A study conducted by Grunwald Associates shows that teens and tweens are more than willing to interact with branded activity on the Internet.
I'm glad this study has come out, along with others, that contradict what is evidently wishful thinking on the part of certain writers.
Not only have people written that you can't interfere in any way with the user experience online, especially with young people, but that it will be harmful to your brand. I always doubted that as a reality, as far as young people go, because there was a lot of things my peers and I interacted with when we were that age that didn't cause us to rebel against a company.
There has been far too much caution on this subject without a reason to be. Of course it has to be done in a way that is accepted by people, but that is no 
reason to hold back out of some type of fear. We've been much too tentative to try out things.
For example, with girls, 70 percent of them said they wouldn't mind at all hearing about personal care products and apparel. That's a lot when all you seem to hear about is nobody wants to hear from brands and/or products.
The study shows that it's not just talk either, as 55 percent of the teen respondents said they've participated in an advertiser-branded activity of some sort over the last month online. Some of those activities are online sponsored contests, online quizzes and visiting the profile pages of a company on a social networking site.
"It's a sleeper category that we think maybe a little bit more attention needs to be paid to," said Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, a research and consulting firm. Hopefully you'll be convinced of that from this study and its results.
Another statistic from the study says that a huge 90 percent of tweens and teens say they want to hear about entertainment productss on their social networking sites. Another 45 percent say they would like to be shown niche products from categories like sports, cars and technology. Even 31 percent said they would like to know more about educational products and college information.
Like I said, we have to do this in the right way, yet we need to do it. It seems that everyone is waiting around for someone else to take the lead here, just like they've been sitting around a lot on video marketing, even when studies there have shown that people are more than willing to view online video ads in exchange for watching videos.
What's great about the Internet is its quick, feedback mechanism that will let you know fast whether what you're doing is resonating with users or not. Even those that try things and have them backfire haven't necessarily suffered from it. Facebook did some changes a while back that caused an uproar. The key was quick communication and an acknowledment that users were heard. There were some changes made and things were ok again. Facebook didn't suffer long-term and are still growing strong.
We need to get rid of that fear that so many have thrown out there about the response of users to online advertising. About every study shows that the fear is unwarranted, and people don't mind being communicated to by brands. We simply have to do it in a way that's not too disruptive or breaking too much into their personal space as far as social networks go.
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