent of the teens said they “use social networks” — exceeding the number who said they “watch user-generated videos” (59 percent), “send or receive instant messages” (51 percent), “play online games” (50 percent), “watch TV/movie clips” (36 percent), “get news/current events” (34 percent) or “blog” (12 percent). The report emphasizes that social-networking sites “have become more important for communication and connection among teens than the telephone, e-mail or instant messaging.” (See also: “Probing the Minds of Teenage Consumers”)
But that doesn’t necessarily mean teens constitute an audience for marketers when they’re visiting social sites. “Notably, we found that teens use social networks to socialize, not to read ads, play games or participate in marketing efforts,” says the report. Indeed, GTR finds teens critical of online advertising more generally. “They know that advertising is the price to pay for getting online services for free,” says the report, “but after spending hours online each day, they have grown weary of the many variations of online marketing. . . . From banner ads, online billboards, pop-ups and advergames to fictitious brand profiles on their social networking pages, teens universally point to these marketing efforts as their least favorite aspect of the Web.”
A report released in the spring by youth-marketing agency Fuse (in tandem with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) found a similar aversion to advertising via social sites. One part of its polling, fielded in June, asked teens to say how they’d like brands in various categories to advertise to them. Ads on social-networking sites ranked poorly across a range of sectors. For instance, just 10 percent of respondents said they like apparel brands to reach them via social networking, vs. 71 percent saying they like those companies to use TV spots; 14 percent said they like consumer-electronics companies to advertise to them via social networking (vs. 69 percent saying the same about TV spots); 11 percent like getting food and snacks marketing messages via social networking (vs. 78 percent citing TV).
Since social networking is so important to teens, do brands risk an out-and-out backlash if they blunder intrusively onto that turf? Gary Rudman, president of GTR Consulting, suggests that they do. “If brands are clumsy and fail to understand how teens want to be approached in the social-networking environment, marketers are risking a potentially hostile reaction,” he tells AdweekMedia. As for online advertising more broadly, he adds that teens are “frustrated by ads that disrupt, distract and disturb their online experience.” Or, as GTR’s report puts it, “From what teens have told us, online advertising is interruptive, distracting and intrusive. In a nutshell, online advertising is not working for this generation.”
Bill Carter, a partner in Fuse, has also seen wariness of marketers’ ventures into social media when these are out of sync with the reasons teens go to these sites. “Teens are indifferent to advertisers on social networks who don’t participate in the actual purpose of the social network, which is to actively communicate with each other and have fun in their communities and organized groups,” says Carter. “Advertisers that treat social networks like billboards, TV, radio or other media in which they simply run advertising will be met with at best a neutral reaction from teens and can be met with real backlash.”
That’s not to say it’s impossible for marketers to create a rapport with teens via social media. “Advertisers that are proactive members and participate as any good ‘friend” does will be engaged by teens,” says Carter. Rudman notes that teens turn to social networks in part for “efficiency” in conducting their lives, and marketers that serve this end can use social media to their advantage. “One teen stated that social networks make their social life easier to handle,” he notes. “If a marketer can create and offer a branded app that can make their online experience more efficient, teens are more likely to appreciate the brand and may even forward the tool to their friends,” Rudman adds.
Rudman also stresses the effectiveness that can come from a marketing approach that lets teens feel they’ve “discovered” the brand or its message. “If teens feel like they’ve discovered something, they’re so apt to pass it on,” he says. “They feel so empowered when they feel they’ve discovered it on their own.”
Along with social sites, video games and online gaming sites have become important venues for teens to use their free time. And, of course, this has lured marketers who wish to reach teens on their home ground. But this entails its own challenges. In the case of online gaming sites, the broadening of the gaming audience beyond its youth-oriented roots can be a complicating factor. Rudman mentions that teens who go to such sites are frustrated by the proliferation of ads that have nothing to do with their own interests. “If you have a Depends ad there, it’s obviously not relevant to teens,” he remarks.
