Tuesday July 8th 2008

Advertising & marketing activity work better, faster & more cost effectively the younger the target audience

Advertising critics regularly question why it is that marketeers target activity to younger audiences. The empirical evidence demonstrates this is for the best of commercial reasons. The younger the target audience, the more they retain the message. The younger the target audience, the faster they respond to commercial messages.

Younger people are far more pre-disposed to trying new things than their older counterparts. And let's face up to the truth. Advertising works best when the marketeer has something new to say.

I first learned this measured truth 35 years ago when we had to ensure that housewives attending focus groups were not accompanied in the room by their children. The children got the advertising messages so quickly their presence severely compromised the information we gleaned from their mums. So we had to budget for a crèche!

Advertising recall, awareness and many forms of ad. tracking have over the years consistently shown that exposure for exposure and £ for £, 16-24's have a 5 times higher response than those aged over 55

The Dove campaigns in the US, the Saga holiday campaigns in the UK and highly targeted older people campaigns for garden sheds in "The Garden" all prove that advertising that targets older consumers can work well

But the set of evidence demonstrates that the cost effectiveness of youth targeted advertising delivers consistently the best results for marketers. You can just spend far less to get the same effect as you have to spend targeting older counterparts.