Youth marketers' about face

Few may be using them, but Singapore marketers named social networks and specifically the genre's poster child, Facebook, as their preferred gateway into the lives of teenagers of both genders. This could either be a reflection of marketers' knowledge gap about where youths are actually spending their time online and global trends as reported by both business and mainstream media, which consistently give Facebook airtime over Friendster. The reason for this is Friendster is the web 2.0 elder statesman of the social networks and Facebook the upstart.

Friendster is a more popular site among Singaporeans according to data and traffic aggregator Alexa, although no specifics are given on popularity of sites by age group. However, Facebook is generally considered a gateway social networking site for more mature consumers, while Friendster sees and positions itself as a younger social platform, so it is reasonable to assume that Friendster enjoys even more popularity than the Singapore average among the teen demographic.

The preference for Facebook, among the surveyed marketers, was pronounced with 20.69% of those surveyed citing it as their preferred method for, for instance, reaching teenage males was via the site as compared to 9.48% who named Friendster as the best way to net the same demographic. Friendster told Marketing recently that Asia accounts for 70% of its global user base.

The result favouring Facebook over Friendster, despite the latter's dominance, is likely to be at least partially due to perceived advertising opportunities on each platform. Friendster's primary paid advertising opportunities are via the deal it inked with Google in early 2007 for search and contextual text ads, while Facebook offers a broader self-service platform offering which has received significant publicity -- not all of which has been favourable. Facebook's advertising model allows for a variety of targeting options including embedding ads deeper into the users' experience, what it calls social ads -- these are ads attached to friends' referrals based on related actions of users. There is also the ability to integrate content from the site such as relevant conversations into ad messages.

At press time Facebook claimed it could reach Singapore 317,840 users with an ad, in other words that is the number of users currently in the Singapore market. Of those 12,260 were males between 13 and 18, 17,520 were females in the same age group. The numbers are relatively decent for fully targetted and integrated ads but it is hardly a mass market play. However, what is likely to make Facebook the choice for marketers to target youth in Singapore is not only the high media visibility of the platform, but this very transparency of its demographics, which is accessible during the sign up for an ad campaign on the site.

It is likely the higher visability for the Facebook ad model is what drives marketers to name it as a better advertising vehicle then the more locally popular Friendster.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg's attempts to monetise Facebook and the subsequent social community backlash was well publicised but also relatively shortlived. Such experimentation with commercial messages within these social networks are important or otherwise marketers are likely to get impatient with such communities and view them merely as a novelty and symptom of the free-for-all attitude that rules the online space in the minds of many young consumers. If such platforms are to be taken seriously, from a commercial perspective, in order to keep them free for users, there needs to be a business model, and despite these sites being hyped as a brand new media, when it comes to their owners looking for their pay day they are looking at monetising along very traditional lines -- ads against content.

Marketers the world over, and our polled marketers are no exception, appear to be tacitly supporting Zuckerberg's mea culpa on the backlash on monetisation, particularly because it lets users understand that these networks can't run on air or love alone.

Both social sites do more tailored work for their commercial clients and have relationships with third party suppliers who connect marketers with the social environment.

Along with the social sites marketers also named search Yahoo and Google in this order as a preferred method of reaching the teen market across both genders. MSN also performed quite well, which is likely to be driven by the perception that considerable time among youths is spent on messenger clients run through MSN.

Polled marketers also threw into the mix several user generated content sites like YouTube and home grown SPH site Stomp, but a look through both platforms fails to turn up much in the way of locally seeded ads. YouTube and the MediaCorp owned Mocca also scrapped into the top 10 desirable sites for hitting the teenage demogaphic.