Teens also bring a judgmental eye to in-game advertising. Says Carter: “Teens apply much the same authenticity test to in-game advertising as they do to other media. Is the advertising authentic? Is it credible? Does it belong in the game? Is it a distraction? Does it bring something positive to the game experience? If an advertiser can pass this test, it will be met with either a neutral to slightly positive response from teens. If the advertising fails this test, the best the advertiser can hope for is a neutral response, and the more likely response is disdain.”
In their eagerness (or, at times, over-eagerness) to connect with teens via newer media, marketers may be underestimating the efficacy of an older medium: television. For one thing, despite their immersion in new media, teens still spend plenty of time watching TV — 2.1 hours a day, according to the GTR report, a shade more than the 2 hours per day they spend online “for fun.” (They spend another 1.4 hours a day online “for school work,” or so they say.) And, what’s at least as important, TV is a medium where teens aren’t congenitally averse to encountering advertising. “When it comes to options for advertising, traditional TV advertising resonates best for teens,” says the GTR report.
“Marketers that fail to emphasize television in their marketing efforts risk missing the boat with teens,” says Rudman. “Teens are visually literate, and a good television ad will engage them. They remember funny, interesting, engaging, unique ads. In fact, if they like them enough, they will look for them online, such as on YouTube, so they can forward them on to their friends.”
GTR’s findings are consistent with those of Fuse Marketing’s survey. Seventy-five percent of the teens polled by Fuse agreed that TV is the “best way” for advertisers to reach them. The teens also ranked TV as their favorite platform for messages from all the advertiser categories about which they were asked, ranging from health and beauty to quick-serve restaurants.
Carter says that noticing which media teens consume is “the easy part” for marketers. “The difficult part is deciphering in which media teens are inclined to listen to a brand’s message versus those media they consider more sacred and want free from advertising.” Nobody ever accused TV of being sacred, and Carter identifies it as a medium “in which teens are open to an advertiser’s message.” Perhaps surprisingly, TV’s utility for reaching teens extends to products that have come along in what some people imagine to be the post-TV age. Thus, when the GTR polling asked teens to say where they “typically learn about electronics and technology,” 56 percent included TV among their sources, putting it slightly ahead of “online” (56 percent) and outpointed only by word of mouth (77 percent).
Those numbers are particularly telling when one considers the importance of technology in the lives of today’s teens, for better or worse. The GTR survey found 21 percent of its teens agreeing at least somewhat that “I have experienced peer pressure to have and use the latest technology.” But that phenomenon does not translate into any general aversion to new technology. One reason for this: 76 percent of the teens polled by GTR agreed (including 42 percent agreeing strongly) that “Technology helps me socialize/communicate with friends.” In other words, it is integrated into daily life for teens in a way that is generally not the case for their elders, even if the latter make ample use of new technologies.
“When it comes to technology, it’s almost universal that teens are not ambivalent about adopting it,” says Rudman. “In fact, technology adoption is part of the teen DNA. They have grown up in a world where technology drives communication and social interaction. They must jump on board so they don’t fall out of the loop. They really do not know any other approach. But although they are pushed on board, they quickly wrest control of new technology and make it their own.”
The numbers in GTR’s report certainly make it clear that engagement with multiple technologies is more the rule than the exception for teens. Given a list of electronic products and asked to say which ones they have, majorities pointed to the cell phone (85 percent), video-game console (79 percent), TV (79 percent), desktop computer (76 percent), digital camera (69 percent), portable gaming device (56 percent) and MP3 player with video (51 percent).
Or, teens may decide that a particular technology simply isn’t for them. This is what has happened with Twitter, suggests Rudman. “Teens as a whole have rejected Twitter as a tool for adults,” he says. “Twitter seems to be an announcement to the world, while things like Facebook and texting are a way of announcing to the people they care about.”
One wild card in how teens will interact with the world around them is the recession. As is the case with respect to consumers in general, marketers are wondering whether the severe downturn will have a lasting effect on teens, persisting even after the economy has recovered. Carter suspects that it will. “Teens are observing an economy with real consequences,” he says. “Maybe one or more of their parents have been laid off, maybe they hear the conversations about not being able to pay a mortgage on time, maybe they won’t go away to summer camp or on a family vacation this year. In any case, their lives have been affected, and they are not going to soon forget the significance of what they are feeling.”