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By Natalia Williams
Be happy, it’s fi nally true: you’re an ageless
wonder. At least that’s the message behind
more and more marketing today.
As baby boomers redefi ne what it means
to age (40 is the new 30, after all) and young
people control the media
sphere, the line
between youth and
adult marketing
is blurring. Youth
culture is now
contemporary
culture, and gone
are the days
when marketing
to youth and
adults employed
different
age-appropriate
tactics and
strategies.
“Youth culture
used to be about a specifi c
age group,” says Ken Therrien, CD at DDB
KidThink, the Vancouver-based youth agency.
“Now it’s about an attitude that transcends age
groups. The quest for youth and youthfulness
is driving popular culture.”
While youth culture has always been a
precursor of trends, what’s different now,
according to experts, is that seismic societal
and technological movements are contributing
to a complete upheaval of the defi nitions
of young and old. Today, young people live
at home and stay in school longer, delaying
YOUTH
pushing
Youth culture rules,
encompassing
every age group in its glow
The Scene program
gives Scotiabank a halo
of youthfulness
16
marriage and having children. The result is, in
a sense, an extended adolescence.
It has also, says Robert Barnard, founder
of Toronto-based Decode, resulted in the
creation of a youth/adult life stage that his
research agency calls the Young Independents.
Based on research from a June 2007 Decode
report, Barnard says that Young Independents
represent about 10% of the Canadian
population. “They are 18 to 35, even 40, not
in school and don’t have kids,” he says. “They
can be in a common-law relationship, married
or single, any of those combinations, [but]
they are in between those two institutions of
school and family.”
Barnard says it is a stage where those living
it may feel uncertain about where their
lives are going, but those on the outside
covet its appearance of freedom and lack of
responsibility. “It is becoming the societal
signal of youthful,” he says. “The Young
Independent is a more contemporary version
of youthfulness as opposed to a teenager.”
Technology – namely the Internet – is also
profoundly contributing to the upheaval.
“Media has changed over the past 10 to
15 years in a way that we’ve never seen
before,” says Mike Farrell, partner and chief
strategic offi cer at Toronto-based youth agency
Youthography. “The Internet is the new printing
press. And the people who are in charge, born
into this new printing press, are young people.
“For us, a culture of 30+, [the Internet is]
learned behavior. For them, it’s just what’s up.
It’s all about them, and it’s all been driven by
www.strategymag.com STRATEGY April 2008 45