This is the percentage of Canadians aged 14 to 34 that agree with the statement ‘I like watching commercials.’ It reflects those who registered four or five on a scale of one to five.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, that may cause a jolting WTF moment, but for the rest of us it should be just another indicator of the changing face of communication and persuasion and not create palpitations of any kind.
If you have been adhering to my column’s advice, you will be employing a variety of approaches and media to get your message out – and not hanging your campaign’s hat on a standard 30-second spot.
Today’s citizen-consumer wants to interact with what you’re offering, hold it in their hands, discuss it with friends, be entertained by it, identify its true value within their context and make damn sure you understand their culture and play a vibrant supporting role within it. That’s a tall order, but the quarry we sell to are more wily, involved and creative than those zombies the principals in Mad Men focus on.
In fact, this is quite a comforting statistic – almost one in five young consumers sees a cornerstone of our industry’s output as entertaining and interesting. And if they really like your commercial, the talk factor output is huge. Fully 27% of the young Canadians we spoke to in this study have gone online to find a commercial they ‘really liked,’ with an equal percentage having forwarded one to friends. And 26% say they ‘usually don’t notice commercials’ – which means the remainder who don’t like watching commercials are still registering them in some way.
Given the current economic climate, I’ll take this as a ray of sunshine, or at least a brief respite from the expanding workload we all have in front of us.
This statsthought was gleaned from ‘Ping,’ Youthography’s quarterly national study of Canadians aged 9 to 34. It was culled from a survey in fall 2008 responded to by 1,762 14- to 34-year-olds, regionally represented. Mike Farrell (partner, chief strategic officer) can be reached at mike@youthography.com.
