Newspapers Should Take a Leaf From Gillette's Promotional Book When It Comes to Getting the Young to Buy The Product

Philip Stone May 5, 2005

Today’s quiz: What does a body spray product and a daily newspaper have in common? Answer: Both want to attract teenagers. Then how is it the body spray does and the newspaper doesn’t? Answer: Because the body spray knows how to turn the kids on, whereas a mainstream newspaper is expert at turning them off.

It’s about time newspapers got their marketing machines into high gear aimed directly at the youth market, and they could do a lot worse than to take a look at what is working elsewhere – even for a body spray.

Imagine yourself as a 15-20 year-old guy and you had the chance to win your dream date with an older woman with looks that got her onto the Baywatch TV series and into the pages of Playboy.

You’re saying such a promotion would never happen. Well think again. Gillette, which just last month launched its Tag body spray aimed at teenage males, is asking teenage guys to bid on EBay for a date with American TV star beauty Carmen Electra, 33, and married. The bidding is already up to $17,500 for the all expenses paid trip to Los Angeles and the dinner date. The auction money goes to charity.

Some newspapers may find offering a date doesn’t comply with their family values approach to readership, whereas others could adapt to it real easy, but the philosophy behind the Gillette promotion should not be lost on newspapers: Find out what the target audience wants, and give it to them.

A newspaper wouldn’t necessarily involve an EBay auction, but instead its campaign could involve using mobile phones. A new survey released by Mindshare, says that more than one-half of American teens 13-17 now own a mobile telephone. And even more important, those teens that own mobile phones are heavier users of media, such as reading newspapers, than are those who don’t have a phone.

It shouldn’t really take too long for a marketing genius to put all of that together and come up with a newspaper promotion aimed at teenagers over, say, a two week period in which they get to win something they can really identify with, and all they have to do is to answer daily, via SMS, a question about an item in the newspaper. The question each day takes the teenage reader to a different part of the newspaper and hopefully by the time the two-week tour is complete scouring the newspaper has become a daily habit.

Promotions are somewhat iffy in maintaining readership when they are finished, and so there is no guarantee that the teenager will stay with the newspaper after the promotion ends. But at least the newspaper will have had a chance to introduce various sections that should appeal to the teenager, and then it comes down to just how appealing those sections are.

Making a newspaper that appeals to the young requires that a newspaper is able to cross the generation gap. What a 20 or 30 something editor might think is something of interest to a teenager, may not necessarily correspond to what the teenager thinks.

Play-Bac-Presse in Paris has been very successful at producing three national newspapers aimed at the youth market. The secret to their success is that it is kids aged 10-14, the same age as the intended audience, that choose the stories and their priority starting with what goes on the front page.

Adults, who often may disagree with the stories chosen and their priority, do the actual writing, but whatever the kids decide is followed because of the simple reasoning that kids know better than adults what kids are interested in.

In the US, The Associated Press recognizes it needs to help its owners, the US newspapers, crack the problem of declining youth readership, and it has announced it is going to produce a new service in September for the 18-34 age group.

But it has chosen a 37-year-old AP veteran as editor who led the team that produced a youth prototype. He’s a fine journalist with great writing skills, but the question is whether at 37 he and the 18-year-old target reader will see eye-to-eye on subject matter, the length of stories, and how they are written.

The AP promises the new product will be “provocative, witty, relevant, engaging and edgy.” But already it has gotten a bad press from one major US media group, E.W. Scripps, on the grounds the service does not adapt to the needs of the young.

Bob Benz, general manager of print web operations, and Mike Phillips, the newspaper division’s editorial director, wrote in a recent article for the Online Journalism Review,” The AP is shopping around a youth publication prototype called Apitutde. Its dominant story form is long narrative, accompanied by a photo or two.

“But young people…are digital natives, not digital immigrants. Their primary language is digital. When they do use their secondary language, print, their warmest response is to print formats that are highly visual and that are built with high proportions of short, non-narrative story forms.” They called the venture “ill-conceived.”

Lots of things can change between prototypes and the final product, but at least the AP is venturing to fill a void. And right now newspapers can use all the help they can get.